Fifteen Minutes Magazine: December 2023

DECEMBER 2023

STAFF FOR THIS ISSUE FIFTEEN MINUTES MAGAZINE CHAIRS Io Y. Gilman ’25 Amber H. Levis ’25 EDITORS-AT-LARGE Michal Goldstein ’25 Kaitlyn Tsai ’25 ASSOCIATE EDITORS Maya M. F. Wilson ’24, Mila G. Barry ’25 Hewson Duffy ’25, Sarah W. Faber ’24 Ciana J. King ’25, Jade Lozada ’25 Kyle L. Mandell ’25, Bea Wall-Feng ’25 Graham R. Weber ’25, Sam E. Weil ’25 Jem K. Williams ’25, Dina R. Zeldin ’25 WRITERS Sazi T. Bongwe ’26, Mila G. Barry ’25 Hewson Duffy ’25, Sarah W. Faber ’24 Michal Goldstein ’25, Yasmeen A. Khan ’26 Ciana J. King ’25, John Lin ’25 Kyle L. Mandell ’25, Kaitlyn Tsai ’25, Bea Wall-Feng ’25, Graham R. Weber ’25 Sam E. Weil ’25, Jem K. Williams ’25 Maya M. F. Wilson ’24 GLOSSY LAYOUT Laurinne Jamie P. Eugenio ‘26 Sophia Salamanca ’25 Sophia C. Scott ’25 Max H. Schermer ’24 Sami E. Turner ’25 Angel Zhang ‘26 GLOSSY PHOTOGRAPHERS Leanne Alvarado ’25, Muskaan Arshad ’25 Jose A. Avalos ’25, Kacy Bao ’26 Lotem L. Loeb ’27, Marina Qu ’25 DESIGNERS Pema Choedon ‘25 Sophia C. Scott ’25 PRESIDENT Cara J. Chang ’24 ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR Meimei Xu ’24 MANAGING EDITOR Brandon L. Kingdollar ’24

EDITORS’ NOTE Dear Reader, This semester has gone by all too fast. Just as the year seems to have started, the end of the semester is upon us. But for this year’s seniors, the semester’s end is just the first of many lasts, the primer to many goodbyes.

But before they leave, FM has profiled 15 of those graduating seniors. To select them, we asked students to nominate seniors for different superlative categories, just like your old high school yearbook. In this issue, we profiled the Class of 2024’s Most Likely to be President, Most Whimsical, Biggest Risk-taker, and Most Chill, among others. Read on to see how these seniors both fit and transcend their categories and to learn about all the cool things they’ve gotten up to in their four years in college. One senior competed on American Idol, another spent a summer cataloging a papuan language, and yet another is researching how the post-industrial Western diet has changed humans’ gut microbiota and overall health. Harvard kids, am I right?

Don’t forget to check out PC’s comic on pregaming and SWF’s amazing crossword, the last one of the year (!), and try to find the easter egg for each profiled senior.

Unlike our dear seniors, we are not graduating at the end of this year, but at the end of this semester we are saying a goodbye of our own and stepping down as the Chairs of Fifteen Minutes.

We’d be remiss to sign off without sharing a few words of gratitude. There are far too many people to list in this note. So for now: Thank you to all the photographers and designers we’ve worked with. You truly bring our stories to life. Thank you to every editor who has touched an FM article, your talent and time is invaluable. Thank you all our reporters and compers — the stories you write are important, beautiful, and always a joy to read. And thank you, dear reader, for sticking with us.

It’s a bittersweet moment, and we are trying to appreciate the time that’s left, savoring the last few meetings and socials we have left. But we can’t be too sad — the future of the magazine could not be brighter. We are so excited to leave the magazine in HD and KT’s more-than-capable hands and watch them take it to new heights.

Retirement, here we come!

IYG & AHL

MOST ICONIC DUO — “Friendship at first sight?” I ask them.

They both nod in fierce agreement. SEE PAGE 31

MOST WHIMSICAL — “Well, do you think risking arrest is whimsical?” SEE PAGE 5 MOST HOUSE SPIRIT — “In a school where people got here because they’re really really good, sometimes it’s really nice to have a community where you don’t need to try to be a part of it,” she muses. SEE PAGE 13

BEST ADVICE GIVER — “I have always been the secret holder,” they say. “And I love it.” SEE PAGE 11

MOST INTERESTING THESIS — “Fanfiction is marginalized in part because it’s very bodily writing,” SEE PAGE 29

BEST DRESSED — “I like a hot pink that’s really in your face,” they say. “And I like wearing it in a way that’s a little bit erotic and loud and aggressive in a way that I feel like sometimes pink is not.” SEE PAGE 15

CLASS CLOWN — “Externally, I do possess some very clown-like qualities, not just facially and with my large feet but also in how I live my life,” he says. SEE PAGE 23

Most Popular:

Fez Zafar

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BY MAYA M. F. WILSON CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

o you know Fez? Fez S. Zafar ’24, that is? Odds are, you do. If you didn’t go to his birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese (almost 800 people RSVP’d), you might’ve participated in his class-wide game of Assassin last spring. And if you didn’t get Fez’d into either of those events, you might recognize him as our Class Marshal. How else would you get voted the Most Popular in the senior class?

When asked if he is, in fact, the most popular boy in the senior class, the coolest cat, the head honcho, Fez states diplomatically, like a true Iowan, “I would not say that.”

The truth is, Fez just loves people. In particular, he loves interesting people.

He also loves talking. But most of all, Fez loves talking to interesting people.

He moves through the world trying to maximize his run-ins with people he wants to talk to.

We sit on the leather couches in the Dunster lobby. Clearly, these are Fez’s stomping grounds. They know him around here. Fez has Fez’d me personally multiple times from this very couch, trying to get me to vote for him, or buy a ticket to Dunster formal, or fill out the senior matchmaking survey. I don’t keep a solid tally but as we’re chatting there for over two hours, countless undergraduates who pass by enthusiastically greet Fez with various combinations of finger guns, and gasps of excitement. Several people loudly address him as “legend.” Fez is just as excited to see them as they are to see him. What can he say? He’s a man of the people.

With this much social reach, it’s not uncommon for the reputation to supersede the man himself. But Fez is just like us. He gets stressed about uncertainty. He has a creative outlet (filmmaking). He’s into startup culture.

He’s a Virgo.

Just kidding. Fez is not just like us.

He’s not just more popular — he’s built

different. He limits his morning phone time in bed to about 10 minutes. How could he dilly-dally? The day awaits.

He skips breakfast unless he’s really hungry, in which case he’ll have a pastry and water. No coffee, no tea. Pure Fezergy. After class, it’s back to Dunster for lunchtime, which is obviously fun.

But lunch is only a taste of what’s to come.

“Dinner time is its own animal,” Fez tells me, with a glint in his eye. “That’s when I’m most in my element.” Who could argue with that level of selfassurance? Especially with the extra hour of dinner afforded at Dunster for athletes, he’s on his home turf, locked and loaded, ready to befriend the entire softball team.

Fez seems to love athletes almost as much as he loves interesting people.

He’s taken to announcing sports games that he knows we’re guaranteed to win.

“You have to enunciate everything really well,” Fez counsels. “I’ve always said if someone’s from Iceland, I want them to feel like they’re in Reykjavik when they’re hearing their name said over the speaker.”

See, Fez isn’t a regular NARP. He’s a cool NARP. And the night is still young.

Because what happens after dinner?

“Then it’s brain break. You see how I tell people, ‘Come to brain break?’ You see that? Yeah, brain break is where it’s at,” Fez declares. “What bothers me is I come to brain break nowadays, too many people are doing work. There’s not enough discussion or socializing happening. I think it represents the deterioration of American culture. Too many people doing work, and not talking at brain break.”

“I like your scarf!” Fez bellows at the top of his lungs at a fellow Dunsterite as they walk by. “Sometimes you yell a little bit, Fez,” I tell him. “YEAH!” he says. “PEOPLE TELL ME I YELL A LOT.” Brain break is over. It’s 10 p.m. What next? “Homework begins,” Fez sighs.

“A lot of the concentrated, diligent work is happening late at night, because that’s when everyone’s asleep, so there’s no distractions. There’s no one to talk to. Everyone has gone.” He

sounds forlorn.

On nights when there’s no brain break, Fez has to resort to other outlets to drain his nuclear social battery. You’d reckon that the most popular boy in school might be something of a party animal. But Fez parties to the beat of his own drum.

“I think everyone is always trying to get into some party or get into some social group. I’ve been more of the mindset of, why not host your own party or start your own social group?” Fez is not antifinal club, but he’s not impressed by them either. He’d rather everyone at the party just all get lunch instead.

Importantly, Fez is not a drinker.

“Not one sip.” For two reasons. First: he’s Muslim. Second: he likes control and he doesn’t need the crutch. “Sometimes I go to parties where everyone’s drinking, and I feel like I’m the one having the most fun there,” he says.

