Fifteen Minutes Magazine: Nov. 2022

FIFTEEN MINUTES

EDITOR’S NOTE

FM CHAIRS

Maliya V. Ellis ’23-’24

Sophia S. Liang ’23

EDITORS-AT-LARGE

Josie F. Abugov ’22-’23

Saima S. Iqbal ’23

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Mila G. Barry ’25

Sarah W. Faber ’24

Io Y. Gilman ’25

Michal Goldstein ’25

Tess C. Kelley ’23

Amber H. Levis ’25

Akila V. Muthukumar ’23

Kaitlyn Tsai ’25

Benjy Wall-Feng ’25

Harrison R. T. Ward ’23

Maya M. F. Wilson ’24

Meimei Xu ’24

Dina R. Zeldin ’25

FM DESIGN EXECS

Michael Hu ’25

Sophia Salamanca ’25

Sophia C. Scott ’25

FM PHOTO EXEC

Joey Huang ’24

PRESIDENT

Raquel Coronell Uribe ’22-’23

MANAGING EDITOR

Jasper G. Goodman ’23

BUSINESS MANAGER

Amy X. Zhou ’23

COVER DESIGN

Michael Hu ’25

Dear Reader,

The cover story of this glossy is about cryptocurrency, which we have spent two months investigating and still don’t fully understand. What is a DAO? How does one block a chain? What happened to Web1 and Web2?

Crypto lingo might go over our heads, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try our hand at some cryptography of our own. That’s right: we’ve hidden a secret message in this editors’ note. Happy searching.

TMB and ITM’s “Dropping Out and Cashing

In: The Rise of DAOHQ” chronicles the Story of Lucas Chu and Emmet Halm, who dropped out of Harvard to found their startup, DAOHQ, which raised $1.3 million in its pre-seed round and counts MarK Cuban among its investors. Lucas and Emmet see themselves as part of a new vanguard of particularly aNti-institutional entrepreneurs — but our writers take a critical look at just how far they, and other elite collegeadjacent entrepreneurs like them, have really distanced themselves from the institutions they critique. It’s a deeply-reported, fascinating loOk into a hugely lucrative subculture — and as billions of dollars pour into the creation of so-called Web3, pointing out its contradictions couldn’t have higher sTakes.

You’ll have to puzzle for yourself how much you buy into their vision of a decentralized, democratic internet. As for us, we’ll be Sticking to some good old-fashioned, low-tech print journalism.

Sincerely, MVE & SSL

P.S. If you’re having trouble cracking the code, here’s a hint: it’s always a good idea to check back(wards) over your work.

Putting Used Books to Use

MOLLY E. EGAN AND CIANA J. KING

Bryn Mawr Bookstore in East Cambridge is a volunteer-run store for used and rare books. Photo by Jennifer Z. Liang.

When you swing open the bright bluepainted door to Bryn Mawr Bookstore, you’re greeted by soft chimes and a plethora of books. Spines ranging from lightly stained to barely bent cover every inch of the walls; every turn reveals a new bookshelf. On the checkout counter sits a small gold handbell waiting to be rung by customers. The bookstore is home to thousands of used, rare, and out-of-print books, the purchases of which fund scholarships for its namesake, Bryn Mawr College.

The shop is run by student volunteers looking to fulfill the college’s community service requirement and retirees looking to occupy their free time. Some days, the workers are welcomed by nearly 10 boxes of donated books which each volunteer sorts, designating each book to its most appropriate section.

Along with processing donations and interacting with community members, the volunteers also work to cultivate the homey ambiance of the bookstore. Before the pandemic, they organized events such as Easter egg hunts and Halloween celebrations; certain volunteers are known for their exceptional efforts to welcome customers.

“We have some famous people,” says Ruth L. Mittell, a bookstore volunteer. “Sydney’s a particular volunteer that makes tea for customers. People know to come by when she’s on, and often she bakes cookies on Thursday afternoon[s].”

