Fifteen Minutes Magazine: October 2023

OCTOBER 2023

EDITORS’ NOTE STAFF FOR THIS ISSUE FM 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, Benjy Wall-Feng ’25 Graham R. Weber ’25, Sam E. Weil ’25 Jem K. Williams ’25, Dina R. Zeldin ’25 WRITERS Yasmeen A. Khan ’26, Sage S. Lattman ’25, Hewson Duffy ’25, Kaitlyn Tsai ’25, Sazi T. Bongwe ’26, Kate S. Griem ’25, Benjy Wall-Feng ’25 GLOSSY LAYOUT Laurinne Jamie P. Eugenio ‘26 Sophia Salamanca ’25 Sophia C. Scott ’25 Max H. Schermer ’24 Sami E. Turner ’25 FM MULTIMEDIA Julian J. Giordino ’25 Joey Huang ’24 Marina Qu ’25 GLOSSY PHOTOGRAPHERS Ben Y. Cammarata ’25 DESIGNERS Sophia Salamanca ’25, Emily N. Dial ’25 Hannah Lee ’26, Angel Zhang ’26 PRESIDENT Cara J. Chang ’24 ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR Meimei Xu ’24 MANAGING EDITOR Brandon L. Kingdollar ’24

Dear Reader, As the leaves turn, so too does FM turn a new page — or rather a new (and refreshed) glossy. As the cold sets in and as midterms loom ominously over us, it’s hard not to think about how quickly this semester (indeed, this whole year) has been going. We’re reminded of the importance of slowing down, of being deliberate with our time and energy. Considering the tragedy and horror of current events, it’s during times like these that we realize the importance of looking out for each other and, most importantly, ourselves.

In the cover story for this glossy, we’re publishing what amounts to 10 months of reporting and writing by KT on Harvard’s leave of absence policy. She weaves introspection with thoughtful and diligent interrogation of systemic issues in our College’s mental health supports and walks us through the obstacles and oversights in the policy by highlighting the stories of five students. Thank you, all of you, for sharing your experiences and being vulnerable with us. Thank you, KT, for being such a steadfast reporter, writer, EAL, and friend.

YAK writes about True Love Revolution, a club at Harvard in the mid-aughts that promoted abstinence on campus, reflecting on how, despite her skepticism of the club’s mission and personal distaste for sexual shaming, the abstinence education she received in school influences her perspective now. Photographer-extraordinaire BYC accompanies SSL to a workshop on how to embalm rats, testing the limits of her fondness for rodents and interrogating why we fear dead animals so much.

HD writes a dual profile of Alice Cai and Anh Phu Nguyen, Harvard’s first and only concentrators in Human Augmentation.

But, while they share an interest in the technological advancement of humanity, they have two very different visions of what that will look like. SZB writes a beautiful reflection on Susan Sontag’s relationship to Harvard, where she got her master’s in Philosophy, and how she came to see herself as incompatible with academia, opting instead to live a writer’s life. In a beautiful endpaper, KSG writes about finding home when there’s no physical place to anchor yourself to.

To close out this issue, END makes a beautiful comic that captures quite well the rainy fall weather we’ve been having, and be sure to check out our scrutiny-themed crossword by famed crossword editor BWF. Before we part, dear reader, we want to acknowledge that, these days, it can be anything but easy to get by. Loss is universalizing — it’s a loss of optimism, of hope, of answers. It is crushing. It is irrevocable.

But there is — and always will be — love.

Sincerely Yours, AHL & IYG

SONTAG — Sontag took that noble aspiration of the liberal arts colleges she swore off and made it hers: teaching people how to think. SEE PAGE 23

LEAVE OF ABSCENCES — I set out to uncover the reasons behind these policies, as well as their effects; for some students, whether they take a leave and how they do so could be, and has been, a matter of life or death. SEE PAGE 13

TRUE LOVE REVOLUTION — For all of my feminist beliefs, I still find myself affected by the pro-abstinence teachings that I grew up with. SEE PAGE 3

HUMAN AUGMENTATION — Beneath the auspices of human augmentation, Cai and Nguyen have fundamentally different approaches to technology, ones that will shape their futures — and perhaps ours, too. SEE PAGE 9

RAT EMBALMING— I pick him up in my plastic gloved hands, puncture his belly with my syringe, and push, watching his belly distend as he fills up with fluid. SEE PAGE 5

ANYWHERE I GO — Being in new places, at least at first, is both terrifying and exhilarating: You get to move a little more freely, losing the weight that expectations and environmental cues hold. SEE PAGE 27

True Love Revolution:

The Club Where Virginity Rocks

BY YASMEEN A. KHAN

I

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

t was the end of my first year at Harvard, and I was fed up with my love life. A series of romantic mishaps had left me spiraling: I scribbled hundreds of words in my diary when I should have been focusing on my final papers. Over dinner in Annenberg, I told my friends that I was done. I donated my skin-tight party dresses. I deleted my screenshots of text threads. I read, and then reread, Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect.” A few weeks later, on my private Instagram story, I announced that I was embarking on an Abstinent Girl Summer.

Although my vow of celibacy was

mostly unserious, there was a time when the pursuit of chastity had captivated the Harvard student body, — and I’m not referring to the school’s Puritan past.

In 2006 — the year of low-rise jeans and Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” — student couple Justin S. Murray ’07 and Sarah M. Kinsella ’07 founded True Love Revolution, a club dedicated to promoting abstinence on campus. By 2007, the group had 90 members on its Facebook page, and it drew about half that number to in-person events.

On Valentine’s Day, 2007, the club sent candy hearts to every girl in the freshman class, along with pink greeting cards that read: “Celebrate love, celebrate life, celebrate you. Why wait? Because you’re worth it.”

Their public programming garnered

national attention, and Murray and Kinsella appeared in NBC News, Newsweek, The New York Times, and other outlets. The pair presented the club as an alternative to Harvard’s undergraduate hookup culture, describing the campus as “saturated with casual sex” in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education.

On campus, though, True Love Revolution faced backlash for their unconventional outreach strategies. In an op-ed for The Crimson, Rachel M. Singh ’10 wrote that “by targeting women with their cards and didactic message,” True Love Revolution perpetuates “an ageold values system in which the worth of a young woman is measured by her virginity.”

Like Singh, I think the Valentine’s Day

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stunt is saturated with sexism. Given that, I was surprised to see how some True Love Revolution members marketed the group as a defender of women’s rights.

In an interview for The New York Times, Janie M. Fredell ’09, a former president of True Love Revolution, contended that “It’s extremely countercultural for a woman to assert control over her own body. It is, in fact, a feminist notion.” Fredell found a sense of control by abstaining from sex — “by telling men, no, absolutely not.”

Fredell’s argument felt familiar to me. Some of my closest female friends from high school are vocally committed to chastity. For them, abstinence is an exercise in agency — an enriching act of self-restraint. One friend explained her choice to me over FaceTime. Weaving her logic between our usual bits of boy-gossip, I started to see abstinence’s allure. There is something romantic in imagining yourself as a pure, sacred thing. The value that the doctrine of abstinence places in the body can seem comforting in the face of a sexual culture that leaves many young women feeling used.

At the same time, I find it difficult to believe that True Love Revolution’s promotion of abstinence advances a feminist agenda. In a statement on their now-defunct website, the club affirms their support for what they call “true feminism,” which is premised on the belief that there are “inherent physical, behavioral, emotional, and psychological differences between men and women.”

In addition to its blatant exclusion of trans women, I am troubled by how this line of thinking binds women to their biology. According to this statement, sex assigned at birth brings with it a series of insurmountable differences, all of which prevent women from acting on the same terms as men. Abstinent ideologies may imbue bodies with preciousness, but they trap women within those bodies in the process.

This essentialist form of feminism serves as the basis for many traditional abstinence narratives. These narratives imply that men are wired to seek out sex, while women are more naturally chaste. This puts women in the position of gatekeeping sex from men. As Singh pointed out, True Love Revolution sent their cautionary Valentine’s Day cards to freshmen girls — not freshmen boys.

It is difficult for me to fully articulate the harms of this dynamic. For one, it denies the force of female sexuality. It also reduces men’s behavior down to their base instincts. Perhaps worst of all, it places the blame on female victims of sexual violence: Women are made to feel

that they’ve failed to protect their purity, while men are absolved of responsibility for their abusive actions.

These ideologies would not concern me as much if they were confined to a long-departed campus club. In 2012, True Love Revolution was renamed the Harvard College Anscombe Society,

Sexist doctrines can spring up anywhere — whether that’s in a Southern public school or on a purportedly liberal campus like Harvard. after the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. In the years that followed, the club continued to advocate for sexual abstinence and “true feminism.”

Eventually, activity fizzled out, with the last post on the club’s website published in 2019. Murray declined to speak with me for this article, and Kinsella did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Unfortunately, harmful ideas about gender and sexuality continue to flourish on a systemic level — especially in the South, where I grew up. The school district that introduced me to my chaste close friends also practiced abstinence-only sex education.

In my eighth-grade health class, our singular sex-ed lecture was conducted by an elderly doctor who ran a local family practice.

For almost an hour, he showed us slide after slide of wart-encrusted penises and rashy vulvas, implying that the only way to avoid the same fate was to save sex until marriage.

My failed sex-ed is largely a joke that I now recount to my college friends. I tell them about how I believed, well into my teenage years, that condoms had to be prescribed by a doctor.