Eventually, it’s time for bed.

According to Fez, he sleeps “just the right amount.” Usually, this is around 6 hours, except on special occasions.

These occasions are special for the rest of us because then there is so much more Fez to go around.

“On Thursday, I got like, eight hours, which was more than I’m used to. So then I pulled up to my seminar. And you know how I already talk a lot? Well, I would not stop talking the entire seminar. I was like, this is heinous,” Fez yells. “I need to shut up. But I wouldn’t! I just kept going, the whole time.”

You might be wondering at this point — does Fez lean into the bit? Is Fez Fezzing himself (and all of us) to Fez harder than we’ve ever Fez’d before?

“I’ve probably leaned into it before,” he says with a smirk. “Recently I started telling people, ‘guys, I’m going to launch a perfume.’” Fez, by Fez Zafar.

Ultimately, Fez smells like success.

You can see it in his walk. Fez thinks it’s amazing that champions (Division I athletes) walk among us. I think it’s amazing that Fez walks among us. And if Fez was going to walk up to the plate to bat with the rest of his beloved softball team, his walk-up song would be “Big Poppa,” by the Notorious B.I.G. Obviously. Get Fez’d.

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Most Whimsical:

Jeremy Ornstein

BY SARAH W. FABER

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CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

hen I walk into Jeremy O r n s t e i n’s room in Adams, he’s watching Noname’s most recent Tiny Desk Concert on his iPad. His room is filled with tchotchkes: birthday cards, a ball he likes to throw against the wall, a blonde wig strewn on the floor (he played Barbie in Adams’ drag show the night before).

Etymologically, tchotchkes are core to the idea of whimsy. As Jeremy explains, people used to call weird little objects “whim-whams,” hence “whimsical.” To Jeremy, “whimsical” evokes “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“One of my most whimsical qualities is talking to strangers,” he says. In the summer of 2021, he walked 400 miles from New Orleans to Houston talking to strangers about climate change.

“We just stopped everyone we could and talked to them — talked to a truck driver about the coastal erosion, and a guy in an excavator, and a fisherman,” he continues.

Jeremy took two years off college during the Covid-19 pandemic to work with the Sunrise Movement, which he describes as young people uniting to create good jobs and stop climate change.

“And that was whimsical,” he says.

“Well, do you think risking arrest is whimsical?”

“I think it’s pretty whimsical,” I say.

He nods, “I totally think it’s whimsical.” Our definition of whimsy continues to expand.

Though his passion is climate activism, he says he has to keep performing in the future. Besides drag, Jeremy also recently acted in the thesis musical “White House Princess” and does stand-up and improv comedy on campus. His most recent stand-up set touched on the best way to get over a breakup (the answer? Get a skin infection). He also wants to make a movie and write a book.

His movie might feature him as a detective. His book would be composed of fragments, like “Year of the Monkey” by Patti Smith. We get to talking about Patti Smith. “You know that she messed up Bob Dylan’s song at the Nobel Prize?” he asks. I say, no.

“Can we watch that?” I say, yeah!

So, as Jeremy explains, when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, he sent Patti Smith to perform at the ceremony in Stockholm. He pulls up the video on YouTube. Midway through her performance of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” she stumbles and apologizes and asks if they can repeat that section, and she apologizes again and says she’s so nervous. She restarts the section and continues singing.

“I love how she stands now. Look at her now,” he says. “She’s taken her strength back, but it still hurts. And all these idiots with their suits…” Her song ends, and everyone in the video applauds, and we applaud too.

He pauses the video and turns to me seriously. “And I’m gonna tell you something else. We’ve already won huge things for the climate already.

Do you know what the Inflation Reduction Act is? Nobody knows.”

He explains that the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022 after sustained movements by climate

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activists, invests $500 billion into clean energy. For Jeremy, this is an example of how we can use the huge amount of power and wealth in the government to transform our built environment. He recognizes that one act won’t solve all of the problems in the world. But it’s a win and should be celebrated. He feels lighter because of it.

“Honestly, Sarah, part of me feels like a feather while I’m on campus,” he says. “Not because there aren’t bad things, not because there aren’t problems I’m called to solve, but because I know that something special has already been done. I’ve been walking with a little bit of, just, joy.”

Jeremy is writing his Social Studies thesis on a technology called ocean alkalinity enhancement, which means deacidifying the ocean a bit so it can absorb more carbon. As Jeremy mentions, the ocean has absorbed billions of tons of carbon — “so it’s got our backs.” He’s studying the public response to proposed testing, specifically the response from fishermen and fishing leaders around New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Jeremy wouldn’t call himself whimsical. After a short while, our conversation has progressed past the framing of whimsy, and we’re simply shooting the shit. He decides he’s over “whimsical.”

“I hate that word. Fuck you, Harvard!” he says. “I’m not whimsical.

I’m serious … stodgy…” he pauses between each list item, thinking deeply, “predictable … and cozy.” He finishes with a smile. Before I go, he looks up “easy rap beat” on YouTube, and insists we freestyle a bit. He raps of sunsets, peanut butter, and changing the world.

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Renaissance Person:

Mira-Rose Kingsbury Lee

BY HEWSON DUFFY

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CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

s I sit down to interview Mira-Rose J. Kingsbury Lee ’24 in a small biology lab on the fifth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, I stare at our sanitized surroundings: the gleaming gas jets, the empty vials speckling the desks.

Then, of course, we begin talking about musical theater.

Kingsbury Lee, the Renaissance Person of her senior class, has written and produced three musicals at Harvard, and she’s working on a fourth: this spring’s Hasty Pudding show.

One of them, titled “Atalanta,” premiered at the Loeb Theater this spring — and was over a decade in the making.

The show, which Kingsbury Lee began writing at age eight, follows a woman in the 1960s unexpectedly catapulted into the presidency of a major newspaper, partly inspired by former Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.

But on another level, according to Kingsbury Lee, it’s also a “naturalistic portrait of historical queerness” and an adaptation of a Greek myth from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”

While Kingsbury Lee was inspired by Greek mythology, she tells me she “also grew up a little bit frustrated with the fact that there are not very many mothers in the Greek myths.” Atalanta’s central mother-daughter relationship subverts this trope.

Though she worked with five different orchestrators (many of them classically trained) to turn her Atalanta melodies into full musical numbers, Kingsbury Lee’s compositional skills have more modest origins. According to her, the “basis” of her musical background was drumming in a middle school rock band called “Stop Stop Playing.”

She jokes that learning to write musicals on her own is why Atalanta needed “eight or 10 years of editing.”

This lifelong labor of love culminated at the end of this summer when Kingsbury Lee brought Atalanta to the

Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world’s largest performance arts festival, which she calls the “holy grail” of her childhood dreams. She speaks about the experience with awe. With thousands of shows going on in locales all around the city, “there’s magic on the street all the time.”

“Because I’ve been writing it for so long,” she says, “it feels like that part of me, part of my life story, finished with the Fringe.”

But that part of Kingsbury Lee’s life story — all those theatrical credits — says nothing about why we were meeting in a biology lab.

She has worked here since her freshman year, when she took a class on the gut microbiome with the lab’s principal investigator, Professor Rachel Carmody.

Kingsbury Lee brings the same enthusiasm to the microscopic organisms of our intestines as she does to the characters in her musicals.

Microbes “have this very unfair reputation as being pathogenic,” she tells me. “Only now we’re starting to realize that for every pathogen, there are about a billion microorganisms which are benign or even beneficial.”

She is now at work on a Human Evolutionary Biology thesis about how the post-industrial Western diet has changed humans’ gut microbiota and overall health. The relative lack of research in the field makes it “so exciting” for her. In fact, last summer, she did preliminary research for an entire nonfiction book about the history of microbes. It’s a fitting combination for a double concentrator in History and HEB. And yet, the immensity of her time commitments does not seem to weigh on her.

“You’d be surprised at how much free time I have,” she says. Between writing and producing plays, going to class, and lab work, she spends time in organizations like Harvard Kiwis, the Salon for the Arts and Humanities, and the student astronomy club STAHR. Among her hobbies are reading, birdwatching, and climbing trees. And she sleeps — ideally nine hours per night. I only learn after our interview that she is also a member of the Advocate poetry board.

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Ironically, the glut of opportunities was one of the hardest parts about college for her.

“I wish I could have met more people and done more things and stretched myself,” she says.

Luckily for her, Kingsbury Lee will have two more years to meet people and stretch herself — this time at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship.

At Oxford and beyond, she has grand hopes for her tiny organisms.

Not only did microbes help make our climate what it is today by oxygenating the planet, she tells me. “They also have this kind of enormous untapped potential to influence our climate in the future,” she says.

Microbes can help with carbon capture, peatlands management, cleaning up contaminants, and possibly biofuel production. At Oxford, Kingsbury Lee hopes to study these applications and make them more feasible and effective.

How does theater fit into that plan?

Kingsbury Lee hopes her interests, in the future, “will be connected by this overarching theme of climate change.”