Before there was the bookstore, there was the book sale; students looked forward to the annual market of used books organized by long-time Harvard staffer Elizabeth E. Butterfield in 1957. Butterfield, an alum of Bryn Mawr College, accepted donations with her husband in a trunk on their porch. Donations often came from professors moving abroad, writers who had accumulated hundreds of books looking to clear out their shelves, or any local Cambridge resident. The books were sorted and priced on a ping-pong table in Butterfield’s basement. Butterfield’s daughter, Hester Butterfield ’65, remembers hundreds of books being dropped in the trunk. “They were sorted very methodically,” she says, recalling how her mother and father scrutinized each book before etching the price in pencil.

The location of the annual sale varied from year to year, often taking place in farms, churches, and, for a few years, in Sanders Theatre, says Butterfield’s son, Fox Butterfield ’61. In 1971, the Butterfields decided to establish a permanent storefront for the donated books at its current location in East Cambridge.

“A lot of the books sold those days for 10 cents or 25 cents. Maybe a really, really important book might go for $1,” Fox remembers. Even with those prices, the sale raised

over $25,000 annually for Bryn Mawr students when the average annual cost of attending a four-year college was $2,725.

Aside from working to raise scholarships at the bookstore, Elizabeth also helped students through her work as the secretary to the dean of Radcliffe College. Later, she moved to the Registrar’s office at Harvard.

Besides her reputation for helping students navigate administrative webs, Elizabeth is remembered as a social activist. She was an organizer of Harvard’s Peace Action Strike coalition, a group founded in 1970 to protest the United States’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In further support of the cause, Elizabeth played a leading role in the closing of many Harvard offices in grievance of the students who lost their lives in the Kent State shootings.

In her activism, Elizabeth also foregrounded educational equality. Fox remembers delivering newspapers to people who did not have the money to pay him. Instead of withholding their delivery, Elizabeth would cover the cost of their subscription. “It was an important lesson for me,” Fox says.

Elizabeth passed on her commitment to higher education to Hester, who attended Radcliffe College. “Successful women come out of these scholarships,” Hester says of the Bryn Mawr Bookstore scholarships. “This is what my mother was building on. Women should get educated, be smart, and be independent.”

After learning that a new male co-worker, whom she had trained, was receiving a higher salary than her, Elizabeth resigned from the Registrar’s Office and worked instead as the secretary to the Social Studies Department, where she worked until her death in 1978.

Elizabeth’s legacy is still visible in the bookstore, where a section of books authored by “Notable American Women” brims with the works of famous feminist figures such as Emily Dickinson and Maya Angelou. A suffrage-era banner reads “VOTES FOR WOMEN” in a striking shade of red coupled next to a Bryn Mawr College flag.

“We want education to be available for women who might have trouble affording it, and we think that there is a reason for women’s colleges to still exist,” says Anne S. Dane, a volunteer of almost 40 years and a Bryn Mawr alum. Dane says she used to receive short profiles of the scholarship recipients which helped her connect with each woman’s story.

In celebration of the bookstore’s 50th birthday, volunteers took themselves back to the 1970s as they placed furniture on the street and filled the sidewalk with sounds of drums, horns, eating, and laughter. Dane says she can see the bookstore maintaining Elizabeth’s vision for decades to come.

The Adams House Raft Race Sunk in The Charles River's Past

In 1989, rafts made of wooden planks and milk cartons stormed the Charles River for the last time. Eggs, tomatoes, and other food littered the water — the remnants of combat. These raft races, sponsored by Adams House and co-founded by William F. Lee ’72 — the former Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation — featured a “funky flotilla” each spring until 1990, when then-Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III ended the event “for reasons of liability.”

“I have no idea what happened,” says Maria C. Mendez ’91, who raced the year prior. “But it could have easily been any one of us that got hurt — or, any student could get hurt — because the rafts tended to not last for very long, and they just came apart in the water.”

Any student — undergraduate or graduate — and even alumni could sign up to race and self-proclaim their

affiliation, often to represent their house, but sometimes to represent their campus organization. To construct their rafts, racers collected materials from across campus. Some made intricate designs, while others threw together a hodgepodge of items.