Nevertheless, studies published in the “Journal of Adolescent Health” have illustrated the dangers of abstinence-only sex education:

It does nothing to prevent unplanned pregnancies, it withholds accurate medical information, and it promotes harmful gender stereotypes.

On a personal level, I also found that focusing on abstinence led to sexual shame. Even though I wasn’t that serious about Abstinent Girl Summer, looking back, I find it odd that my first reaction to romantic strife was to double down on my sexual purity. For all of my feminist beliefs, I still find myself affected by the pro-abstinence teachings that I grew up with.

If the story of True Love Revolution proves anything, it’s that these sexist doctrines can spring up anywhere — whether that’s in a Southern public school or on a purportedly liberal campus like Harvard.

I do not mean to discredit abstinence completely — sex is a deeply personal topic, and I am in no place to dictate someone else’s sexual decisions. Instead, I want to imagine a world without the stigma that surrounds female sexuality — a world where a woman’s value is uncoupled from her sexual choices.

To me, that would be something truly revolutionary.

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Lessons in Rat Embalming

BY SAGE S. LATTMAN

I

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

t’s strange walking through the halls of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, knowing that in a few minutes, I will soon be embalming a rat. The animals enclosed in their glass cases look different from past visits.

Maybe it’s the heightened awareness that they were once alive, and that pretty soon, I’ll be doing the thing that got them to where they are today.

The museum’s Rat Embalming Workshop is set up with six tables of four, toolkits laid out in front of each seat. Fluorescent lights beat down from the ceiling. It’s just like a high school classroom on lab day.

The leader of the workshop, taxidermist Mickey Alice Kwapis, walks into the room as the class is about to start.

She wears chunky-buckled black boots and a black dress, matching her black hair, cut in a choppy bob. One arm is covered in a sleeve of tattoos: a peacock, an insect, a hand holding a scalpel with little spurts of blood along the tip.

There was a huge line in the lobby, and I called out, ‘Who is here for embalming?’” she says with an almost mischievous smile. “Everyone just looked at me like…” She turns her head towards us, eyes wide in mock shock and surprise.

Kwapis takes us through a history of the craft, explaining that the firstever embalming solution was made from a mixture of clotting pig’s blood.

I feel queasy as she explains to us that in a few minutes, we’ll be stabbing our “specimen” all over its body, pumping it full of fluid, which will eventually “mix

with blood and guts and leach out.” *** Earlier that week, I received an email from my editors asking if anyone would be interested in attending a rat embalming workshop. It took me less than a minute to reply saying that yes, I most definitely would.

I’m kind of obsessed with rodents.

My Instagram explore page is filled with videos of guinea pigs trotting to the tune of “Pretty Girls Walk” and capybaras lounging around a public park in Curitiba, Brazil.

There was part of me that just wanted to tell my friends I was taxidermying a rat and see their horrified reactions.

Taxidermy is not exactly a thing that is done or spoken much of in polite society.

When I told my boyfriend about my rodential weekend plans, he looked alarmed.

“Why would you ever want to embalm a rat?” he asked.

I found that I couldn’t provide an answer. It was the first time since signing up that I considered what embalming a rat would actually mean. The rat wouldn’t be like one of the rodents in my videos, with their silly motions and squeaks. This rat would just be dead, motionless in a jar. *** The rat lies on the green and white absorbent pad Kwapis gives us, so we don’t accidentally spill non formalin preservative fluid on ourselves. His hair is wet, and the way it’s brushed around his ears makes him look like a child, calm and sleepy after a shower.

That is until I pick him up in my plastic gloved hands, puncture his belly with my syringe, and push, watching his belly

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distend as he fills up with fluid. Gross. I’m timid at first, but then it becomes easy. I start to chat with the others at my table, asking what brought them to this rat embalming workshop.

Katherine D. Flaherty has a mouse skeleton dressed in a grim-reaper hood peeking out of her handbag. I learn it’s her Christmas tree topper and one of many skeletal specimens in her collection, most of which came from what she calls her “skull of the month” club subscription.

I ask how she found out about the class.

“My mom — who finally understands me! — sent me a link,” she says. “She was like, ‘this looks up your alley.’ Yes. Yes it is.”

Ian, who sits across from me, says he’s fascinated by weird museums, like the Cushing Brain Collection in New Haven or the Philadelphia Mütter Museum’s collection of preserved fetuses.

My tablemates, Kwapis, and I discuss whether my rat is sufficiently fluid-filled.

I decide to give it one more go, sticking the syringe in the rat’s neck, compressing the plunger. Blood springs from my rat’s face. I scream.

The whole class turns to look at me.

“She’s okay,” Kwapis says. “It’s just— blood came out of the mouth.”

Everyone has a good laugh.

It’s now time to submerge our rats into our jars full of non formalin preservative.

Kwapis suggests we put them head up. “It feels a little more respectful to me,” she says.

I dunk my rat, watching him float and bob in the jar. Lara, who’s sitting next to me, says he looks relaxed, like he’s in a sauna. I’m not sure I agree. A few minutes pass, and we listen to Kwapis’s instructions for maintaining our

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embalmed rats once we take them home.

“Look, it’s dripping down like drool,” Lara says, pointing at my jar.

I look. The rat has a little trail of blood leaking from its mouth, leaving a cartoonish-trail. *** Later that night, I inform my roommate that the embalmed rat has made its way back to our room. We are currently in the presence of a dead rat, kept in a glass jar inside a cardboard box under my bed.

“Sage, no,” she says. “Just like— why?

Why would you tell me this?”

I have to admit — even I was a bit creeped out. My rat was once a living creature, and now his fate was to just be a dead guy in a jar living under a dorm room bed.

But wasn’t my compunction for the rat a little nonsensical? I see dead animals all the time as meat. I eat dead animals hardly thinking twice about it. But seeing the rat felt different. He looked like he’d just been alive, with his tiny curled up paws and faintly blood-stained nose. He might as well have been sleeping.

On a Zoom call with Kwapis a couple

days after the workshop, I ask her the question I’d been unable to answer earlier in this week, one to which I still couldn’t quite grasp the answer: Why would anyone embalm a rat?

For one, she explains, for taxidermists, a rat specimen is often the most logical and convenient choice.

“I had a whole bunch of them in my freezer,” Kwapis says. “I do really want to utilize specimens that are available to me without seeking out new specimens elsewhere.”

Though the rats Kwapis bought for our class were raised and euthanized to be used as reptile food, she now prefers to source animals that have already died, either from natural causes or by pest control professionals.

She says she wants to “just utilize the resources that are available to me, instead of essentially becoming a squirrel hit-woman.”

I then ask her something else I’ve been wondering: why are so many people unsettled by taxidermy?

She partially blames it on Norman Bates in the movie “Psycho,” which created a stigma around the practice. But

it goes beyond that.

“You’re looking death in the eye,” she says. “The part that is unsettling to people is that they’re facing mortality, and maybe grappling with their own mortality, or their pets’ mortality when they look at taxidermy, without even knowing it.”

Kwapis calls her work “a labor of love.”

“You wouldn’t spend your days elbows-deep in a dead animal if you didn’t really love the work that you were doing and really want to honor those specimens,” she says.

She adds, “For me, the choice is simply to make the taxidermy and for other people, the choice might be to just throw something in a dumpster and be done with it. And for other people, the choice might be to bury an animal and have a little ritual. So it’s just a matter of personal taste. It’s a matter of what our own life experiences have been.”

I doubt this argument would hold up against my roommate if I were to take my embalmed rat out into the common room. But I’ll definitely be thinking of Kwapis’s words each time I shake my jar, allowing the rat’s stomach fluid to leach out.

The workshop is set up with six tables of four, toolkits laid out in front of each seat. Fluorescent lights beat down from the ceiling. It’s just like a high school classroom on lab day. BEN Y. CAMMARATA — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

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At Harvard Museum of Natural History’s Rat Embalming Workshop, participants embalm a rat, which they then take home with them. BEN Y. CAMMARATA — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

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Two Harvard Students, Two Contrasting Approaches to Human Augmentation

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BY HEWSON DUFFY CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

E

very year, as hundreds of Harvard students dutifully shuffle through Economics and Computer Science department requirements in hopes of an approving scribble on their degree, a few eccentrics design their own course of study — what Harvard calls a special concentration. The academic plans must be unique, and the topic must fall betweenoroutsideallexistingdepartments.

Titles of past special concentrations include “Neuroeconomics,” “Music Cognition and Perception,” “Nuclear Geopolitical Studies,” and, most recently, “Human Augmentation.” But for the last entry in the list, the road less traveled is more populated than usual — “Human Augmentation” has two concentrators, Alice X. Cai ’25 and AnhPhu D. Nguyen ’25.

Cai and Nguyen have a lot in common.

Besides their shared course of study, they both help direct the Augmented Reality Developers club (which the pair cofounded), they both participate in the art technology collective Conflux (which Cai co-founded), and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they both love thinking about the future.

Although the two concentrators may seem to be operating in parallel, their paths are quickly diverging. Beneath the auspices of human augmentation, Cai and Nguyen have fundamentally different approaches to technology, ones that will shape their futures — and perhaps ours, too. *** Nguyen grew up a tinkerer. During high school in Omaha, Nebraska, he built a coin sorter out of Legos that went viral on Reddit and founded a phone repair business called Phu’s Phone Emporium.

While Nguyen took apart phones, Cai put together novels. Growing up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, she began writing them at the age of eight and published her first — a fantasy story about a kingdom of bears — at 16. She has also won many awards for her nonfiction writing. On the side, she researched nanomaterials at the University of Arkansas.