For her, scientific research and creative writing can be a shared mode of effective communication.

“How do we get people to really care?

To me, the answer has always been a combination of education and art,” she says.

As she explains these aspirations to me, I’m struck by another overarching theme of our conversation: gratitude.

“Everything I’m doing now is because some person or another either took me under their wing or taught me how to do something,” she says. “It’s all been through the influence of all these incredible people that I’ve been able to meet over these three and a half years or so.”

Even her interests themselves, she tells me, “have been a combination of just really extraordinary people who have influenced my life.”

As our conversation winds to a close, I ask Kingsbury Lee if she’s happy with what she’s done.

“I’m so happy with the people I’ve met,” she says. It’s the answer to a different question, but perhaps a more fitting one.

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Most Chill: Micah Williams

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BY BEA WALL-FENG CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

icah I. Williams ’24 is probably easier to make plans with than anyone I’ve ever met.

“I spend most of my free time in my room these days. Lots of sunlight,” he writes in response to my email inquiry. “There’s also a spot at Fresh Pond where I really like to sit in the afternoons. Sunset on Weeks Bridge is cool too.” It’s like emailing a cat.

We meet up at Fresh Pond on a gray Friday afternoon. When I get there, Micah is plucking out scales on a mandolin,

stopped,” he says, comparing it to the scene in “Ratatouille” when Remy tries strawberries and cheese for the first time, fireworks exploding overhead.

“I’m chasing that feeling. That’s what I want to get to all the time,” Micah says. “You’ve got to push back on this commodification and industrialization stuff to be able to get there.”

Once we start talking about the industry, Micah leans forward so he can gesture with his hands. He has a startup called Anonymous Foods that aims to make food production supply chains “radically transparent.” For this project, Micah has traveled to chocolate factories in San Francisco and goat cheese farms outside of Worcester; he blogs about his process on LinkedIn. In addition to his

Looking down from his room in Dunster, as your eyes catch the sunset, you also have to look down at Memorial Drive. It’s hard to ignore that there’s something “seriously wrong” with how American cities are designed, Micah says: Memorial Drive is noisy, increases pollution, and cuts people off from the river. This year, after locals signed petitions and organized protests to keep the road closed for full weekends, which the Cambridge City Council voted in favor of, the state opened it back up to traffic on Saturdays anyway.

“What would it look like if we tried something different?” Micah says. “If we tried something a little more extreme, or a little more disruptive?” He asks if I’ve read the book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” by

“Some people say you can maximize luck, you know, you can put yourself in a position to be lucky. I think the same thing is true for happiness.” wearing black Converse high tops, a black North Face jacket, and a heathered bluegray sweater. I apologize for being late, but whatever, no rush. “I was here yesterday, I’ll probably be here tomorrow,” he tells me.

Micah comes to Fresh Pond all the time to just sit on the benches — right now, he’s leaning back at a 45-degree angle, using his hands for support — and he bikes to the North End once a week, hanging out in the bakeries, coffee shops, and fruit market.

During our conversation, he spends two whole minutes describing the best pizza places in Boston (first place: Galleria Umberto) and another two making the case against the New York dollar slice (they churn them out too fast).

His long-term dream in life is to build a pizza oven. Maybe also to build a house with a huge greenhouse and spend four or five hours a day making soup; good food can be a life-changing experience. Once, Micah was out collecting insects for class and saw grapes growing on a vine nearby.

“I ate this grape and my whole world just

love of cooking, he says the project was inspired by growing up in Hawaii, where around 85 percent of food is imported.

As we talk about the pitfalls of fair trade and direct trade labels, the mandolin next to us catches my eye.

Micah says he likes to play songs by Watchhouse and Gregory Alan Isakov.

Sometimes he jams with his roommate, who plays banjo, sitting in front of their dorm window and watching the sun go down over the Charles.

I ask if it’s easier to learn if you can already play guitar. “Do you want to try?” he says, handing it over. Turns out the knowledge does not transfer, but whatever, we have time. He shows me how to balance the instrument in my lap and how the strings are tuned.

Although spending time like this is probably why he was crowned Most Chill, Micah doesn’t really agree with the title.

“There are some things that I’m super intense about,” he says, laughing. “My friends like to joke with me about it, like, ‘Here he goes talking about roads again.’”

the climate scholar Andreas Malm, who argues that we have a moral obligation to sabotage fossil fuel infrastructure. (To be clear, Micah says he does not advocate for, say, blowing up Monsanto.)

So maybe it’s time to rethink chillness altogether.

Chillness is selective, exonymic, and probably not even real; more importantly, whatever it is, it’s a process. During Micah’s freshman year, the pandemic sent everyone home in the middle of winter, and he ended up taking a year off. “My sophomore year, I came back and I got through winter,” he says. “And then I got to spring and I saw everything come alive again. I was like, ‘Whoa, I get it now.’”

“Some people say you can maximize luck, you know, you can put yourself in a position to be lucky,” Micah adds. “I think the same thing is true for happiness.

You can put yourself in a position to be happy.”

He laughs, gazing out at the water.

“Maybe chill is a good word for it and maybe it isn’t.”

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Best Advice Giver: Matilda Marcus

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BY SAZI T. BONGWE

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CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

he day I meet Matilda Marcus, they are late.

Fourteen minutes past the hour.

“I was actually just on the phone with my best friend from home, who I went to elementary school with. We’ve been best friends since we were seven,” they tell me.

“We’re still best best friends. She has a key to my house; she’s coming to my graduation as a member of my family.”

The term “best friend” rolls off Matilda’s tongue often. “Best Friend” — itself a superlative — implies one chosen from many, but that definition wouldn’t do for Matilda: they use the tag for many people in their life.

One of those other best friends is Matilda’s roommate. This past year, Matilda did something that, in Harvard’s hallowed halls, borders on sacrilege: they transferred from the refuge of a river house to the distant lands of the Quad.

“I just wanted a more peaceful life.

I wanted less river, less Harvard,” they say of transferring from Dunster to Cabot. “It’s made me enjoy the University way more, when I’m away from it.”

Some might imagine that Matilda was trading close ties for peace and serenity. But their case has been quite the opposite.

“I would say that truly, the dorm has somebody there maybe four times a week, five times a week.” They explain that their best friend will “text at midday and be like, ‘Okay, who are we inviting over tonight?’ It’s calculated, but in a way that’s just, ‘Yeah, let’s build a friendship with this person.’”

It’s not just about who’s coming; it’s about the environment they’re entering too. In the middle of a conversation with their roommate last week, Matilda recalls saying, “‘Can you just give me a second?’ I closed all the doors in our common room and I turned the lights down and I just

changed the ambiance of the room.”

“I was like, ‘we want to invite people over to try and build intimate relationships with them,’” they say.

“And we can’t do that unless the context is giving that too. So why don’t we induce this?”

These are the kinds of questions Matilda doesn’t shy away from asking.

“I’m not afraid of saying those sorts of things explicitly. Like, let’s get deep, let’s get deep!”

Their approach to “friend-making,” as Matilda calls it, is an attempt to go against the milieu. “I feel like so much of friendship here is like ‘friendship’,” they say, making air quotes. “It’s beyond fair-weather friendship and it’s more like network-acquaintance friends.”

Matilda grew up in South London — “the best city ever to grow up in.”

“My admissions file says, which is pretty crazy, ‘Modest Afro-Caribbean background now single-parented,’” Matilda tells me. “I was raised by my mom. When I was seven, she liquidized her pension and put me in private school.”

Their nine years at that school — which was all-girls with roughly 60 students per class — were formative, not least because of the intimacy.

“You knew everybody’s name,” Matilda says.

“It was this alternate reality — this matriarchy. I went home to a mother.

I had two male teachers, maybe three.

And yeah, it was so awesome.”

Matilda carries their upbringing with them like the freckles on their nose. “Something I really love about home, that I feel has shaped me in a big way, is feeling that part of my social contract,” they trail off into a chuckle, “is this real sense of community, at least with other Londoners.”

I asked Matilda what it was like to come from this Rousseauian world to the United States, the land of rugged individualism, and ‘e pluribus unum’ — out of many, one.

“I sort of just built my own society, honestly,” they tell me. “All of my friends were raised by immigrants, or are not American themselves.”

Matilda traces their closest friends on campus to two spaces: The first is Harvard Radio Broadcasting — known by its call name, WHRB — where they are the Social Chair of the Record Hospital department. The other space is their multimedia learning job at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.

Giving advice is a long-running thread in Matilda’s life. In their last week of secondary school, a friend told Matilda about a conversation mentioning them. Someone asked, “‘Is it just me or does Matilda know your darkest secret?’” And then somebody else answered, Matilda explains, “‘No, no, she knows mine too.’ And the conclusion of the conversation was: she could break us. She could break us all.”

“I have always been the secret holder,” they say. “And I love it.”

As much as Matilda is an advicegiver, they’re also an advice-receiver.