“We were just making a raft from just probably gigs and gags and whatever we could find,” Mendez says. “I don’t think there was any scientific computation before we started building the raft. We were using pretty much anything that we had leftover from anything.”

For his first race in 1977, David F. Wilson ’75 joined his pinball teammates to build a raft with a pinball machine; they managed to buy an affordable one and hauled it to the river on race day. However, they discovered that the box was too top-heavy, and they had to make last-minute changes in order for the raft to float. For his second race the

JEFFREY Q. YANG

following year, Wilson entered with Frank M. Kulash ’76, representing Currier House, and they created their raft from milk jugs.

“That raft, we named ‘The Mystery Floating Chairs,’ built with the flotation of five-gallon milk jugs from the cafeteria,” Wilson says. “We collected enough of those and did the math — I think it’s like seven pounds of flotation per gallon — on how many of these things we would need. To fulfill the vision, we put them out on pontoons way away from the central area of the raft. The central area of the raft was simply two chairs.”

Others just hoped to float long enough to wreak havoc, as Daniel W. Gil ’79 reported in a Crimson article from 1976: “Kirkland House, whose three kamikaze crafts — loaded with smoke bombs, four cases of dry ice and rotten fruit — never made it to the starting line. Their plans to capture the ‘senseless violence’ award went down in smoke and bubbles from the dry ice crates.”

Over the race’s 20-year duration, the awards changed, but the goofy spirit remained — from “first to sink tastefully,” originally named the Huckleberry Finn Award, to

the “most-polluted crew member,” awarded in 1976 to a Mower resident.

“His raft, the ‘Detente,’ had sunk after 20 feet and he had spent the rest of the race consuming an entire bottle of Scotch,” Gil reported.

That same year, a team donning red “Ve Ri Crass” shirts won the “Ronald Reagan” award for leaning furthest to the right: the crew of “15 drunk students and one not-soreluctant proctor” managed to cling onto their raft after falling into the river multiple times and “battling a dog who had made off with an oar.”

During the inaugural race in 1971,

Student race across the Charles in makeshift rafts. Photo courtesy of UAV 605.295.8, Harvard University Archives.

the “most unsportsmanlike boat” award celebrated creative malpractice. Lee, the co-founder of the race, remembers that a group from Harvard Business School won the award.

“The raft had a long, long, long, long rope, and they stationed a group of very strong Business School students down near the bridge at the

finish line, who basically pulled the boat the entire distance,” he says. As the years went on, roughhousing became a tradition. Lee recalls no instances of spectators or participants throwing objects at the original 1971 race, adding that “the idea that the head of Adams House was sitting on the bridge to judge who is coming

over first, I think, caused people to be on better behavior.”

Six years later, Kulash remembers that the race was still “very lighthearted” but involved “a lot of trying to sink other people’s rafts, throwing things like eggs and water balloons at other competitors.”

Larger houses often organized larger boats that had the capacity for “warfare concepts.” “Mayhem and sabotage were actually an important feature of the event,” Wilson says.

In their early years, the races attracted a decent crowd. Lee remembers having at least 12 rafts in the first year — others may have raced but never finished — and a sizable group of spectators that he thinks “enjoyed themselves,” especially in the beautiful weather.

The year that Wilson raced with Kulash, Wilson recalls the event remained just as popular as the original race, with at least a dozen rafts and “quite a few people watching. “I think partly that warfare made it more interesting,” he says.

However, in its final years, the races generated less excitement. By 1989, Mendez does not remember having many spectators — generally, just the friends of the participants.

Still, the event’s purpose remained the same. In 1971, coming off the heels of political unrest and student activism on campus, the students experienced “many, many issues beyond the norm,” Lee says. He envisioned the raft race simply as “something that was just fun for the community.”

Even as the event’s popularity dwindled almost two decades later, Mendez remembers the races as a bonding experience. “Yes, it was for fun, but it was just one more thing to have pride in your house and come together from different groups within the house,” she says.