Cai and Nguyen both arrived at Harvard in fall 2021. According to Nguyen, Cai was thinking of applying for a special concentration in computational creativity, while he was considering concentrating in CS, Economics, or Engineering. After taking a class at MIT with Cai on virtual reality and brain-computer interfaces, Nguyen changed his mind.

“We were both really interested in cyborgs and technology, and how humans and computers and machines can combine into something new,” he says. “We kept talking more and more and basically I had the idea: what if we did ‘human augmentation,’ both of us together?”

Cai frames the special concentration as a practical matter.

“Human augmentation was the broadest umbrella that could describe almost anything I wanted to do,” she says.

Indeed, an explanation of the concentration on her website describes it as “the interdisciplinary study of motivations, ideologies, history, theoretical foundations, methods, and implications of augmenting the human condition.” An attached academic plan lists courses — seven of which are at MIT — in topics including systems engineering, science fiction, neurobiology, transhuman forms, and artificial intelligence. The scope of human augmentation, in other words, leaves Cai and Nguyen with a vast space to explore. *** With a boyish, infectious grin, Nguyen gushes about an MIT class called “Human 2.0,” taught by professor Hugh Herr, who built his own prosthetic legs after a climbing accident.

For the final project, Nguyen built “JETSON,” a software that allows those wearing augmented reality headsets to use AI while engaging in conversation.

This form of augmentation — enhancing cognition through interfaces between humans and computers — is what Nguyen finds most interesting. “How do we make humans more seamlessly communicate with AI?” he asks. “And what are the interfaces for that?”

In the demo video for JETSON, Nguyen is having a mock conversation with Alina Yu ’25, his partner on the project, about

the ethics of making an AI girlfriend. Yu is wearing the AR headset, which displays semi-transparent blue boxes in her line of sight: “summarize,” “ideate,” “define,” “fact check.”

“Basically, this AI listens to you at all times passively,” Nguyen says. “If someone ever says any word that you don’t understand, like BCI” — the acronym for Brain-Computer Interface — “you can simply glance — very quickly — at ‘define.’

And the language model will automatically look for all the difficult terms and then relay the definition to you.”

In the video, Yu glances at the box marked “ideate,” and AI-generated text begins appearing in the center of her vision, offering different arguments for and against AI girlfriends that she can use in conversation.

Nguyen wants to reinvent how humans interact with computers, building interfaces that are easy to use and maximize the amount of data transferred between brain and machine.

Nguyen also just loves to build. Among his other projects like JETSON, his website showcases a 3D-printed Iron Man Helmet and a “punch-activated” flamethrower (modeled after the firebending martial artists in the animated show “Avatar: The Last Airbender”).

The next version of JETSON, which he is currently working on, trades in the bulky headset for an augmented reality monocle.

Before he explains it, he pulls the glass monocle out of his backpack and hands it to me. It’s light and transparent, with a small glint of gold and green electronics near the top. “It has a camera, microphone, Bluetooth, and capacitive touch sensors for input,” he tells me. He’s especially excited that the monocle fits neatly in a small case like the ones used for AirPods. As we talk, he fidgets with the case.

Though Nguyen firmly believes in the power of augmentation, he recognizes that reducing friction between humans and computers doesn’t always make people’s lives better.

He brings up TikTok: “The elimination of friction from new content there has been pretty terrible, I would say, for mental health and social interactions.” He doesn’t want technology to help people be selfdestructive or promote bad behavior in the

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I want to augment that and understand why these stories exist, and then see how I can retell my story in a different way.”

When she got to college, Cai wanted to merge humans and computers, much like Nguyen. She collaborated with Nguyen and some of their friends on the flamethrower The next version of JETSON, which Nguyen and a hand-controlled is currently working on, trades in the bulky skateboard. headset for an augmented reality monocle.

With them, last year, Cai PHOTO COURTESY OF ANHPHU NGUYEN started the Augmentation Lab, a student-run collaborative to house long term. augmentation projects, and for 10 weeks Still, he says making the decision about over the summer she worked full-time with what’s good or bad is “really hard.” But one seven other students and recent graduates good way to use technology, he thinks, is to in an Augmentation Residency on projects quantify human behavior and allow people ranging from an immersive, VR-aided to use the data how they want, like how search engine to software translating brain many phones now track screen time. He activity into artwork using AI. also brings up the tech entrepreneur Bryan Many of her projects, she said, arose Johnson, who has spent millions of dollars more from a desire to “build something tracking and optimizing his own health in cool” than out of any real need for the an attempt to slow or reverse aging. (“I don’t augmentation. But over time, she began to think you should be forced to live forever,” turn away from this mode of development.

Nguyen says. “But you should have the “A lot of tech development is an choice.”) expression of ego, like, ‘look what I’ve Despite the concerns, as long as we’re made,’” she says. That kind of expression “careful about it,” Nguyen argues that drove her own work until she started merging humans and computers would discussing it with people and realized its be best for humanity.“We’re already seeing hold over her. that with phones that give you perfect She now sees building augmentations memory, right?” He points to the phone I’m without considering their meaning a kind of using to record our conversation. “You can “affliction.” Instead, she wants to “integrate look at this later and write a better article. artistic processes with tech development.”

I think we will only inevitably progress “Artists, I think, try to find truth and toward more and more integration with meaning,” she says. The objectives of art, machines.” then “almost counterbalance the objectives of tech development.” The impulses that *** once drove her to write novels, in other words, now steer her creation of technology.

Whereas Nguyen is fascinated with the As she talks, she stares pensively into physical means of connecting organic and the space between her gesturing hands. mechanical intelligence, Cai’s definition of She tells me about Game Changer, an augmentation is much broader. application she’s currently working on “I would include the stories that run our with members of the Augmentation Lab. lives as part of augmentation,” she says. Game Changer works through “a mix of “If I have some story about how I grew up, narrative and software” to help people and what my parents’ influence on my change themselves. In the first stage, which character was, this is sort of an autopilot Cai calls the “‘yes and’ experiment,” the user story that has been generated by society. has a close friend — or if one’s not available,

an AI assistant — repeatedly insult them.

“It’s supposed to be pretty brutal,” Cai says. The user on the receiving end then must say “yes, and” to all the insults, as in improv, collecting evidence from their own life to support the insult. Through the “yes, and” experiment, Cai says, users could “develop courage” and come to terms with their own negative qualities as a person.

The next stages of Game Changer then focus on imagining alternative versions of oneself — assisted with AI and guided meditations — and trying to become some version of those people.

“The classic kind of rationale for why you should build technology is that it’s some sort of optimization, improving human productivity or improving human wellbeing,” she says. But art, she explains, isn’t always about happiness or productivity.

Cai says that the Augmentation Lab is “interested in building technologies that enhance some aspect of human meaning,” she says “Sometimes those are not necessarily pleasant technologies.

Sometimes they’re provocative.”

Developing Game Changer, she tells me, was “an ambiguous process” — part traditional tech development, part storytelling. It also involved making members of the group the first users of all their projects.

“I’ve been much more in favor of augmentation as a method for bringing out inherent capabilities,” she says. She contrasts her current perspective with the idea of merging humans with computers: “I call it magic within humans rather than necessarily facilitating merging.”

Despite their differences, Cai and Nguyen share a fundamental belief in technology’s transformative power. Indeed, Nguyen is relentlessly optimistic about the future. “The scale of humanity will be much more than on one planet,” he says. “It seems like technology allows you to possibly destroy the world a lot faster than anything else could before. But I’m generally optimistic that we can control that.”

In the future Cai imagines, technology could be just as vital in reshaping our interior lives.

“Rather than necessarily becoming just optimally efficient,” she says, we could become “super fulfilled in our souls.”

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A robotic limb project Cai and Nguyen worked on. PHOTO COURTESY OF OF ALICE CAI

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‘You’re a Case Number’: The Bureaucratic Gaps Behind Harvard’s Mental Health Leaves of Absence KAITLYN TSAI

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

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GRAPHIC BY ANGEL ZHANG — CRIMSON DESIGNER | 14

Content warning: Mentions of suicide and self-harm; descriptions of depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric conditions.

J­

azzy muzak plays over the phone pressed to my ear. Sitting alone in my room, the world blurring before my eyes, I fight to contain my sobs and take deep breaths before I’m connected to someone on the suicide and crisis lifeline. A crippling, all-encompassing feeling of loneliness wracks my body, and my chest feels like it’s caving in, squeezing wave after wave of pain out and over me.

Suddenly, the line clicks. “Hello?”

Her name is Rachel; her voice is soft and soothing and reminds me of the color cinnamon. She asks if I feel grounded, and I tell her I’m lying on my couch under my thick, fuzzy blanket to feel safe. “Feeling safe and feeling grounded are two different things,” she explains gently, then walks me through a grounding exercise.

By the end of our call, the exhaustion sets in. I don’t feel less sad, but the pain has subsided, giving way to a quiet, tired numbness that has become all too familiar.

Most days of my sophomore year unfolded like this: emotional rollercoasters and spirals that would intensify at various points throughout the day, often leaving me to withdraw to my room as soon as I could and curl up in a fetal position on my couch. I dissociated almost every day. I hurt myself. I called 988 so many times I could predict what they’d say and do. I thought about taking my life, multiple times a day, and, in the spring of 2023, made two extremely halfhearted attempts within the span of a week, though thankfully, neither resulted in hospitalizations. This was the reality of struggling with severe major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder, diagnoses I received that year.