“My whole life I’ve been getting myself in trouble, not by telling other people’s gossip, but just telling my own,” they say. Now, they’ve reached a point where “I have a rule that when something happens, I am allowed to tell one inside-of-school friend, one outside-of-school friend and wait for two weeks.”

It is not just London or their matriarchal upbringing, to which Matilda attributes the strength of their friendships. “It’s also just the wonderful power of weed, right?” they explain. “I’m being really serious, it has not only cemented but forged so many of my friendships here.”

Preparing to leave Harvard, Matilda says “the rose tint is coming down.” They’ll go on to do many things, chief of which will be to “build that community wherever I go.” Before that, though, will be some time spent with the person that I sense also belongs on their list of best friends — Matilda’s mother.

As they pull their brown-stitched denim jacket over their shoulders, I tell them that their profile will be in print. “I’ll mail it to my mom,” they say.

“She’ll be happy. This is my legacy.”

PHOTO BY LEANNE ALVARADO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER | 12

Most House Spirit:

Audery Kang

BY KYLE L. MANDELL CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

J

ust like her beloved Leverett House, green is Audrey N. Kang ’24’s signature color. Green proliferates in her room, from her Celtics poster (she became a fan from the influence of some friends in Leverett) to the plants lining her walls (“I keep telling myself I’m a plant girl and I really am not”). To top it off, she’s even using a green Godzilla mask to scare mice as part of her thesis research.

Coming to Harvard from Dublin, California (“an hour away from anything interesting”), Audrey might’ve thought she’d be trading in Dublin green for Harvard crimson. But once she was sorted into Leverett House, she put on the classic green light-up bunny ears and has been a Leverett staple ever since. “I feel like people sleep on Lev,” she says of her nomination in this category. “So I was really happy to have a house spirit moment.”

I’m meeting Audrey in her suite, high up in Leverett G-Tower. We pause to admire the view of Cambridge sprawling out before us. “You can literally feel the golden light pouring through the room,” she tells me. “I kind of stand here and photosynthesize.”

She also appreciates simply “waking up, opening the window, and seeing people you know walking into the courtyard.” She’s become close with these fellow Leverites as co-chair of the Leverett House Committee, a role she assumed “effectively two months into joining the House.”

“I actually don’t really remember House life before being the co-chair,” she says.

Audrey wears many hats at Harvard, from working for Consulting on Business and the Environment to event-planning with the Harvard-Radcliffe Chinese Student Association. And yet, “HoCo is

honestly the best thing that I’ve done,” she says, before diving into a description of her life as co-chair.

Every Sunday morning, Audrey buys snacks for the weekly 11 a.m. HoCo meeting, where the group convenes to plan events from formals to weekly steins with themes ranging from karaoke to April Fools. She coordinates it all with her co-chair Austin Ma ’24, whom she didn’t know before joining HoCo but is now “one of the people I’m closest to on campus,” she says.

“In a school where people got here because they’re really really good, sometimes it’s really nice to have a community where you don’t need to try to be a part of it.”

Then on Thursdays, she helps set up for, run, and clean up Stein, wrapping up just in time for intramural volleyball B (“another highlight of my Lev experience”). When the weekend rolls back around, she does it all again: “It’s just rinse and repeat after that.”

I’m exhausted just hearing Audrey’s weekly routine, but somehow, she’s still bursting with energy as she tells it to me.

“In a school where people got here because they’re really really good,

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sometimes it’s really nice to have a community where you don’t need to try to be a part of it,” she muses. “It’s not like I needed to prove my Leverett-ness or anything.”

Even so, she’s definitely proved it. She tells me of many long nights walking in and out of the tower courtyards or down into the HoCo closet, waving to security guard Mike A. Grant — “one of the staples of the Leverett community” — or even talking to the HoCo chairs from 20 years past about their old events and traditions.

“Most of my other time when I’m not doing a lot of these fun events is literally spent in a laboratory with mice,” she says about her thesis on dopamine signaling in different brain regions in mice (hence the Godzilla mask).

More precisely, she’s comparing how two centers of the brain interact when a mouse is put in a context where there’s both a reward and a threat. The Godzilla mask acts as the threat, popping out and roaring at mice as they try to drink water. Throughout the process, Audrey is recording the activity of the brain areas in order to see how the dopamine signaling is happening. In comparison with her Leverett duties, she notes, there’s “a lot less human contact in my research.”

While Audrey has spent her undergraduate years in labs as a Neuroscience concentrator, she’ll be returning to Cambridge soon enough to attend Harvard Law School. Up until this point in our conversation, I didn’t even know she was interested in law.

“I came to Harvard and was like, ‘You know what, why decide when I can join a consulting club and then be pre-law while being a neuro major?’ No decisions made at all,” she tells me with a smile.

Even though her time as HoCo cochair and as an undergraduate in the House is coming to a close, Audrey will always be connected to Leverett. “I’d be so down to come back as a tutor and then be able to foster community in a different way,” she says eagerly. “So maybe not a permanent goodbye.”

PHOTO BY LOTEM L. LOEB — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER| 14

Best Dressed:

Allure Akaeze

BY YASMEEN A. KHAN

W CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

hen Allure O. Akaeze ’24 meets someone for the first time, they

like to wear pink.

For our interview — which doubles as our first meeting — they wear a pink fishnet top, pink butterfly pasties, a pink fur coat, a pink garter belt holding up pink thigh-highs, pink legwarmers over pink glitter platform heels, a bedazzled hat with a pink varsity patch, beaded pink jewelry, and a blue (!) micro skirt with a trim that looks like it’s made of teddy bear fleece.

Allure’s pink is not the muted pink of Glossier ads, nor is it the blushing beige-pink of coquette moodboards and the Brandy Melville logo. It’s closer to the supersaturated “Barbie” pink, but even that shade is too bland to match Allure’s hue.

“I like a hot pink that’s really in your face,” they say. “And I like wearing it in a way that’s a little bit erotic and loud and aggressive in a way that I feel like sometimes pink is not.”

On a campus full of Canada Goose puffers and crimson “H” sweaters, Allure’s bold take on pink has attracted attention. “My friend was like, ‘Allure, sometimes people know you exist, but they don’t know your name. So they just call you The Pink One,’” they say.

Allure transforms pink — a typically soft, demure, “girly” shade — into a color with teeth. They are a nonbinary femme lesbian, and they

remix the rules of femininity in order to represent their identity.

“My relationship to femininity feels different,” they explain. “My goals with dressing are a reflection of that, because some of the goals that I have when I dress up might not necessarily be the goals of everybody around me.”

“When I put on makeup, I don’t have the intention of looking like a flawless version of myself,” they continue.

They say this while wearing sparkly silver eyeshadow and long artificial eyelashes. Their eyebrows are drawn thin and dark, and their face is entirely covered in pink powder. “I like putting on makeup and you knowing I have makeup on.”

Allure credits their style to the groups they belong to. “I’m surrounded by people who are subversive in their own ways,” they say. “Them being and dressing like themselves — especially when it comes to the trans people that I’m around — is revolutionary, beautiful, and cool.”

Allure’s primary fashion influence is their older sibling. “They were the first person that I was able to see, in real time, experiment with themselves and their fashion and their gender expression, and with color and texture and patterns, in a way that was really important to me,” they say.

Other notable influences include the rapper Zepkins, whose pinned Instagram post features themself lipsyncing in rhinestone cheetah print patches, as well as the model Sunny Bunny, who poses with their entire body painted pink, white, or green.

Allure also draws inspiration from two contrasting subcultures: the sugary street style of the Harajuku

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district in Tokyo and the drama of the goth scene. “I’m friends with a lot of goth folks who have taught me about not just different ways of dressing, but also how to be confident in going out in the world looking drastically different than everyone else,” they explain.

Their love for fashion is intertwined with their interest in performance. They admire the aesthetics of sex workers, burlesque dancers, and the video vixens (think grainy hip-hop music videos, velour tracksuits, glossy lips) of the ’90s and 2000s. They are a dancer, musician, and producer, and they have performed at events across Boston, including a Hello Kitty rave and at the Trans Resistance March.

“I’ll buy things for a performance, and then rework them in my clothing because I want to wear them in other contexts,” Allure says.

“But also, I think that the version of me that is all dressed up — whether I’m on the stage or going to CVS — is still myself,” they continue. “I feel comfortable and confident looking this way, and I don’t want it to be only left to the stage. I want to carry that in every aspect of my life.”

PHOTO BY MARINA QU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER | 16

Life of the Party:

Madison Pankey

BY JEM K. WILLIAMS

I­

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

If I get invited to an event, I will almost always say yes,” L. Madison Pankey ’24 tells me in the Dunster dining hall, her bracelets shifting and colliding as she talks, punctuating her turns of phrase.

For Pankey, partying is not about the place but the people. “My ideal night would be getting ready with my roommates, meeting up with my girlfriends, going out to somewhere with a live band, and dancing, and singing, and just living life, meeting people,” she says.