Photo courtesy of UAV 605.295.8, Harvard University Archives.

A Pathetic Aesthetic

AMBER H. LEVIS

As the leaves mature into arresting hues of red and gold and the annual pumpkin spice latte plague kicks into high gear, we herald the arrival of Sad Girl Autumn.

Sad Girl Autumn, as defined by the TikToks and Pinterest boards that emerge from hibernation this time of year, involves donning thick cardigans and a pair of Doc Martens, binging “Gilmore Girls,” and curling up with a book while listening to raindrops patter across your windowpane. However, in a departure from more dispassionate fall-themed cognates, such as dark academia and Christian Girl Autumn, Sad Girl Autumn coziness is embedded in melancholy.

But how is it that this beautiful season earns the epithet of “sad”?

The answer is simple: The sad girl aesthetic is not an annually adopted aesthetic, but rather, has come to define the culture we live in.

Sad Girl Autumn is simply a seasonal flavor of something we’ve become familiar with; it’s the same postpretty cry mirror selfies posted on finstas year-round, but overlaid with a warm filter of creamy browns and oranges. It’s still the act of watching Sofia Coppola movies with a drink, but switching out the glass of red wine for a mug of Earl Grey. The Sad Girl aesthetic does not go out of season, but instead adapts to it.

The term “Sad Girl Autumn” was first popularized by Taylor Swift’s 2021 release, “All Too Well (Sad Girl Autumn Version),” a moody, pared-down acoustic arrangement of the original song from her album “Red.” Indeed, listening to the nostalgia of a Taylor Swift breakup tune, the haunting ache of Phoebe Bridgers’s finger-picked guitar, and, of course, Lana Del Rey’s breathy ballads, is an essential element to curating the Sad Girl aesthetic, with or without its autumnal flair.

On my Spotify recommended page, I’ve been occasionally (frequently) assaulted with the uber-popular playlist “sad girl starter pack.” It’s a Spotify-curated playlist with a regularly rotating selection of approximately 75

songs. As of publication, these songs range from the objectively sad (“It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” by Weyes Blood, a song about the alienation of living in modern society), to the dubiously sad (“Miracles,” by Alex G, a song that, indeed, reflects on the miracles of life). The one throughline I can identify is that they’re all generally mellow lo-fi songs which can be nebulously categorized as “indie pop.”

This is, I believe, the intention behind the playlist. It’s not meant to provide catharsis by evoking our most painful memories; rather, it’s meant to create an enduring mood. It’s an unchanging landscape set to the lowest frequency; it’s a solipsistic sadness that is static, and, therefore, comforting. It’s a melancholy we don’t quite want to shake off.

Beyond its sonic and visual appeal, some people value the Sad Girl aesthetic for its role in reframing sexual politics. In 2014, artist and critic Audrey Wollen made waves with her “Sad Girl Theory,” which asserts that the demonstration of female suffering is “an act of protest” against systems of masculine power.

In an interview with i-D, Wollen said, “I think that a sad girl’s self-destruction, no matter how silent or commonplace, is a strategy for subverting those systems, for making the implicit violence visceral and visible, for implicating us all in her devastation.”

She continues, “There’s this ethos of excess and approval, making it cool and fun to be a girl. The problem is: It isn’t really cool and fun to be a girl.”

In The Independent, Merideth Clark poses a similar argument, contending that, unlike trends like the “clean girl aesthetic,” Sad Girl Autumn is inclusive and “reflective of a culture — music, movies, fashion, fragrances — that celebrates melancholy, nostalgia, and unapologetically female expressions of emotion.”