Truthfully, I knew I would never hurt myself to the point of needing medical attention — the thought of my loved ones served as a life raft, keeping me afloat even among the darkest, most tumultuous waves. Yet a bleaker force restrained my self-harming behaviors as well, hanging thick and oppressive over me, like smog:

If I told any adult on campus what I was going through, if I went to Harvard’s Counseling and Mental Health Service, I would very likely be packed away on an involuntary leave of absence.

According to the leave of absence policy today, the reasons students can be placed on an involuntary leave are related to either academic or disciplinary infractions or “medical circumstances,” which include mental health conditions. Such circumstances entail behavior that “poses a direct threat to the health or safety of any person, or has seriously disrupted others.”

Moreover, the administration will not automatically allow students to return to the College following a hospitalization that “raises serious concerns about the student’s health or well-being,” or other circumstances that raise such concerns and “reasonably call into question their ability to function as a student in the Harvard College environment.”

Though I seemed functional — excelling in school and extracurriculars and taking care of my physical health — and fought to keep that facade, I felt that if I let anyone in on my inner turmoil, I would be seen as a

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liability, someone unfit to be on campus.

Moreover, I knew if I were to take a leave, I would have to slash through layers of red tape to return. This includes seeking psychological and psychiatric care; providing “evidence of productivity,” often in the form of employment; meeting with CAMHS for approval to return; obtaining letters from providers and employers testifying to your readiness to return; and writing a statement about why you should be allowed back.

During the leave itself, I would also effectively be cut off from Harvard’s community and resources; in most cases, you cannot reside or work on campus while on a leave, nor can you participate in extracurriculars or access school facilities.

Notably, these are requirements specifically for those on leave for mental health reasons, whether voluntary or involuntary. The process for going on leave for any other reason, such as for a disciplinary infraction, travel, or professional development is much easier to navigate.

In 2018, the Ruderman Family Foundation, a Boston-based disability rightsadvocacygroup,inconjunction with legal, psychological, and educational experts, published a study scoring leave of absence policies for students with mental health conditions at Ivy League schools. None of the schools received grades above a D-plus; Harvard received a D-minus, tying with Cornell for the secondlowest score.

That same year, the parents of Luke

Z. Tang ’18, who died by suicide in Lowell House in Sept. 2015, filed a lawsuit against the College and several of its employees, alleging that the school was negligent in its engagements with Tang and their failure to prevent his death.

As of the 2023-24 school year, the College has implemented changes to its leave of absence policy. But the nature of these changes are relatively limited — they primarily outline in further detail the criteria for requiring a student to be placed on involuntary leave.

College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo declined to comment on the criticisms in this article.

The goal of this piece is not to weigh the pros and cons of taking a mental health-related leave of absence. Rather, I want to examine the role the College plays in how students make — or don’t make — decisions to take such leaves.

Though the College undoubtedly carries a degree of responsibility for its students, the nature of this responsibility remains unclear. The College’s leave of absence policy is essentially a one-sizefits-all measure to address these cases, but such universalizing often can’t take into consideration the variance of experiences for students suffering from mental health issues. So I set out to uncover the reasons behind these policies, as well as their effects; for some students, whether they take a leave and how they do so could be, and has been, a matter of life or death.

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‘School as Police’

eresa, a College undergraduate who spoke on the condition of anonymity, tells me she struggled heavily with depression and anxiety her first semester of college and relapsed with self-harming. When her proctor and dean heard about this incident, her dean strongly advised her to take a leave, as did CAMHS when she went in for an evaluation and treatment.

“I understand where the College is coming from, but I felt like it was almost like they were giving up on me, in the sense of, ‘You cannot handle this environment, you might as well just leave,’” she explains.

And Teresa didn’t want to leave. She had spent a lot of time and effort forging

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new connections with other people and felt that being forced to leave her friends behind would worsen her mental health. Deepening these fears was the lingering trauma of being involuntarily hospitalized for a suicide attempt in high school.

“I was basically taken away from everything I knew, my entire family, so I know firsthand how traumatizing that can be,” she recounts. “So having this fear always in my mind, like, ‘I know I’m not well, but if I seek help, will I only exacerbate my current condition?’ It’s very hard.”

So Teresa stayed quiet the best she could, though that came at a price as well.

“There were some times where I would just wake up, and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself because I knew that I was not in a great mental condition, but I didn’t really know where to go to seek help and where to start,” she says. “I was just so afraid of being taken away from my friends and everything I built up in my first year.”

Fortunately, circumstances improved greatly the following semester. Teresa began taking an antidepressant through CAMHS and received further support from the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, which made her feel “safe and welcomed and supported.” Things weren’t perfect; she would run into issues with CAMHS when it came to medication refills, going cold turkey for a few days and experiencing a relapse in depressive symptoms as CAMHS would take days to respond to her requests or have technical issues. Still, she found herself in a much better place, which she credits to the fact that she did not take a leave of absence.

“It would have been crushing for me to have stayed at home,” she says. “I would have missed so many things, I would’ve never met such amazing people as I did second semester. It would have been absolutely horrible.”

As I spoke with Teresa, something in my heart twisted. I knew how isolating and anxiety-inducing it all was — being afraid of reaching out for help, afraid of being removed, afraid of losing what you’ve built at school.

Mere months before my conversation with Teresa, I’m sitting in a music room in

the basement of Standish Hall, speaking to my therapist on a video call. My laptop rests on the keyboard; beside it, a pack of pocket tissues.

As always, she asks me about my selfharm — the frequency and my triggers — and I tell her. Then, she asks, “When you hurt yourself, how do you do that?”

This catches me off guard. Does she really want to know? After a long pause, I tell her. “But it’s never enough to warrant medical attention or anything,” I add at the end. “Mostly it’s because I know if I have to go to the hospital, then the school will kick me out. Same reason why I don’t ever have any intent to act on my suicidal thoughts. Though I guess there are also other, more important reasons for that one.” I let out a dry laugh in an attempt to lighten the mood. See? Things aren’t that bad! I would never go to the hospital, and I have real reasons to live!

It doesn’t work. My therapist leans forward, brows furrowed. “You know what I find extremely sad about that?” she asks. I look down at my hands; I already know where she’s going with this. “I think it’s extremely sad that you’re limiting your self-harm because you’re afraid of being kicked out. It’s not that you know you have people here to turn to for support. It’s that you’re afraid. And when I hear that, I hear school as police.”

School as police. My throat constricts.

“Yeah,” I manage to squeeze out. “Yeah, that’s what it feels like.”

It was hard to tell sometimes whether my feelings of distrust and not being cared for stemmed from legitimate fears of the administration’s possible response to me, or from my disorders and the ways they distorted how I viewed the world. After talking to Teresa, my fears felt more valid now that they were grounded in hers.

From looking into the archives of past student handbooks, I found that the College has historically used leaves of absence as a punitive measure. It’s unsurprising, then, that so much fear surrounds the idea of being placed on a leave.

From at least 1984 to 1998, the College handbooks did not have any sections discussing placing students on leave for medical reasons. Involuntary leaves were instead filed under a section titled

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“Unsatisfactory Records and Discipline.”

An oddly foreboding message remained until the 1996-97 school year: “A student who has twice been required to withdraw from the College will ordinarily not be readmitted.”

The College began to more explicitly discuss putting students on leave for medical or “emotional disturbance” reasons in 1998, separate from the general section on requirements for withdrawal.

This change followed discussions among Harvard University Health Services, Harvard University Police Department, resident deans, and former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 in response to a situation where a student “was suddenly released from a hospital to a House, with inadequate opportunity for the House to arrange appropriate accommodations,” wrote Lewis in a memo at the time. The administration realized they finally needed to formalize the process of students taking leave for mental health reasons.

But despite this new explicit acknowledgment of mental health conditions, the language of much of the 1998-99 policy characterizes students with these conditions as problems. A new section titled “Effect of Health Issues on Dormitory or House Residence” opens with a series of statements that emphasize the College’s concern for the well-being of the members of its houses, which means “safeguarding the right of all community members to be free of undue disruption in their academic and residential lives.” The following sentence states: “In a residential college, an individual student’s physical illness or emotional difficulties affect not only the individual, but also others in the community.”

This language remains almost exactly the same in the 2023-24 handbook. And indeed, from speaking with students and alumni, I found that the College responds in this heavy-handed way to students whose behaviors are seen as dangerous to themselves or to the community.

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‘No Human Touch’

ven with his relative willingness to talk, Joseph C. Felkers ’22 seems reluctant to tell me too many details about his experience. Though he just graduated, he still fears some form of repercussion from the school.

The journey to and through Felkers’ leave of absence was a long one — one kick-started by a misdiagnosis from CAMHS. Felkers began developing signs of depression the summer after his freshman year, and the following fall, CAMHS diagnosed him with major depressive disorder and prescribed him an antidepressant. During his appointment, Felkers’ doctor gave him a brief disclaimer: If he in fact had bipolar disorder instead of major depression, the antidepressant would likely trigger a manic episode. But the doctor “made it seem pretty i n c o n s e q u e n t i a l ,” Felkers recalls, so he took the medication.

And launched into a full-blown manic episode.

“Pretty quickly after taking that medicine, I kind of lost my shit. I started staying up for nights on end. I at most went five nights in a row without sleep,” Felkers says. “I was clinically psychotic, like I thought the government was chasing me and I was a spy, and hearing voices and shit, it was crazy.”