She describes the eccentric close-knit feel she gets from being with her friends

in the crowds of live music performances and in the collective rallies of House spirit. Yardfest and Housing Day are equivalent to the “Super Bowl” for Pankey — she has the face paint and homemade posters to prove it.

Hailing from a suburb just outside of Atlanta, Pankey comes from an area defined by southern “Friday Night Lights” football culture, big homecoming parades, dances, and house parties. Her school was bonded by the nights of full stadiums that shut the rest of town down.

How does she make Harvard compare to that? It’s simple. Though Harvard might not offer the traditional perks of a “party school” — large tailgates at every football game and ample parties to choose from every weekend — Pankey isn’t bothered. Her definition of a party is much more expansive than a physical

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space.

“You can have fun anywhere you go, if you decide,” she says.

Pankey does find the party scene she’s looking for, and it has a schedule.

Find her at Grendel’s on Wednesday nights — or “Grendsdays” as she enthusiastically refers to them — at The Burren, an Irish pub in Somerville on Thursday nights, and at the occasional “big functions” that pop up around campus over the weekend. But most importantly, she finds it in all the nights spent with her friends.

Pankey explains her relationship to partying and her own social life through stoicism, a school of philosophy that emerged from Ancient Greece.

She was inspired by Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” which her brother recommended she read when she was a freshman.

“My understanding of stoicism is that it’s controlling what you can control and making the decision to be happy about it,” Pankey says.

There were many things outside of Pankey’s control at the beginning of her freshman year — a pandemic for one.

Stoicism helped her navigate new-found intellectual interests and social life after being introduced to a campus limited by weeklong quarantines upon arrival and restrictions on indoor space capacities.

There wasn’t much of a social scene. Most gatherings, for example, occurred on the banks of the Charles River and were broken up fairly quickly.

So, with the guidance of the stoics, she found something she could control in the creative tactics she could employ to meet new people.

“My first friend I met through a window,” she says, smiling in reflection.

She sees positives in arriving at campus during Covid-19, which she says reorganized the state of social dynamics on campus. Pankey says she’s noticed that typically people on the same sports teams or clubs tend to stick to those groups. But five of her seven current roommates were athletes at one point, and she doesn’t know if she would have met them under normal circumstances.

For Pankey, being the “life of the party” means being someone that is “just excited to be there” and someone who attends events “because your friends are hosting it” or, more simply, “just because you want to meet more people.”

Anyone can be the life of the party, she tells me repeatedly. According to Pankey,

the main attributes that make someone the life of the party are showing up and building community.

“It’s an understanding of, ‘we’re all trying to make it and we’re all trying to make friends and have a fun time,’” she says.

She insists that there were numerous other people in her life she feels deserve this title, but she also finds the “life of the party” to be a complicated title.

“I don’t want to paint any of them as party girls because they’re so much more than that. They’re scientists. They’re athletes. They’re comedians. They’re writers. They’re all these crazy things,” she says.

But, what makes them the life of the party to Pankey?

“They love life as much as I do,” she says.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEANNE ALVARADO| 18

Most Likely to be President:

Arjun Akwei

BY CIANA J. KING

T

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

he wide, stone stairs of Claverley Hall with its freshly polished banisters and high ceilings felt like the appropriate place to meet this year’s Most Likely to Be President, Arjun A. Akwei ’24. Upon entering Arjun’s dorm, I was greeted by his big smile and a tidied shoe rack — the epitome of culture and order.

I then spot Campaign Trail, a board game where players compete to become the President of the United States, stacked on a shelf with a teapot, spices, and other board games. How fitting. To its left was a nook with three red armchairs, a faux taxidermy deer mount, and a wall covered with a woodpatterned wallpaper to “emulate the old Harvard aesthetic,” Arjun explains.

As our conversation begins, Arjun’s roommate jokingly promises Arjun his vote and says bye to “Mr. President” on his way out the door.

But Arjun is no joke. Despite having a laid-back vibe, he speaks evenly, holds himself with strong posture, and maintains a piercing gaze. Okay, Obama. As one would assume of the most presidential student on campus, Arjun has racked up an impressive resume. Currently, he is pursuing a concentration in Government, a secondary in Astrophysics, and a citation in Chinese — all while serving as founder and co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate Think Tank and playing for the Men’s Club Soccer team. This doesn’t even include his stint as an ROTC cadet during his sophomore year.

Arjun, who was raised in the D.C. area by parents working in human rights activism and international

development, has always known he was destined for policy.

“It was always interesting to me to watch them and hear about their work, and the struggles that they faced working on these policy issues from the outside,” he says. “I always thought that it would be better if there are people within government who are actually already taking steps to solve these problems rather than waiting for someone outside to either push them to do the right thing or fill gaps where they fell short.”

Arjun has spent his last four years dabbling in consulting, working on political campaigns, and researching the European Union’s relations with India and China. This year, he is exploring U.S.-India interests and relations for his thesis.

Like the rest of us, of course, Arjun doesn’t quite have it all figured out yet, but he does know the problems he wants to solve.

“I love working on state and locallevel politics, not even the big federal stuff. How do we figure out the most efficient way to build a public transit system in order to connect people with opportunity? Or a supermarket? What is it going to look like for us to improve educational outcomes or mental health outcomes for students?” he asks. “Those are issues that I want to be banging my head against for my entire life.”

“As a 97-year-old, I want to look back and know that my life has been spent really working towards those,” he adds.

To achieve Arjun-level ambitions requires consistency. Aptly, his parents gave him the initials A. A. A, he jokes.

He sticks to a strict routine.

“Typically, I’ll wake up around eight. Go to the gym. Grab breakfast. Then, have one or two classes. I’ll have a meeting for the Undergraduate Think Tank.

Do a bit more work. Hang out with my

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suitemates. Grab dinner. Head to club soccer practice. Come back and do a bit more work,” he lists. “And then call it a night.”

The night of our interview, however, will be topped off by a performance with his blocking group at the Adams Drag Night. Clearly, Arjun was born for the stage — whether recreating Tom Holland’s rendition of “Umbrella” or giving his future inauguration speech.

But perhaps his most presidential trait is his desire to get to know people.

“I like getting to hear people’s stories and trying to understand how they approach things, what they want from other people, the world,” he says. “I think we need more of that from our leaders.”

To Arjun, he is just like everyone else.

“I think people who interact with me tend to see the polished narrative,” he shares.

What most people don’t know is the version of him that bounced around between three different policy initiatives before finding his true interest. Or the person who was really struggling freshman and sophomore year and switched out of Social Studies largely because he “got bad grades on my papers and wanted something simpler.”

“My path through Harvard and the narrative that I string together based on that was not one that was clear at the outset or really clear in the middle,” Arjun says. “It’s something that makes sense looking backwards.”

“I would actually argue that my C.V. is not all that impressive in the conventional sense,” he adds. According to Arjun, the main pitfall of his C.V. is its lack of concentration in one area.“That is something that I just never did well at this place. But in not doing that, I had the opportunity to pull together a lot of very different experiences, all of which fit into my idea of service.”

PHOTO BY MARINA QU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER| 20

Most Main Character:

Isa Peña

BY JOHN LIN

I

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

f you find yourself in a musical theater around Harvard on a given weekend, there’s a good chance that you’ll bump into Isa Peña ’23-’24. At first, you might not recognize her. One week, she might be singing soaring ballads set in a brothel; on another week, she could be sporting a yellow wig, rosy cheeks, and bright red boots.

Today, sitting in the basement of Cabot Science Library, Isa is herself. Donning an unassuming leather jacket topped with a pair of sunglasses, she admits that despite her many theatrical roles, she does not consider herself a “main character.”

Instead, Isa believes her eventful life is what makes her stand out.

“Whenever someone makes a joke about some disaster or crazy sequence of events, it’ll happen to me,” she says. “I feel like the main character is always the one who has the crazy day, and I have a habit of having crazy days.”

Spontaneous happenstances should be a rarity considering Isa’s packed schedule. Every day, she wakes up at 6 or 7 a.m. before heading for a full day of back-to-back classes.

On most weekdays, she shuttles into Boston where she is dually enrolled at Berklee College of Music. Her evenings are filled with rehearsals or performances across multiple productions and the Opportunes, an acapella group that she has been a

part of since freshman year.

Yet, what might seem like random accidents turn into formative experiences. In the fall of freshman year, Isa received an email from the producers of American Idol, inviting her to audition. “It was a total ‘roll with the punches’ moment. I couldn’t let an opportunity like that pass me by,” she says.

After meeting with the cast directors, Isa flew to Los Angeles over Halloweekend.

There, she performed in front of celebrity judges, K a t y Perry, Lionel Richie a n d Luke

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Bryan. In a way, her audition represented a full-circle moment.

When she was 11, Isa auditioned with Perry’s “Firework” on “La Voz Kids,” a Spanish children’s edition of “The Voice,” but she left the blind audition with no chairs turned.