The implication is not only that melancholia belongs to women, but that therein rests the inclusivity of the Sad Girl aesthetic. This notion of radically inclusive feminine pain is echoed in the beloved Netflix dramedy “Sex Education.” In 8

“The aestheticization — dare I say fetishization — of female pain reaffirms the conditions that made girls sad in the first place.” Design by Samanta A. Mendoza-Lagunas.

the penultimate episode of the second season, in an attempt to discover the identity of a graffiti artist who defaced the girls’ locker room, essentially every notable female character is placed in detention together, trapped until the culprit confesses or until they complete a joint assignment given to them by a teacher. Their task? To define what “binds [them] together as women.” In a room of six women who differ not only in personality, but in sexuality, race, and socioeconomic status, they inevitably find their only common denominator to be their harassment at the hands of men. They leave the school sharing knowing glances and subdued smiles. Of course, their friendship won’t last the episode; it’s like it’s “The Breakfast Club” if it failed a fucked-up sort of Bechdel Test.

To this point, both Clark’s and Wollen’s celebration of the Sad Girl aesthetic lies in their belief that it is a testament to what it means to be a woman – that is, to be a subject of violence and oppression.

On this point, I don’t disagree with Wollen. Given the artifice of the gender binary, it has become difficult to define “womanhood” in any concrete way. You could argue in the same vein as Wollen and define womanhood by what it is not; to be a woman is to not be guarded against sexual and domestic violence. It is to not be in control of how your body is seen, used, and commodified by society. It is to not be respected on the grounds of your ability, but rather, measured by your adherence to societal beauty standards.

But the aestheticization — dare I say fetishization — of female pain reaffirms the conditions that made girls sad in the first place. Simply put, the Sad Girl reeks of complacency. She takes the sadness that has been handed down for generations and makes a home in it; she dresses it in a

turtleneck and blankets it in dreamy, wistful soundscapes. She makes us see her sadness in all its glory without any real appeal for change. She doesn’t seem to want it — she’d live her life with the “sad girl starter pack” playing in the background in perpetuity.

Yes, the sadness is visible through hashtags, but it is not in any way subversive; rather than challenging the systems that oppress her, the Sad Girl beautifies her suffering, and represents a very white kind of beauty. Need I mention the sad-girl indie Swift-Bridgers-Del Rey trifecta again? While we can talk ad nauseam about the radical inclusivity of feminine pain, we don’t see this inclusivity reflected in all those aesthetic mood boards because it is typically whiteness that we categorize as aesthetic.

And, of course, the commercialization of the Sad Girl has erased any kind of depth from her complicated identity.

The “sad girl starter pack,” at least, has nothing to do with the injuries incurred by the patriarchy and has everything to do with “sitting on your green velvet couch, thinking of her <3,” as the Spotify playlist description currently reads. This description changes often, though the meaning stays the same. A few months ago, it read: “sapphic songs that described your music taste as ‘yearning.’” The cover shows two silhouetted women making out.

Maybe the sapphic spin is a halfhearted attempt to move on from defining women by their relations with men (though we still can’t let go of the need to define them through their relationships). Regardless, it’s a far cry from Wollen’s Sad Girl.

In an article explaining Sad Girl Autumn for Elle subscribers, Ariana Yaptangco asks: “Wait, why are we sad again?” and answers, “There are so many things to choose from! Sad that the world is on fire, literally and

figuratively. Sad that summer is over. Sad it’s getting cold out. Sad it’s cuffing season and you’re still single. Sad your summer fling has ended. Sad the year is pretty much over. The possibilities are endless!”

At the end of Yaptangco’s article is a sad girl starter pack that you can shop from. The cheapest item is a $60 candle.

Aside from the glaringly false equivalence of the end of the world with the end of summer, the positioning of these sources of sadness as hot new accessories falls in line with the kind of thinking that leads to a corporate playlist called “sad girl starter pack.” It’s a sadness with all the glamor, but without the teeth, bought at the low price of $9.99 a month. Frankly, sad sells.

And while we do a disservice to ourselves by glamorizing and selling sadness, we also do a disservice to the artists whose art we classify as “Sad Girl music.”

Perhaps Lucy Dacus, who has two songs featured in the “sad girl starter pack,” put it best when she tweeted: “Sadness can be meaningful but I got a bone to pick with the ‘sad girl indie’ genre, not the music that gets labeled as that, but the classification and commodification and perpetual expectation of women’s pain, also I don’t think my songs are sad, anyways good morning.”