That November, the weekend after the Harvard-Yale game — during which he hadn’t been sleeping at all — Felkers visited HUHS urgent care and told a nurse he thought he was having a manic episode. The nurse “totally brushed me off,” he recalls. “She was just like, ‘Oh, it’s just classic anxiety. You’re having a panic attack, try breathing exercises, whatever, go home.’”

Two days later, as a result of his mania, Felkers was detained by HUPD and involuntarily hospitalized before being committed to McLean Hospital. Once he was discharged, the administration

placed Felkers on an involuntary leave for the rest of the semester, though they allowed him to finish his papers and projects from home given how late in the semester it already was.

Felkers, however, did not want to stay on leave. This was before the pandemic — during which the number of students taking time off increased — and leaves of absence were not as common as they are today. He admits he was “really afraid of that administrative restraint being placed on me and how it looks socially.”

He also felt that he had been mistreated

by CAMHS and filed a petition against his leave.

In his petition, Felkers cited three points: his misdiagnosis by CAMHS, the invalidation of his symptoms by the CAMHS nurse, and his lack of a decent relationship with his assigned therapist, even after he had expressed his concerns to CAMHS administration. Even during his interview with his case manager, Felkers recounts, he felt demeaned. “It was not a pleasant experience, I’ll say that much,” he tells me.

The Administrative Board ultimately approved Felkers’ petition, and in the spring of 2020, he prepared to return to campus. But shortly after, the pandemic struck, and Felkers effectively spent the remainder of that semester at home.

When I ask him how he felt throughout this entire process, he frowns. “I have two answers,” he finally says. “One is just confused, like really lost and not understanding — but two, symptomatic.”

Felkers explains that he was placed on a heavy antipsychotic medication, which made him “totally zombied out.” Still, he remembers feeling vulnerable; his involuntary leave, compounded with blockmate drama, left him feeling like he didn’t have many people at Harvard he could rely on.

Shortly after he was sent home during the pandemic, Felkers was notified that he had been selected to do a creative thesis for his English concentration.

Over the next two years, he would write a collection of poetry that would serve as his “anchoring point all throughout the rest of my journeys through college, with that catastrophe right behind me.”

He took another leave of absence — this

time, voluntary — in the spring of 2021 and traveled abroad with one of his blockmates, doing freelance business strategy work for various clients.

Looking back, Felkers says he regrets appealing his involuntary leave. He was, after all, “very ill.” But the necessity of the leave didn’t change the fact that Felkers felt the school had mistreated him.

“I’m sure they did their best trying to be respectful to me and work with me the best they could, but it still came across as very isolating and devaluing and just kind of embarrassing,” he recounts. “I felt like I was being talked down to by Harvard like a baby.”

He adds that the heavily bureaucratic nature of going through a leave of absence further creates a sense of dehumanization. “There’s no human touch in the experience,” he says. “You’re a file. You’re a case number. You’re an issue email that somebody is getting.”

CAMHS declined to comment on Felkers’ story, citing a policy against discussing individual student matters.

My conversation with Felkers took me a while to digest. That the College could make such a consequential mistake was one thing, but what was more shocking to me was how coldly they continued to treat Felkers when placing him on leave.

But interestingly, the College’s treatment of every student with severe mental health conditions isn’t always so intrusive; rather, their response seems to vary greatly based on how unwell the student seems to be.

‘How Did No One Prevent This?’

A

s soon as Grace Benkelman ’25 returned to campus the fall of 2022, she noticed that her roommate, Luke T. Balstad ’25, “felt like a shell of a human.”

“He clearly was very preoccupied,” Benkelman recalls. “He just felt really distant, and he would sleep all day. I would come back to our room, and he’d be sleeping, and then he would go to bed at nine, and it was just – it was so hard to watch.”

Luke was diagnosed with bipolar disorder that summer while he worked with the Broad Institute, Benkelman tells

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me. At the time, he was experiencing a manic episode, but as fall crept around the corner, and as he struggled with adjusting his medication, he slipped into a severe depression.

The administration was aware of Luke’s situation; prior to the beginning of the semester, he had met with a professional associated with the College to establish that he was ready to return to school. But as the semester progressed, it became increasingly clear to Benkelman that Luke was struggling. He talked to his adviser and decided to drop a class.

Still, the depression was debilitating, and he was hospitalized at McLean around late September due to issues with his medications.

Though Benkelman felt that Luke should have returned home to fully focus on managing his mental health, Luke was more hesitant to take a leave. As much as he was struggling, he had strong friendships at school and was worried about losing a year with them. “It felt like there was nowhere for him to go,” she says.

Throughout the entire process, Luke was basically alone. Though he shared some details with Harvard administrators, Luke’s primary confidant was Benkelman. She listened to him and supported him the best she could, and when he decided to leave, she helped him pack and ship some belongings while keeping the rest to store over the summer for him.

“I was just worried throughout the entire thing,” she says. As she talks about this time period, she fights back tears.

“I just felt helpless. He basically only talked to me about this. He didn’t have the energy to talk to our other friends or his other support systems, so I felt like I was very much the only one involved in this situation.”

On top of that, Benkelman recalls that the administration was relatively hands-off throughout the process of Luke’s leave. Though she does not know what Luke discussed with Quincy House Resident Dean Nicole S. Simon or with other administrators, she recalls that after every meeting, he seemed to sway in a different direction, lacking direction on what exactly he should do. To Benkelman’s knowledge, no CAMHS psychologists or psychiatrists were involved in the process. Much of the responsibility, it seemed to her, fell to Simon, who acted as Luke’s primary point person — though she, like every other resident dean, is not a licensed professional trained to assess the needs of a student struggling with mental health.

After having a stress-induced seizure in October, Luke finally decided to take a leave. He filed his paperwork and booked his tickets home three days later.

A week after leaving, Luke texted Benkelman expressing that he might return to campus. “I think he finally got home and was really feeling what he was missing out on,” she says. He met with Simon to discuss the possibility of him returning to school. She strongly urged him to take the year off, but acknowledged that since his paperwork still hadn’t been processed, he could technically still change his mind. Benkelman views the whole situation as “poorly handled.”

Luke ultimately decided to stay at home, but instead of resting and recovering, he began “trying to fit into this new scene of ‘go, go, go,’” Benkelman says.

He took up a full-time job as a barista, she guesses, to fulfill the employment requirement of his leave.

“I was worried because it felt like this should have been a time where he was only focusing on one thing, which was his mental health and his medication, and it was very concerning to see that that was not what was happening,” Benkelman says.

“But Luke always put other people first, and he always put on a brave face. And so I would call him, and he’d be like, ‘Oh, I went on a run today.’ He would talk about his situation as if he was doing alright, when in reality, it was

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very draining.”

In November, around a month after returning home, Luke took his life. When Benkelman received the news from Simon, she felt shocked and horrified, but she says part of her “felt like, ‘How did I not see this coming? How did no one see this coming? And how did no one prevent this?’”

She’s still processing his death, she tells me. “I feel like this entire thing was like a big explosion, and there was just this cloud of, ‘Wow, Luke is dead,’” she says. “And everyone else around me was continuing to walk forward, so I continued to walk forward.”

She adds, “I was in a state of shock for a month.”

Initially, Benkelman says, she felt guilty about Luke’s death because she had been the most involved in his process of taking a leave and had encouraged him to go home. She believes that if he had stayed at school, he would still be alive.

But over time, she slowly began to wonder why the administration had acted the way they did. Why had the administration not provided Luke with more support? Why was there no follow-up after he had left?

“It just felt very unorganized and depersonalized for such a sensitive topic,” she says.

CAMHS and Simon declined to comment on Luke’s case.

After talking to Benkelman, I sit in my room, processing everything. The lack of involvement from the College, especially in comparison to the response that Felkers had received following his hospitalization, seems shockingly inconsistent.

I sink into my couch and stare up at the ceiling. And I begin to cry — not just because of Luke’s story or because Benkelman’s grief was devastating to bear witness to, but also because what Benkelman said kept echoing in my mind: How did no one see this coming?

The reality is that mental health conditions, especially more severe ones like bipolar disorder, are incredibly complex. No single policy can reasonably be expected to serve as the “solution.”

At the end of the day, a one-size-fits-all policy for an issue so colored by nuance will be imperfect — and this imperfection

means that some students, like Luke, will fall through the cracks.

This is not to say that the leave of absence policy always fails. In some cases, it works, as further conversations with students and alumni showed me.

But even these positive experiences come with caveats.

Lesser of Two Evils

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hen David M. Hirsch ’90 arrived at Harvard from his hometown in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, he struggled with adjusting to college. He did poorly his first semester but didn’t reach out for help because he “was ashamed,” he recalls. After taking a voluntary leave the following semester, he returned to the College — and failed all his classes.

“It was one of these things that I have nightmares about now. It’s something I know other people have nightmares about, except I really did it. I went to the first day of classes,” Hirsch says, “and then I just never went to them. I went, took, and failed the final for all four of these classes.”

At Harvard, Hirsch was thrown into an environment that was different from what he was used to, and that impacted him — hard. “I really struggled,” he recounts. “I was far away from home, I did not have the same sort of family support that I did at home, and in general, I didn’t apply myself very well. And the problem is that I didn’t have the resources to pick up and keep going.”

The Dunster resident dean informed Hirsh that he would have to take a leave of absence. But Hirsch didn’t want to leave; he was afraid to tell his parents what had happened. He stayed on campus as discreetly as he could the following semester, residing in his dorm until the resident deans caught him in March and reiterated, firmly, that he had to go.