This time, she made it past the audition round, and soon, she learned what it was like to be in the entertainment business. “I always knew that being a performer was more than just singing. But that was a huge wake-up call. I was like ‘Damn, you gotta be on 24/7’ because there’s always a camera on you,” she says.

In spite of the glamor and glitz of Hollywood, Isa maintained some semblance of a normal college life.

She still showed up to her 9 a.m. classes after catching a red-eye back from filming. Fresh from her elimination, she lugged her suitcase to Tasty Burger with her freshman roommates.

Whether it’s a nationally-televised competition or a campus-wide production, Isa treats every experience to perform as a learning oppor tunit y.

One of her most formative

experiences was playing Vanessa from “In the Heights,” which connected theater with her Latinx culture and family history. She also dabbled in comical evil as Heather Chandler in “Heathers” before toggling over to powerful vulnerability as Lucy Harris in “Jekyll and Hyde.”

Isa credits the Hasty Pudding Theatricals for pushing her outside of her comfort zone, describing it as an “out-of-body experience” with their extravagant costumes and overdramatized characters.

“I can really just immerse myself because I love it. I care about it. And this is important to me,” she says. “Taking that kind of seriousness to something as unserious as playing a diva who is yelling at her boyfriend every two seconds — it’s kind of beautiful.”

Still, the most challenging character to play might be herself.

She most recently ventured into songwriting, jotting down lyrics as an outlet in times of high emotion.

But accepting the vulnerability of sharing them with the world has been daunting.

This semester, she co-wrote a song that was selected to be performed at Berklee next spring. “The song was absurd. It was about this girl seducing her dentist at her appointment. I was like, ‘This is fine to share with people because it’s weird,’” she says. “But if I tried to write something from the heart, I’m like, ‘Nobody will ever see this ever in a million years.’ I don’t know why that is. But hopefully, I grow out of that soon because eventually, I would like to have my own stuff out there.”

Beyond the stage, Isa’s academic

interests are just as ambitious and spontaneous. Initially a Government concentrator on the data science track, Isa took an interest in Chinese foreign policy. When she found out that she could not work with her dream thesis adviser unless she concentrated in East Asian Studies, Isa was unfazed. She made the lastminute decision to pursue a joint concentration.

Isa understands the absurdity of her academic trajectory, characterizing her switch as “the craziest email that you could get from a junior in May.” Next spring, as she rushes to complete the joint concentration, she will be the only senior in its sophomore tutorial class, though she foresees it as a “nostalgic” experience.

No matter how disparate her passions seem, Isa finds a way to fuse them together. Her senior thesis looks at Chinese propaganda during the Cultural Revolution through the lens of musical theater. It’s a relatively new realm for her.

“I think it’s just so different to apply what I’ve learned about popular music and why it’s popular to 1960s Chinese model opera music and why it was successful. I’m like ‘Ah, this is so different, but it’s been fun,’” she says.

Fun and stochasticity are a common thread in Isa’s life. Despite the intensity that she approaches each of her passions, she has no regrets.

“Definitely, I’ve had my flops,” she says. “But I think that’s like the biggest thing that I’ve come out of college with. I’m just like, ‘You gotta go 100, or why?’”

PHOTOS BY MARINA QU — CRIMSON PHTOGRAPHER | 22

Class Clown:

Matthew Cole

BY GRAHAM R. WEBER

B

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

eing “a goofy, goofy guy” is no easy task.

Just ask this year’s Class Clown Matthew W. Cole ’24, who sometimes finds himself “unnecessarily stressed” about doing exactly that.

I meet him outside the clubhouse of The Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770 on a dark and rainy afternoon. He punches a code into the front door’s keypad and leads me inside. We walk up a grand, spiral staircase, past walls teeming with memorabilia, and into the organization’s library, where we sit in opposing leather chairs.

Matthew tells me he is driven by a desire to make himself and others laugh.

“I’m someone who is very serious about the very silly things that I do,” he says.

Matthew has been a cast member of Hasty Pudding Theatricals since his freshman year, though Covid-19 kept the show off the stage that year.

Matthew played Millie O’Nair during his sophomore year in “Ship Happens” and Aunty Establishment in last year’s production “Cosmic Relief,” which he also co-wrote.

Performing in a show he wrote was “very Lin-Manuel Miranda of me,” he says.

Alongside the Pudding, Matthew performs stand-up comedy and is part of the undergraduate improv troupe On Thin Ice. Harvard’s Office for the Arts even awarded him a grant to practice and perform stand-up in Brooklyn during the summer after his sophomore year.

At the start of the semester, he auditioned for the “very sincere” undergraduate musical “White House Princess” by singing “a very overwrought rendition of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’” to make his friend who co-wrote the show laugh. The show’s production team loved it so much that they asked him to come back and do it in front of audiences before each of the performances, dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.

He describes performing as a vulnerable endeavor. While performing improv with a team helps soften the challenge of having no script, solo standup performances heighten the stakes. “If you fail, it’s all on you. If you succeed, it’s all on you,” he says.

An English concentrator, Matthew was also awarded a grant from the English Department this past summer to work on his thesis, an hour-long single-scene play tentatively titled “Speed Bumps (and Other Things Jesus Wouldn’t Have Wanted).”

“That grant was for me to go to New York for a bit and watch plays,” he says.

“If nothing else, I’ve really learned how to ask Harvard to give me money, so I can go to New York and do whatever I want there.”

Matthew tells me that last year he created and co-hosted the “Salient Pod,” a podcast that masqueraded as part of the self-described “free speech publication” The Salient, most of whose writers conceal their identities. He and two friends published weekly episodes on Spotify, trying to “disrupt their messaging” by talking at length about celebrity gossip.

The Salient Pod garnered little fanfare until a series of popular posts about it materialized in a forum for Harvard

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students on the anonymous social media app Sidechat. “There was a brief flurry of people trying to guess our identities,” Matthew says.

No evidence of the podcast currently exists on the internet. Matthew attributes this to “ongoing legal disputes that I will not disclose more about at this time.”

Despite his passion for comedy, he tells me that he is surprised to be named Class Clown. He describes himself as “more of a mild-mannered sort of guy” in the classroom, one without the “desire to disrupt” that his newfound title may suggest.

“What I lack in class, I more than make up for in clown,” he says with a laugh.

“Externally, I do possess some very clown-like qualities, not just facially and with my large feet but also in how I live my life,” Matthew adds.

After he graduates, Matthew hopes to write for film and television and live in New York City. Still, he doesn’t consider himself a “capital ‘A’ actor,” and promises “if you ever see me acting again, after college, my hope is that I do it by way of writing.” (“I hate auditioning,” he says.

“It’s very stressful.”)

If a career writing comedy does not come to fruition, he has a backup plan: medicine, or as he calls it, “the family business.” Matthew’s parents are both doctors, and his sister is in medical school. And alongside his English concentration, Matthew has completed all the courses required to attend medical school.

“I wish so much that I loved medicine and could happily fall in line with a path that makes sense, that I understand, and that my family understands,” he says. “But, unfortunately, my joy lies elsewhere, and I’ve been chasing that as far as it will take me.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF GRAHAM R. WEBER | 24

Biggest Risk-Taker: Alex Wright

BY ADELAIDE E. PARKER

A CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

few hours before his Spanish class, Alex T. Wright ’23-’24 found himself stranded in a field in New Jersey.

Alex, a recreational pilot, had flown down to Princeton to visit his younger brother.

But when he went to fly back, the key to his plane’s engine snapped off. With no spare key and no other way back to Boston, Alex was left with only one option: hotwire the plane.

“I flew that plane all the way back from New Jersey to Boston on a hotwired engine,” Alex says nonchalantly, as if he’s describing any other morning commute.

He grins. “That’s why you always take the afternoon Spanish class. So, if stuff happens, you can still get there.”

To Alex, navigating high-pressure situations is second nature. During his pandemic gap year, he moved to California and took an interest in extreme sports. After three years of practice, Alex has now mastered the art of spearfishing, become a certified skydiving instructor, and jumped out of military planes over the Pyramids of Giza. When I ask him about the most dangerous things he’s done, the hotwired plane doesn’t even make the list.

But he wouldn’t call himself a thrillseeker. According to Alex, if you’re approaching extreme sports looking for adrenaline, you’re doing it wrong.

“I want to be clear that there’s a distinction between the kind of risk teenage boys take, which is where they’re just being idiots,” he says, “and activities in which you have a very real appreciation of what you’re doing, which typically only happen with skill.”

For Alex, taking risks is a way to develop expertise and engage with the world more authentically. He grew up in London, a setting he says wasn’t optimal for engaging with the outdoors.

When he moved to California, Alex wanted to explore nature. He started by getting his pilot’s license, then shifted to paragliding and scuba diving.