Why are we asking Elle for reasons to be sad? Are we donning the Sad Girl cable-knit sweater for some illusion of emotional depth? Because we do just the opposite when we create identities out of nondescriptive platitudes. We flatten the peaks and valleys of life, minimizing its fluorescent ecstasy, its volatile passions, its frivolous absurdity. We forget the peace of taking a morning walk and the uncomplicated beauty of an oak tree changing colors, shedding old leaves.

Deirdre Barrett Brings Her Dreams to Life

Looking at Deirdre L. Barrett’s artwork, you feel like you’re entering another world, or maybe just a different version of your own. A world that’s psychedelic, dripping with color and texture and pulling inspiration from the likes of Edward Gorey and Hieronymous Bosch.

Each square inch of Barrett’s work contains a mindboggling explosion of detail. Picture animals whose feathers melt into scales, eerie faces emerging from trees, and the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to publish a so-called humor magazine, covered in bird heads. A Lecturer on Psychology and prominent dream researcher, Barrett likes to inhabit the spaces we can’t firmly grasp — the hours between wake and sleep, the gap between the real and unreal, the world of dreams.

Dreams have always compelled Barrett. By the age of six, she realized that she was different from other kids at school — her dreams were bizarre and vivid, and she seemed to remember them with startling accuracy. “As a really little kid, when I only remember discussing [dreams] with my parents, I kind of thought it was a kid thing,” she says. As she got a little older, she realized that the other kids on the playground weren’t experiencing the same thing. “I guess it was then that I did get that I seemed to have more and more vivid dreams,” she recalls.

And her dreams are, admittedly, a little strange. In an email, Barrett describes one of her recent dreams, about “some bird people that are incubating a fetus in an odd incubator while a ghost floats overhead that is both sort

of another image of the fetus and sort of the spirit of a deceased entity the fetus is replacing.” Instead of shying away from the weirdness of her dreams, Barrett leans into it.

“I relate to dreams more as metaphoric, meaningful things that you can get both personal insight and creative inspiration [from],” she says.

The path to dream research felt natural to her. “[I] realized that [if] somebody was going to pay me to work with dreams all the time, I’d better major in psychology and go to graduate school in it.”

As an academic, Barrett has explored the impact of mass trauma on dreams. In June of 2020, she published “Pandemic Dreams”: a book inspired by 15,000 individuals’ Covid-related dream submissions. The accounts were strikingly similar at the start, but “decoupled in time” as different states and countries adopted different public health policies, she says. (Barrett notes that despite most mask mandates being lifted, people are still dreaming about forgetting their masks; it’s the modern-day equivalent of the classic “naked in public” dream.) Today, she is working on finding more empirical ways to characterize Covid-era dreams.

Starting in the mid-2000s, Barrett began writing for the general public as a means of increasing accessibility to her scientific research. “I started writing trade books, and I started doing movie reviews of films about dreams, and moved a little bit away from the ‘academic-only’ way of talking about dreams,” she says. Eventually, her hunger to represent dreams began to take the form of another

ANNIKA INAMPUDI AND UNA R. ROVEN

medium — art.

Throughout her career, Barrett would occasionally use pencils or watercolors to try and recreate images from her dreams when they were particularly compelling. However, these sketches were often more frustrating than illuminating for Barrett, since they would typically wind up looking “like a second grader had done it,” she says.

Barrett was stumped not only by the discrepancy between the vividness of her dreams and her disappointing artistic ability, but by her friends’ inability to understand her goals: she was not interested in making art based on her dreams, but rather in using art to reproduce her dreams. “If I could have just projected photographically what was in my head, that would have been the ideal,” she says.