Returning home, however, wasn’t as disastrous as Hirsch had expected.

Though he met with a therapist for a while, he found that what most helped him was his family’s support, as well as the job he picked up as part of his requirement to return. Hirsch decided to work at a local Kinko’s since he had experience from working at Gnomon Copy while at school.

The work, Hirsch recalls, provided him with the structure and accountability that he had lacked in college and gave him a sense of competency.

“I knew I had to fix this. I was definitely ashamed, I was definitely as low as I could go, I felt like,” Hirsch recalls. “Maybe I couldn’t do academics — that remained to be seen at that point — but I could definitely make copies. So I felt good about it.”

Hirsch also began playing in a band, which would spark a lifelong engagement in music, and met his now-wife. With this newfound stability in his life, Hirsch ultimately decided to extend his leave, staying at home for 18 months before he felt fully ready to return to campus.

At the end of the day, a one-size-fitsall policy for an issue so colored by nuance will be imperfect.

Upon returning, he lived off-campus, first with a friend studying at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and then, when she graduated six months later, with his now-wife. Determined to set himself back on track, attending classes during the day and working fulltime in the evenings, Hirsch graduated three years after his return with a degree in English and American Literature and Language. With his years of experience working in copy shops, he proceeded to work at Kinko’s in Harvard Square before taking software developer jobs and, eventually, studying medicine and working as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

“My life is what it is because of all that,” he says of his leave. “It was the low point or the kick in the pants that I really needed to understand that I needed to make some lifestyle changes and get some help.

Harvard really helped me through that by making me work for it and believing in

me, not just booting me completely, but saying, ‘Okay, go figure yourself out.’”

Still, Hirsch acknowledges that an involuntary leave of absence might not be the best response for every person.

His family was particularly supportive of him, and he says he can imagine that for a student who lacks that kind of care at home, leaving school may not be as helpful as it was for him.

Vandie A. Dumaboc ’26 was one such student. Like Hirsch, she did not want to go home. But when her depression left her bedridden the spring of her freshman year, she felt compelled to choose what was at that point the lesser of two evils.

“I was doing well in my classes. I just could not get out of bed,” Dumaboc recounts. “It was just not sustainable, but I wanted to drag it out as much as possible because my other option was going back home — which is what I ended up doing — but home is not really a safe space for me.”

On the whole, going home to Chile proved helpful for her: She managed to find treatment, as mandated by the terms of her leave, and took up a fulfilling job working as a pre-K to eighth-grade English teacher at her former school.

Still, Dumaboc faced a host of challenges. Her home environment felt unsafe — there was a history of family violence — and she had to readjust to both a lack of independence and caretaking responsibilities for her younger sister. She also missed her friends from school. “I did feel very, very alone,” she tells me. “The friendships I made here are incredible friendships, and I rarely had connected like that with people back home.”

Worse still, the conditions of her leave were hard to meet because she is an international student. According to the requirements, she had to seek therapy, but it was hard to access in Chile. It took several months for Dumaboc to find a therapist and a psychiatrist, and after a few sessions, her therapist ghosted her.

She also struggled to secure her job in a timely enough manner to fulfill her work requirement. “In Chile, finding a job at 19, without a university title, and without using family connections, and getting paid more than $400 a month?”

Dumaboc says. “Impossible.”

Her eventual return was also

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complicated.

She couldn’t place international calls, so she had to email CAMHS to set up the mandatory meeting prior to her return. CAMHS took a month and a half to respond to her, which placed further stress on Dumaboc because her F-1 visa expires every year. If she wasn’t able to return to school, she would have to reapply for her visa — and she would be cutting it close since she had limited time to do so with only one embassy in Chile to go to — and she would have to find a new job before her current job contract ended in December.

Dumaboc’s anxiety was at an “all-time high,” she says. “I remember I was doing very well, mental health-wise. And then when I started the process of sending emails and not getting any responses, I did have a depressive episode, and I think it was triggered by that. So it’s very ironic that the service that’s supposed to help you with your mental health was the triggering factor of a depressive episode.”

Dumaboc says she felt the administration had been dismissive with her case and that she was treated impersonally.

She adds that the policy clearly did not account for her experience as an international student with an unsafe home environment. “One question I was never asked from Harvard was, ‘Do you have a safe or safer space back home?’” she says. “I would like Harvard to actually think about that.”

Though the leave was ultimately helpful for Dumaboc, that she had managed to come back even with all the challenges she faced was no small feat. And it raises the question: Why is the process of returning still so difficult, even for students who no longer face the challenges that required them to leave in the first place?

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‘A Walking Liability’

he hurdles to returning from a leave of absence that Dumaboc discusses are part of a broader pattern in mental health leaves at the College: It doesn’t take much for someone to go on one, voluntarily or not — but to return from or even dispute one requires significantly more effort.

On top of the requirements for proof of productivity and treatment, students must notify the College of their desire to return at least 12 weeks prior to the semester that they want to come back. Yet, when it comes to mental health, a lot can change in 12 weeks. A student who doesn’t currently feel ready may not be able to make a compelling case to return, but their state now doesn’t accurately reflect how they’ll feel by the following semester.

In the current handbook, the College also states that students whose petitions to return are denied can file an appeal to the Harvard College Administrative Board — but only if they follow the College’s guidelines: They must discuss new agreements to engage in treatment

“How do we make the system so that people are not inherently scared to reach out?”

or provide “materially relevant” information, or provide evidence of an error in the Ad Board’s decision-making process, within just five calendar days.

The policy seems like it’s structured so that students are incentivized to stay on leave for the full year that is required of them. Even then, the hurdles to returning remain.

One of the reasons, Dumaboc believes, may be a fear of liability. In Massachusetts, schools can be held liable for a student’s suicide on campus if they knew about the student’s suicidal ideation but did nothing. Indeed, though the case was ultimately dismissed, Harvard did face legal repercussions in response to Luke Tang’s death after he died on campus.

“Sometimes, it felt like they treated me like a walking liability,” Dumaboc says.

“I guess it makes sense for an institution

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to want to take a step back from any legal repercussions of someone who can cause damage to their image. But also, you have to think that we live here. This is an institution that deals with humans on the daily, and we’re also under their protection.”

“I believe that the University should have more responsibility in how they deal with these cases,” she adds.

The student handbook states that when deciding whether to place a student on a medical leave of absence, the College takes into account “the nature, duration and severity of the risk” — it does not define what “the risk” refers to — and whether “reasonable modifications of policies, practices, or procedures,” such as course accommodations, will “mitigate the risk.”

Such “reasonable modifications,” however, do not include those that would “fundamentally alter the academic program or unduly burden the College’s resources or staffing capabilities” or those that would “exceed the standard of care that a university health service or the staff of a residential college can be expected to provide.”

In other words, when it comes to dealing with students with mental health conditions, the College takes the current institutional systems as a given. Rather, it expects these students to conform to its systems and standards.

Palumbo, the College spokesperson, declined to comment on a series of questions about the decision-making behind the policy and placing students on leave.

This expectation of conformity to the College environment may be why students must provide “evidence of productivity” in order to return. While Hirsch found the structure of a job beneficial in his time away from school, Benkelman is skeptical of the requirement. She questions why the College would require this of someone if they are expected to take time away from school for the sake of their mental health.

“If you have bipolar disorder, which is the leading mental illness that leads to suicide, then it should not be, ‘Go back home and get a job,’” she says. “It should be, ‘We are going to, as an institution, check in on you and have mental health professionals involved in this to decide

what is best for you at this time.’ And that absolutely was not working at a coffee shop for Luke.”

The administrative oversight of students struggling with their mental health doesn’t stop at the gaps in the leave of absence policy. It is inseparable from what many students see as a systemic lack of institutional support for mental health resources on campus as well.

“I think CAMHS needs to be reformed,” Benkelman says. “I’m sure you’ve heard so many horror stories about people trying to get appointments. I just feel like it’s very, very difficult to actually find mental health care on campus.”

A spokesperson for CAMHS stated in an email that they are “committed to providing comprehensive mental health care” and “continue to focus on recruitment and further developments to services,” including the hiring of “over a dozen” clinicians this past year.

Still, shortcomings in the College’s support for student mental health add to a culture of mistrust in the institution’s ability to care for students.

“We are always telling people, ‘Don’t be afraid to get help, don’t be afraid to reach out,’” Dumaboc says. “How do we make the system so that people are not inherently scared to reach out?”

T

To Hope, To Love

eresa tried to hide her mental health struggles out of fear of removal.

Felkers was misdiagnosed by HUHS and placed on an involuntary leave because of it. Luke fell through the cracks of the leave of absence policy. Hirsch floated around college before crashing and leaving. Dumaboc almost couldn’t come back.

Each of these people’s experiences differ. Yet one thread tied them together: Bureaucratic solutions to mental health conditions often don’t work. And these failures happen for a range of reasons, chief among them the inherently impersonal nature of these policies.

The truth is, there is no quick fix for any of this. There is no quick fix for mental health problems. There is no quick fix for policy reform. And coming to this conclusion at the end of all of my

researching and reporting felt, to put it mildly, disheartening.

But I have to hope. *** Warm folk music fills Memorial Church, mingling with the sunlight filling the high-ceilinged room. Brightly colored flowers match the summery outfits that the attendees don — floral dresses, pastel button-downs, sandals and sneakers. At the entrance to the service, a few of Luke’s friends hand out sky-blue programs and point the stream of people flowing into the church to a poster wall filled with Post-it notes conveying messages of love.