“Diving is awesome. But in some ways, it’s an inauthentic way to engage with the water,” says Alex. To explore the sea in a less manufactured way, Alex decided to try freediving — where divers hold their breath until resurfacing rather than relying on scuba gear.

“It’s hard to do. There’s a lot more risk involved with freediving,” says Alex.

“But the trade-off is that it feels much more authentic.”

To Alex, taking risks is meditative — a way to practice being fully present under pressure.

“The whole point of meditation is that it demands a huge amount of focus,” says Alex. “In the same way, whenever you’re in a scenario which requires a really high degree of skill, and the consequences of it going wrong are death or serious bodily injury, it requires you to be super present in the moment.”

During one freedive, his equipment got caught on a piece of coral.

“Everything in my body made me want to just keep pushing right toward

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the surface. But I knew that I had to swim back down to solve the problem.

And that’s a really hard thing to do when you feel like you’re running out of breath,” says Alex.

Paradoxically, Alex often feels calmest while in risky situations.

“It really kind of clears out any peripheral concerns,” he says.

I ask him about risks he’s taken at Harvard, but Alex laughs. The Social Studies and Philosophy concentrator says that compared to the other experiences we’ve talked about, “they’ll be boring answers, like moving to a different country or doing a degree program that sounds like a fourth-grade class.”

Alex’s experiences taking risks add perspective to his life at Harvard.

Harvard’s competitive environment can encourage students “to lose perspective on how important the things you do are,” he says. To be successful, you often “have to think that doing a pset or getting whatever recommendation is as important as the firefighter who is going into the building and pulling people out.”

Taking risks pulls Alex out of this mentality.

“Risk gives you some perspective,” he says. “It’s really hard to get super stressed about a pset when you’re like, ‘No one’s gonna die, all my friends are safe. I’m not in imminent risk.’”

Taking risks has made Alex more intrepid in all areas of life. Compared to jumping out of planes, braving a tough class or awkward social situation doesn’t seem like a risk at all. He believes we can all benefit from more adventure in our day-to-day lives.

PHOTO BY KACY BAO— CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER | 26

Most Mysterious:

Alexander Chen

BY SAM E. WEIL

C

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

lad in a beige trench coat, a man of ambiguous age and average stature enters a taxi. As he rides through Western New Guinea — or perhaps some part of the Virgin Islands, India, or Malaysia — he strikes up a conversation with his driver, describing his job as an English teacher.

And yet, in another taxi ride, he is a light natural gas engineer. In another, a graduate student studying archeology.

Evidently, these professions are lies — personas that Harvard senior Alexander J. Chen ’24 takes on “for the memes, to see how people react to different things,” as he explains it. While the hoodwinking might be harmless, each driver has been shortchanged nonetheless, for Alexander is withholding the bountiful knowledge that he holds, be it on the white matter of fox brains, undocumented Papuan lowland languages, Czech folk music, or ancient Roman numismatics.

The taxi driver will never know the true Alexander Chen. But even those who do know the real Alexander are absolutely mystified by how he manages to do so many goddamn things.

A double concentrator in Chemistry and Neuroscience and a premed, Alexander has taken at least five classes (most of the time, six) since his freshman spring. He’s done research in fields ranging from neurobiology and animal neuroscience to psychology and ethics. He’s been published in multiple scientific journals for helping physicians develop an algorithm to compile and analyze Covid-19 case data.

He’s also studied anxiety behaviors in mice at the Boston Children’s Hospital.

“That was really fun,” he says. “It got me really interested in the intersection of the brain and the mind, which is actually a field I want to go into.”

And for his thesis, Alexander is now examining the white matter (“the highways of the brain,” he explains) of foxes, hoping to establish ways in which conductivity between critical regions differ between aggressive, docile, and control foxes. (Not to mention his research with the Safra Center on ethical education in the U.S.) Alexander sees a throughline between these diverse interests: He cares about “using data, and using quantitative approaches, to tackle problems [that] are very qualitative.”

Did you think that was it? Alexander leads the Phillips Brooks House Association’s Chinatown ESL program, working with elderly Chinese speakers on Zoom every weekend, all while directing various committees for Harvard Model UN. He’s been a bass singer for the Harvard Glee Club since his freshman year and briefly worked on a Doordash-meets-farmers-market startup called Harvest Haul.

Last year, he wrote a biweekly opinion column for The Crimson called “Artifactual” in which he highlighted artifacts from the Harvard Art Museum’s collection in discussing contemporary events like the crypto craze. Recently Alexander began working shifts at the Quincy Grille, and he has just joined Harvard Radio Broadcasting’s classical music department.

“What baffles me is he doesn’t even have a calendar,” his friend Alan F. Zhang ’24 tells me. “He holds everything in his mind. And he somehow makes time for everything.”

Alexander, meanwhile, perceives his approach a bit differently: “I’m a very very big procrastinator, but I think it’s like a Jenga tower, you know; it balances.”

During his sophomore year, while bouncing between his six classes, various random conferences, and numerous extracurriculars, Alexander began reading a paper on undocumented and dying languages (“Totally for pleasure,” he wrote in an email — I had to clarify). Looking further, he identified that a language

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called Mawes, found in the lowland region in Papua — an Indonesian province in Western New Guinea — was essentially undocumented.

After reaching out to various Swedish and Indonesian researchers, Alexander was able to spend a month this past summer living with the 800-person Papuan tribe. Engaging in anthropological research, he spoke with the locals in Indonesian and began cataloging the basics of Mawes. “I was able to do some pioneering work on the language,” he says.

Passion for preserving linguistic diversity practically bursts out of the man. “In every way a language chooses to express something, is embedded so much cultural color,” he tells me.

During the two hours we spent together he shared dozens of “etymological tales,” such as the Arabic-influenced etymology of “California” to the linguistic puzzle as to why the Greeks described the sky using the word “bronze” (spoiler: because bronze turns blue after oxidizing).

He traces his interest in linguistics back to his childhood struggles with stuttering. “The difficulty of language to me, as someone who stuttered severely as a child, made the spoken word all the more precious,” he says. Alexander no longer stutters, but his experience moving through the world with a speech impediment sparked his interest “in how stigma arises, with disease. And in general, the social aspects of medicine.”

While Alexander is pursuing many interests here at Harvard, he’s staying true to his core passion of medicine — “the one discipline that captures all I want to do.” He aspires to be a physician “who is much more than just a pill pusher. Someone who looks at medicine as synonymous with human existence and nature,” he tells me.

He hopes to follow a similar path to Paul Farmer: practicing medicine while addressing health disparities and “also synthesizing this linguistic work with my public health work,” he tells me earnestly. “That’s the dream.”

PHOTO BY MARINA QU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER| 28

Most Interesting Thesis:

Tatiana Miranda 29 | PAGE DESIGNED BY SOPHIA SALAMANCA AND SAMI E. TURNER — CRIMSON DESIGN-

I

BY KAITLYN TSAI CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

f you asked freshman-year Tatiana Miranda ’24 whether she would imagine herself writing a thesis on Joker fanfiction, the answer would be, “Not in my wildest dreams, no!”

But fast-forward three years and Tatiana is doing exactly that. Her thesis explores how Joker fanfiction writers, particularly those who have marginalized identities, use their writing to reckon with their experiences.

Coming to Harvard as a woman of color, Tatiana recounts, she felt “trapped” in her body, and she would often receive comments about her appearance that she found strange. Throughout her academic career as a joint concentrator in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Tatiana found herself engaged in conversations about mind-body dualism in literature — how the mind is typically associated with masculinity and Western culture, whereas the body is relegated to marginalized groups.

These discussions planted the seed for her thesis.

“Fanfiction is marginalized in part because it’s very bodily writing. It’s usually written in first person or second person, and the action’s usually about the body,” she says. “My thesis, I ended up thinking, ‘Okay, let me connect fanfiction with another very bodily genre,’ which is the superhero genre, that’s all about super abled bodies. So ultimately, I chose the Joker because he doesn’t have superpowers — he just takes punches, he’s not attractive, and he’s kind of gross.”

Tatiana initially delved into the world of fanfiction when she was around 12 or 13 years old, long before she would start researching this topic for her thesis.

“That’s when I took an interest in writing on my own, and when I discovered that I can engage with stories that I already enjoy and already envision myself in,” she says.

From there, fanfiction became her means of “hyperfixating and procrastinating for many, many years,” Tatiana says. “And when I got to college, I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve loved this all my life. I kinda want to study it.’ So I’ve always sprinkled it in whenever I could.”

Aspects of Tatiana’s personal life also sparked her interest in studying the body and bodily forms of writing. Tatiana pole dances and has felt the stigma that surrounds the art when someone asks what her post-graduation plans are.

“It’s a totally viable option for me to go ahead and be a pole instructor. I already have a job in Miami,” she says. “But I feel like that’s a controversial thing to say.

It always seems like you can either do smart people jobs that don’t involve your body, or dumb jobs where you’re just moving your body.”