It wasn’t until six and a half years ago, at an art show by Nobel Laureate and former Harvard biochemistry professor Walter Gilbert

’53, that Barrett was inspired to use photography and digital photo editing to reproduce her dreamscapes more accurately. Soon after that, when she had a dream about a mask coming to life, she reached for her camera roll instead of her sketchpad. “I already have some photographs of masks because I collect masks when I go to mask shows,” Barrett says. Starting with a picture of a real mask, then adding “living eyes” and “some of the creatures that were crawling up the side of its face” changed the game.

Barrett has also recently begun to experiment with a computer program called Deep Dream, which generates images from text narratives of dreams or user-uploaded base images. Barrett appreciates the ability of Deep Dream to recreate dreams with a “sparkly psychedelic” or “unreal, night time glittery” look.

Despite having sampled the various advantages of Photoshop, DALL-E, and traditional painting,

Barrett is still looking for the perfect way to put her dreams to paper. As a result, her artistic style has changed over the years, with earlier pieces featuring iridescent jewel tones and later ones including more matte, muted images. “It feels like I’m still kind of learning and experimenting,” she says.

The target of her ambitions — the dreams themselves — is moving, too. Barrett has started dreaming less as she has gotten older, putting a clock on her source material. She recounts with some horror that she “actually failed to recall a dream one night this week in any dream content at all,” she says.

Despite these challenges, she plans on continuing to use art to bring dreams to the general public — projecting her mesmerizing and fantastical dreamscapes onto the waking world.

Deirdre L. Barrett, a lecturer on psychology, has explored the impact of mass trauma on dreams. Design by Michelle Liu.

'A Very Fraught Moment': How

Elizabeth Holmes Joined the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows

SOPHIA C. SCOTT

While conning a slew of A-list investors, Holmes was also courting a different kind of prestige: a seat on Harvard Medical School’s Board of Fellows. Design by Julia Freitag.

The infamous saga of Elizabeth A. Holmes has been well-documented in popular media. Between an HBO documentary, a Wall Street Journal exposé, a plethora of podcasts, and a star-studded Hulu series, all chronicling the rise and fall of her fraudulent biotech company Theranos, it seems just about everyone has an opinion of Holmes.

Theranos Inc. was a healthcare startup — valued at $10 billion at its zenith in 2013 and 2014 — once considered to be on the cusp of revolutionizing the blood-testing industry. Founded by Holmes, a Stanford dropout, in 2003, Theranos quickly garnered funding from an illustrious set of big-name investors, with Holmes touting her company’s technology as a way to run hundreds of medical tests with a single drop of blood. However, in 2015, the technology at the core of Theranos was ultimately exposed as a massive deception. Holmes was convicted of fraud in January of this year.

But before Theranos came crashing down, Holmes raised over $700 million from high-profile investors, drawing numerous distinguished personalities to her company’s corporate board. While conning a slew of A-list investors, Holmes was also courting a different kind of prestige: a seat on Harvard Medical School’s Board of Fellows.

The Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows is a non-fiduciary board created in 1990. Board members serve as external advisors to the leadership of the school and provide counsel on topics related to the strength, health, and well-being of the institution.

Before the fall of Theranos, many on the Board were excited at the possibility of having Holmes — a rising star in the biotech industry — join their ranks. What they didn’t

anticipate was that her time at HMS would be so short-lived and riddled with controversy.

‘She Might Learn Something New’

In 2015, then-Dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey S. Flier received a call from a senior professor at Harvard Business School who hoped Holmes would deliver a keynote address at their upcoming healthcare symposium.

The professor wanted Flier to connect him with William H. Frist, a member of the HMS Board of Fellows who also happened to sit on the board of Theranos. “A keynote address to that group would have been quite an important role,” Flier says.

Soon, Flier would have other hopes for Holmes — courting her to join the HMS Board herself.

The Board is “designed to be a highly accomplished group of people with whom we have regular contact and are informed about what the school is doing, what the future activities are, what the challenges are,” Flier says.

Frist told Flier that Holmes had to pass on the opportunity due to a scheduling conflict, but that she would be happy to meet with Flier if she was ever in Boston or he found himself in Palo Alto, California, the site of Theranos headquarters.