It’s been five months since Luke’s death, and at the invitation of some of our mutual friends, I’m at his memorial.

The warmth, the color, the light, the life — even though I never met him, all of it feels strangely perfect for this event.

As his friends read their stories about him, many shed tears, and I find myself getting choked up too. They speak of his overly-sugary IHOP order, his infectious laugh, and the poems he collected; his warm “How are you?” texts, his attunement to nature, and his chaotic morning routine; how he’d never end a phone call without saying, “I love you,” how he’d stop and say hello to people on the street, and how he saw beauty in every little thing. They remember his kindness. They remember his boundless gratitude and love for the world.

As I reflect on the memorial in the following days, I think about my own experiences with suicidality. I think about what others would say and remember about me if I were gone. I think about what I would say about others if they were gone. I think about how fragile it all is — how terrifyingly easily these vivid, little things we know about each other turn into bodiless memories.

I think about my work on this piece. I think about the layers

and layers of societal and institutional failures that create a world in which we are inundated with headlines about mental health crises with seemingly no end or solution. I think about the historic stigma surrounding people with mental disorders — that they’re unstable, undesirable, unfit to remain in their communities. I think about the stark individualism that pervades even our conceptions of healing and care. I think about how easy it is to respond to people struggling with their mental health in broad, impersonal ways. I think about how all of this intertwines with our mental health leave of absence policy.

But most of all, I think about love.

If you or someone you know needs help at Harvard, you can contact a University Chaplain to speak one-on-one at chaplains@harvard.edu or here. You can call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

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The Ghost of Susan Sontag

BY SAZI T. BONGWE

I­

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

NTERVIEWER: You taught only through your twenties, and have refused countless invitations to return to university teaching. Is this because you came to feel that being an academic and being a creative writer are incompatible?

SONTAG: Yes. Worse than incompatible. I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation.”

— Susan Sontag, the Art of Fiction No. 143, “The Paris Review,” Winter 1995.

Consider a girl, suppose her name is Susan. She inherits from her father two home movies –– one filmed on a Parisian Ship, another in Beijing — what was by all accounts a perfectly photographic memory, and a love for reading at age three. Out of that recipe, the entirety of her life. Her father dies when she is five, and where her largely absent mother isn’t, the literatures of the world are.

Her “imitations” of “Les Misérables” and Shakespeare adorn the pages of the monthly newspaper she self-publishes and sells to neighbors for five-cents a piece — a killing, when you are nine years old.

At 15, she’s reading Rilke, Faulkner — the list of books she tells herself she “has to read” goes on for five pages of her diary. Later that year, Dostoevsky.

They lead her where she has always been going: “I want to write,” she declares. At 16, she’s off to the University of California, Berkeley. Soon after, the University of Chicago. The big questions: philosophy, religion, the self, “how should one

live?” Still 16, she sees it for herself: “the important thing is that there seems to be no profession better suited to my needs than university teaching.” And the prophecy is fulfilled: she becomes, aged 20, “the youngest college instructor in the United States.” Hers is a story told and told again. There is only one place where it ends.

When Sontag was admitted to Harvard for a master’s in English in 1954, she had already been married for four years to Philip Rieff, a sociologist 11 years her senior, whom she had met at 17 and married 10 days later. In 1952, she gave birth to her son, David. In 1955, she switched to a master’s in Philosophy,

“I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation.”

— Susan Sontag, “The Paris Review”

graduating three years later. Sontag was 24, and her devotions were to a life both academic and domestic. Both marriages would die a cold death in the Cambridge winter.

Sontag foresaw this. It takes a certain person to re-read their diaries, another type to edit them. Sontag went back to that sentence about teaching and inscribed over it, “Jesus!” She was 16 when she first wrote it. Academia had

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appeared to be her calling; within a few months of graduating from Harvard, she came to see it as what would one day become her undoing: “Most particularly I become frightened to realize how close I came to letting myself slide into the academic life. It would have been effortless … just keep on making good grades…stayed for a master’s and a teaching assistantship, wrote a couple of papers on obscure subjects that nobody cares about, and, at the age of sixty, be ugly and respected and a full professor. Why, I was looking through the English Dept. publications in the library today — long (hundreds of pages) monographs on such subjects as: The Use of ‘Tu’ and ‘Vous’ in Voltaire; The Social Criticism of Fenimore Cooper; A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines + Newspapers of California (1859–1891) …

Jesus Christ! What did I almost submit to?!?”

Her premonitions be damned, she came to Harvard and got her answer.

For Sontag, two years in Cambridge brought dizzying clarity: “the sense of not being free has never left me these six years,” she wrote with regard to her husband, the father of her child.

Benjamin Moser’s sprawling, PulitzerPrize winning biography of her presents Sontag, not Rieff, as the true mind of “The Mind of the Moralist,” Rieff’s great book that he published under his name alone.

Despite all these hours spent on Freud, Sontag

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still had other callings: literature, metaphysics, her son. She reflects in 1957 on “[her] son, aged four, first reading Homer.” An entry from a year earlier simply states,“we’ve been discussing the soul.”

If there was a semblance of a family in her Chauncy Street house — two blocks away from the Radcliffe Quadrangle — all it did was to bring her to consider “A Project—Notes on Marriage,” an emblem of her larger idée fixe: philosophy among the ruins. On the steps of Widener Library she took this question to Hegel and Marx, to gnosticism. Elsewhere, the themes were the same. “Philip is an

the evenings I can manage — I shall be quiet, courteous, and disinvolved!”)

But for Sontag, no word went unqualified, no word was left without its own definition to her, not “Camp,” not “illness,” not even “I,” and certainly not “writer.” “A writer is someone who pays attention to the world,” Sontag believed.

She thought of writing as a heroic vocation, and by her own definition she thought herself good at it: “Maybe I have an Attention Surplus Disorder,” she later said in the same interview.

(Geoff Dyer would come to coin the adjective “Sontagishly,” to mean highbrow literature’s synonym for “with the

was by all means on the brink: addicted, unemployed, newly-single, critically anxious. He needed his mother and she was floating on Italian canals with her newest lover, the dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs. David found solace in the home of renowned writer and Harvard professor, Jamaica Kincaid. She and her husband took him in for half a year. “We couldn’t really believe she was getting on the plane,” Kincaid told Moser, regarding Sontag’s choice to go to Italy, though she added, “Yes, she was cruel and so on, but she was also very kind. She was just a great person.”

She could not separate the ivy-lined academy from the kind of life it seemed to be sucking her into any more than she could separate herself from her shadow.

emotional totalitarian.” She concluded “whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor.”

Though she hadn’t lost sight of philosophy and the questions she had for it, Sontag had it confirmed, both feeling and theorizing it: She could not separate the ivy-lined academy from the kind of life it seemed to be sucking her into any more than she could separate herself from her shadow. Contemplating the English monasteries and the synagogues of America, she wrote in her diaries that “The world is cluttered with dead institutions.” At Harvard she felt she was in one, a colosseum of many others.

For months Sontag had been planning her escape, and one September afternoon in 1957 she executed it —– in a rare moment of unoriginality, like her one-day biographer, she left America for Europe. She shook off the shackles of academia and the traditional family only to be brought back to those she’d always known: her wish to be a writer. (At 16 she wrote in her diaries, “2:00–5:00 every day I shall set aside for writing and study outside in the sun, and whatever time in

utmost hubris”).

Her vocation was writing; her provocation was living. Between essays and novels, Sontag courted fame and she courted lovers, including photographer Annie Leibovitz; she traveled over land and sea as Radcliffe and Harvard made every attempt to win her back, a feat not even the allure of the Norton Lectureship could achieve. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1993; she received it with the most youthful of smiles, for not even Sontag was immune to the charms Harvard works on one’s sense of self. She paid attention to painting, to architecture, to sex (Moser’s biography references a list in which Sontag names 36 people — men and women — she had slept with before she was 17); she paid attention to literature, to theater, to the wars of the world and of her mind.

Academia couldn’t hold all of that. “What I really wanted was every kind of life,” she said, “and the writer’s life seemed most inclusive.”

But paying attention to some things meant not paying attention to others.

Not least of these was David. In 1982, he

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This did not mean Kincaid envied Sontag: “I don’t think I ever wanted to be a great person after I met Susan.”

“The Sensational Susan Sontag,” “The Leading Lady of the Mind,” “American Iconoclast,” anything in the realm of the superlative feels as fitting as the leather jacket she’s pictured in on Moser’s cover.

Her alumni file held in Schlesinger Library is less of a record than it is her shrine. Among the paradoxes of the “loveable-not-likable” Susan Sontag is this: her singularity, in every sense, imparts onto every word of hers a necessity to read it and at the same time to dismiss it, to revere that otherworldly mind and at the same time to exile it to that other world. Is it that Sontag proclaimed a great truth — would-be writers, stay away from academia! Go live! — or is it a fool’s errand to bring the plural or the abstract to Susan Sontag, to take any tenet of that whirlwind of a life and draw anything universal from it?

“The Self as a Project.” That’s what Sontag told Charlie Rose she was working on when she wasn’t writing. The grand irony is that she took that noble

aspiration of the liberal arts colleges she swore off and made it hers: teaching people how to think.

I write that and wince. To write about Sontag — to have Sontag as my subject — is to have no choice but to write in her spirit.