These experiences, in combination with WGS classes about bodily care and Black feminist theory, inspired Tatiana to explore marginalization and the body in depth. When she decided to pursue a thesis, she began the process of putting the pieces together. First, she honed in on which movie and character would be her focus, then decided to study fanfictions involving relationships between the Joker and an original character — a new character made up by the writer — since such figures have more direct connections to the writer.

Next, she “read a ton of Joker scholarship,” she says, to get a better sense of what most people currently portray the Joker as: an outsider, someone who is “mad” and “evil.”

His portrayal in “The Dark Knight”

in particular is very physical, Tatiana explains; he is physically deformed, is assaulted frequently, and his experiences of marginality are apparent. This, she says, helped her draw connections to the fanfictions she picked, and how the writers’ experiences of marginality interacted with the Joker’s.

As it turns out, drawing these connections was no easy feat. “My ADHD brain was on, like, 18 different tracks,” she explains. She shows me her full workspace — what she and her roommate call “the crazy stuff” — which consists of printed, annotated fanfictions; more annotated PDFs; several documents of research, outlines, and drafts; and notebooks where she has repeatedly summarized and synthesized her ideas.

Throughout this process, Tatiana credits her advisers, Stephanie Burt ’94 and Ericka R. “Ricky” Sanchez, for helping her stay on track with her project and, most of all, for allowing her to pursue something she felt passionate about, no matter how unconventional the topic.

“I’m very grateful,” she says. “I definitely picked the departments and the teachers and the pathways that would be best for me. I didn’t want to be flamed or put down in any way, so I chose a good niche, and I’m very thankful.”

After these four years of college, especially with this intensive process of working on her thesis, Tatiana is “very exhausted.” As of now, she isn’t sure what her future plans are; a break seems to be in store. But one thing does remain clear.

“If I do end up pursuing further studies, my focus would be on fanfiction,” she says. “I like studying my own cultural moment.”

PHOTOS BY MARINA QU —CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER | 30

Most Iconic Duo:

Henry Haimo & Tobias Benn

BY MICHAL GOLDSTEIN

H CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

enry N. Haimo ’24 is already waiting for me in the Lowell House dining hall when I walk in at 3:58 p.m., two minutes before our scheduled meeting time. Tobias A.A. Benn ’23-’24 shows up right at 4. Years earlier, at Henry’s mayoral debate watch party in New York — the duo’s first in-person meeting — this punctuality was Tobias’ first impression.

“I was the first person to arrive,” Tobias says. “Henry said, ‘I knew you’d be the one to arrive on time.’”

“Friendship at first sight?” I ask them.

They both nod in fierce agreement. “It was, absolutely,” Tobias says.

Until the watch party, Henry and Tobias had only ever spoken virtually.

In the fall of 2020, while Henry was taking Humanities 10, the two were matched together through the course’s mentorship program which connects students currently taking Hum 10 with students who have taken it before. Tobias was Henry’s mentor.

Their first meeting was through Zoom, around 40 minutes long. “I think I have the time recorded,” Tobias says, explaining he had documented the encounter in his journal.

“I kept a very intimate journal of pretty much everything I did,” Tobias says. Before I can probe this habit further, Henry chimes in, “You’re talking to a reporter here.” They tell me later that they are “private people.”

After sparks flew during their initial Zoom, the two called each other frequently throughout the subsequent spring semester. Once they were back

on campus in the fall of 2021, they spent more and more time together, often around Lowell House, where Tobias lives, which is also where they both participate in the Lowell House Society of Russian Bell Ringers. (Tobias is the copresident; Henry is the historian.)

Now, they are in their third year of friendship. I ask about their favorite memories together, and the two confer.

Some, they choose to keep to themselves.

“We have non-disclosure agreements that we sign,” Tobias jokes.

But some memories, they’re willing to let me in on to fossilize in this article.

One includes a trip to one of Tobias’s hometowns, Santa Fe, where the two had dinner with Tobias’ high school philosophy teacher, visited the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and went hiking with Tobias’ high school friends.

Another memory is perhaps less grand, but just as meaningful — a series of conversations in the small courtyard of Lowell House at the beginning of their first fall semester together on campus.

“It was still warm enough to be outside,” Henry says. “Our first in-person encounters, very late into the night, were very memorable.”

“Returning from Covid for me was very jarring because I’d been away from campus for so long,” Tobias adds. “Seeing Henry again, after the only time I’d seen him in person, was the perfect welcome back.”

Their friendship has only blossomed over time.

“Initially, we had a lot of similarities with which we could identify with each other,” Henry says. “We’ve also grown to appreciate and discuss our differences.”

Tobias adds, “It’s very rewarding to go over the small details of difference because it’s in those details that one isn’t able to explore with many people that we might learn the most.”

Across the table, the two look like

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mirror images: both have glasses and curly hair and proper collegiate New England outfits, Tobias in a collared shirt and Henry in a sweater. In fact, they tell me that they’ve been mistaken for brothers. But the two do differ, and I attempt to decipher those differences by putting their friendship to the test.

First, I ask them a series of “most likely to” questions, yielding revealing results. Tobias is most likely to give his kid a terrible name. Henry is most likely to win Survivor, but Tobias is most likely to win Love Island. Henry is most likely to become a fortune teller at a carnival.

Next, I ask them a string of questions about their favorite things — colors, books, music artists — and see if they can guess each other’s answers. The game becomes uncompetitive very quickly; they freely give each other hints or nudge each other in the right direction.

I ask them to name a class the other has that meets on Thursdays. They succeed. I ask them to write down each other’s thesis topics. They succeed again, finding it to be an easy task. I posit that a lot of friends wouldn’t think so. Tobias says, “Oh, no. We’re nerds.”

I ask them to name the other’s favorite restaurant in Harvard Square.

Henry changes the prompt to “in Cambridge” so that he can write “Dalí,” and Tobias asks if he can alter his choice to Dalí when we review answers, because Henry’s right, that’s actually his favorite restaurant, and he should have put it down himself.

By the end of our interview, I’ve grown to love Henry and Tobias’ simple partnership. And while the future remains a mystery, I’d be sad to see a postgrad world in which the two potentially live in different areas. But, they assure me there’s nothing to worry about.

“I think we’re confident that we will always stay in touch,” Henry says.

Tobias agrees. “Always.”

PHOTOS BY MARINA QU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER| 32

33 | CARTOON BY PEMA CHOEDON — CRIMSON DESIGNER

15 Seniors ACROSS 1 Lady ____ (IP!) 5 Partner of switch 9 "Does it strike you ____?"

14 Now! 15 Campus military org (AA!) 16 Hawaiian island 17 Leader in a matrilineal social order (MM!) 19 Indigo plants 20 It can see you...

21 Print type, for short 22 Marcus Aurelius, philosophically (MP!) 23 'Frozen' queen 24 Claimed, as a seat 26 Edinburgh film festival, colloquially (MRKL!) 29 March madness org.

30 Radio frequencies...or copies of this magazine?

33 Starr drummer?

34 City on the Yangtze River 35 On the ___ (fleeing) 36 Tolkien creatures 37 Sneaks a look 38 Trumpet sound 39 Opposite of NNW 40 Italian cheese

15 Seniors 41 Gotham city villain (TM!) 42 __ Majesty, hidden track on Abbey Road 43 Memo header 44 Most secure 45 Former Press Secretary Jen 47 "Alas!"

48 Class _____ (MC!) 50 Discard 52 Hat named for a Moroccan city (FZ!) 55 Kenyan tribe 56 Prepares for a dental appointment, say 58 8-downs, for example 59 Godzilla costume part (AK!) 60 "Play It ____ Lays," 1970 Joan Didion novel 61 Drop in on 62 Rough guesses 63 Type of butter DOWN 1 Scrabble or Catan 2 "Don't I get ___?"

3 Garden entrance 4 Aries + Taurus season 5 Cook slowly 6 Heart part 7 Something to scratch 8 Whim-wham (JO!)

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28 34

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31

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41 44 47 50

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9 Like some salmon and huskies 10 French toast?

11 Everything bagel ingredient 12 Spanish surrealist (HH + TB!) 13 Frisbee form 18 Volunteer's offer 23 MIT grads 25 Small batteries 26 ___ Pond, Cambridge reservoir (MW!) 27 Step after 'lather' and before 'repeat' 28 Puts in between 29 Uno + ocho

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31 Papuan language (AC!) 32 Clever 34 Booooring!

37 Rosy shade (AA!) 38 Had on, as clothes 40 Tickler of ivories 41 Leaps (AW!) 44 Beef cuts 46 Hindu teacher 47 "Give it ____!"

48 M - XCVI = 49 Notes between sol and do 51 Tax experts 52 Swimming vertrebrates 53 'Sopranos' star Falco 54 Greek Z 57 Used to be

For solutions and more puzzles, visit https://www.thecrimson.com/section/fm/crossword/ CROSSWORD BY SARAH FABER — CRIMSON STAFF WRITER| 34