My first encounter with Sontag came in 2021, when I read the ‘Regarding the Pain of Others.’ It was a total revelation for me. It would take some time before I came back to her. Intellectually deadened by a first semester at Harvard that hardly stimulated or inspired me, I enrolled in Introduction to Still Photography at the beginning of my second semester and picked up, at least in a serious way, a camera for the first time. The far more important event was that I went into Widener Library and picked up a copy of Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.” I cursed my younger self for turning away at the sight of gold. Here was a mind at

work, a mind really thinking. For the rest of the semester I plunged into as much of her writing and her life as I could; my search brought me back here.

She is a specter over this piece — to begin by quoting her, inhabiting her words, is to have her say to me at the outset: “Here is your model. Here is your standard.” To leave cliché in an essay on Sontag — for hasn’t she taught everybody how to think — feels like betraying the enormous debt I owe to her, feels — and there is no other word — sacrilegious. Because yes, I confess: for a long time, I have worshiped her, true as I have worshiped Zadie Smith, or Julio Cortázar, or Marquez.

Sontag had her gods once, too — for one, Thomas Mann, who she met with so much wonder and perplexment that she had to take it to the page. But the 54-year-old Sontag who wrote that story was not the 15-year-old who bowed down

to Mann. Five years after that piece was published, Chris Lydon asked her to name the writers that inspired her most.

Sontag told him unless he had hours to spend listening to her answer, the question was ridiculous.

He replied, “Well, who do you light candles to?”

Almost instantly, Sontag retorted “I don’t light candles to anyone. I re-read the writers I admire.”

I am one of those people she taught to think. She taught me to think about photography, about war, about suffering, and, until I stumbled upon that interview, about everything under the sun but for one subject: her life. She had her writers she once worshiped, but she traded that for something truer, something that holds up, something she could use: deep attention. She grew up, she shed her skin. I am trying to shed mine.

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Anywhere I Go

C

BY KATE S. GRIEM CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

oming home is a deceptively ordinary human habit. We do it all too often, and still each return is a motion in time, a forwardness that is also a regression, a necessary coming face-to-face with layers of our past selves.

I’ve lived in a total of six places in New York City, five of them in the past four years. This number is explained in large part by my parents’ divorce nearly four years ago; I think that flurries of transitions are natural in moments that demand the conscious uprooting of old familial identities, the brave and messy construction of new ones.

My parents each moved to the apartments they live in now during my first year of college. I had little to no awareness of these moves when they happened — partially, I suppose, because I was so many miles away. But really it was because I had nothing resembling a childhood bedroom I wanted to save, no physical things I was worried would get lost in the crossfire of the transition.

The signed yearbooks and middle school track medals that wouldn’t fit into our first set of post-divorce apartments had already been put in storage. I didn’t have the heart to decorate the walls I knew I’d leave in a year.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think of New York City as a home. I find my lifeblood in the subway more than anywhere else there: I spent upwards of 12 hours per week on it through high school until Covid. It connected my mom’s apartment to my dad’s, and their apartments to my high school in Manhattan. It linked Brooklyn Bridge Park to my friend’s apartment in the Bowery that I love waking up in. On the train, I’ve written essays on my iPad and poems in my Notes app, fallen in love with albums, laughed with my very best friends, and cried more times than I can count.

On the subway, you’re between

where you were and where you’re going: everywhere and nowhere all at once. No matter how hard you try, you can’t pin yourself down. *** There’s a boygenius lyric from the song “Ketchum ID” that I love: I am never anywhere anywhere I go. What does it really mean to be somewhere, anyway? the band asks. Of course, geography matters to a certain extent. But there isn’t necessarily a one-to-one correlation between the distance you travel and how far away you are from home, or familiarity, or whatever you want to call it. My relationship to myself, I’ve found, is the only constant force underlying my reality, no matter where I travel.

Like many of my peers, I went somewhere far from home this summer, traveling from the East Coast to the West.

I found myself constantly awed by how much space, physical and otherwise, I found in San Francisco. Even though it is doubtlessly metropolitan, the slant of the sidewalks and the fickleness of the weather — the wildflowers and orange sunsets and coasts only blocks away — make the city more than that too.

When you lose the trappings of the familiar, you have no reminder of who you have been, or who you are supposed to be. So being in new places, at least at first, is both terrifying and exhilarating: You get to move a little more freely, losing the weight that expectations and environmental cues hold. I learned, in San Francisco, about making friends with law students, balancing cynicism and idealism in the workplace, sitting languidly at bars, watching the sea rush by as I drove along the coast. I learned about being someone new and then someone new again without regard.

It’s a running joke between my freshman year roommate and I that I bring less to college than is reasonably needed to live on the day-to-day, and she more. (She was very proud of me for bringing tape and scissors for the first time this year, though I still borrow lots from her closet.) But what I have with me at college is more than enough to live. I

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think I find freedom in leaving what I don’t need behind: the less you carry with you, the less you owe to the past.

The second half of the “Ketchum ID” lyric goes: When I’m home I’m never there long enough to know. The way boygenius sings the couplet is chilling and plaintive yet wrapped in peace. There is a sort of relief in understanding that you can’t control the way space and change interact to blur time, coloring whatever home you return to with inevitable dissonance.

The period of life I’m in right now is fraught with transitions, quick stopand-starts: semesters and breaks and summers and time off, fragmenting these purportedly cohesive college years. I grapple with that a lot: the way relationships and friendships and even identities rooted in a place are often cut off before they have a chance to breathe.

How are we really supposed to know what to call home?

The point of the San Francisco story is not that I had to travel far from New York to grow, although I did end up growing.

It’s also not that I wanted to stay in SF because of all the ways I fell in love with it, although I did fall in love. It’s that maybe we’re meant to stop holding so tightly onto that idea of home and stay close to ourselves instead, watch the past fracture behind us time after time instead of getting cut trying to fit the pieces back together. *** I won’t pretend I don’t miss having a childhood bedroom to come home to where I can find ghosts of my old selves with their arms open, ready to welcome my newest rendition. But — for better or for worse — that’s not what home means to me anymore. I wouldn’t change that even if I could.

When I’m riding the B train across the Brooklyn Bridge from one borough to the next, I see my face reflected through the city in the window. Apartment lights are freckles on my cheeks; stop signs are my eyes frenzied red like in a flash photograph. I’m dusted and sprinkled into those metal grates, those sun-warped wooden slat walkways. I melt farther into the city every time it rains.

When you lose the trappings of the familiar, you have no reminder of who you have been, or who you are supposed to be.

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Rainy Day Vignette

BY EMILY N. DIAL CRIMSON DESIGNER

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Missing Out

BY BENJY WALL-FENG CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

ACROSS 1 Lowest vocal parts in an opera 6 Obscure, as part of an image 10 Secretly includes on an email 14 Had no co-conspirators, say 16 Seep 17 Santana hit that’s actually a Fleetwood Mac cover (!)

19 Kind of tent also called a ger 20 “Season of Glass” artist 21 “Crying In _____” (Michelle Zauner memoir) 22 Like some trans people, for short 23 Nails 25 New York City, babyyy 30 Denali and Kilimanjaro: Abbr.

33 Tools of seduction 34 “Great. That’s awesome. I’m so happy about this.”

36 “Gotcha” 37 Certain rationalist religious view 39 Name that becomes a country when a G is added 40 “Stop making out where everyone can see you” 42 “Shut up!!”

43 Opposite of NNW 44 Move at _____ (soooooo slowly) 47 Lunes y martes 48 Classroom helpers, for short 49 Havoc

52 NBC or CNN, e.g.

53 “At Folsom Prison” singer 57 Some involuntary breaks from school ... and what’s going on with the circled letters 61 Part of my house where birds built a nest one time :) 62 Kind of small portable radio 63 Sapphic poetry?

64 _____ Robles, CA 65 Hot pot and ghormeh sabzi, for two DOWN 1 Word with powder or blue 2 Prefix with -pressure 3 Data type for this clue: Abbr.

4 Band performance 5 Certain Freudian concept 6 Sauvignon _____ 7 Taco Bell’s bell, for instance 8 Prefix with corn 9 Letters next to a red circle on a camera 10 Opposites of busts 11 Unconscious state 12 Powerful policymaker 13 Email folder 15 Egyptian deity who later fused with the sun god Ra 18 Revolutionary idea?

22 Mapping technology 23 Chimps et al.

24 Kind of marine animal a geoduck is (not a duck!!)

25 “cellophane” artist FKA ___ 26 Ducks under the covers, say 27 Like the superrich 28 Lou of “Mambo No. 5” fame (who is ... German?)

29 Feature of un poema 30 React sexily, say 31 Writer Morrison 32 Part of a window blind 35 Chinese tea

37 Crepe made with fermented batter 38 Ages and ages 41 Union demand, maybe 42 Electric field, for short?

45 “_____ big deal!”

46 Makes a getaway 47 Birds that are actually just pigeons :/ 49 _____ Sol, vocalist whose name rhymes with the genre of music she creates 50 Unit of cabbage 51 Language most “Gen Z-speak” comes from

52 Some writers’ degrees 53 Chicago clock setting, for short 54 Did that.

55 “Me _____ing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! / Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck” (@screaminbutcalm tweet) 56 Some divs. of time 58 Motor oil brand 59 Singer Rita whose surname means “time” (and whose original surname, Sahatçiu, means “watchmaker”) 60 Be present?

For solutions and more puzzles, visit https://www.thecrimson.com/section/fm/crossword/ PAGE DESIGNED BY BENJY WALL-FENG — CRIMSON STAFF WRITER | 30