Later that year, Holmes found herself on Harvard’s campus to receive an award, and her office reached out to set up a meeting with Flier. The pair had lunch in a private room at the Faculty Club, “with one of her guards posted outside,” according to Flier.

During their meal, Flier says Holmes touted several other highprofile board invitations she had rejected, but she expressed interest in becoming involved with HMS. She

delivered her Theranos pitch to Flier, during which he says Holmes claimed that “everyone is in mortal fear of a blood test.” Flier challenged her, arguing that too much self-ordered blood testing could lead to “false positives” that could elicit further testing with “harmful and disruptive” results.

“She looked at me like no one had ever said that before,” he says.

Flier thought Holmes’s reaction to his query was “slightly odd,” but he ultimately pushed aside his doubts because the role was strictly advisory and did not require any medical expertise or involve fiduciary responsibility, he says.

“Look, we’re not asking her to run the world of testing. We’re asking her to be on our board while this all plays out. And she might be interesting and valuable, and she might learn something new,” Flier explains.

The Board of Fellows Nominating Committee meets annually to review and approve a slate of candidates for the board, and in Holmes’s case, Flier decided to extend an invitation after informally consulting with a few other board members.

“We were interested in some younger people, we were interested in women, we were interested in people with entrepreneurial activity, and she fit the bill,” Flier says.

Until It Was Too Late

But one board member who wasn’t included in these discussions knew something about Holmes that the others didn’t.

Phyllis I. Gardner first crossed paths with Holmes in 2003 when the now-disgraced founder was an undergraduate at Stanford, looking to share her idea for Theranos with an expert in the medical field. During this time, Gardner says she became

“the early skeptic” of Holmes after observing her “extraordinary egoism” and “air of invincibility” first-hand.

“She came to me with this weird idea, a very weird idea,” says Gardner, recalling Holmes’s initial pitch, a precursor to the vision of Theranos. “And I kept telling her that’s not going to work. It wasn’t the idea she ultimately commercialized, but she had no knowledge.”

Despite her past with Holmes, Gardner was never consulted prior to Flier extending the Board invitation to her. When Gardner learned that Holmes was to join the HMS board, she says she privately lobbied the Development Office to expel her, pointing to the fact that Holmes was under investigation at the time. She says that in response, she was told that Holmes would be treated as “innocent until proven guilty.”

“She was put on the Harvard Medical School Board by a nominating committee of three powerful people who hadn’t done their due diligence,” Gardner says. “It was hard for me. I begged them not to put her on and it was too late.”

In retrospect, Flier says he should have consulted Gardner, but says he didn’t realize that she and Holmes had a prior relationship until it was too late.

“The reality is that I wish I had asked, but I didn’t even think of the connection,” Flier says. “It just didn’t occur to any of us.”

A few weeks later, Gardner’s suspicions about Holmes were publicly vindicated.

The morning of Holmes’s first meeting as a member of the board, the Wall Street Journal published its first front-page exposé by journalist John Carreyrou, who would go on to write “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” a book about Theranos’ fall from grace. Gardner

was quoted as a source in Carreyrou’s article.

The story interrogated the validity of Holmes’s technology, publicly planting the first major seeds of doubt in Theranos and casting Holmes’s burgeoning empire as a potentially fraudulent operation.

When Flier introduced Holmes to the board, he hadn’t yet read the article and recalls he “didn’t know what to think, but we welcomed her.”

“You can imagine these are all very smart, well-connected people. The word was being whispered around the room for those who hadn’t read the Wall Street Journal already that this had happened,” Flier says.

In a 2019 op-ed for the British Medical Journal, Flier wrote that despite the tension, “Elizabeth remained unimaginably calm and unflustered” during the two-day meeting, though “everyone talked privately about this cosmic anomaly.”

‘It’s All Gonna Blow Over’

At the first Board of Fellows meeting after Holmes joined, Gardner says she sat with her “arms folded and scowling,” face-to-face and across the table from Holmes.

When she was introduced, Gardner remembers that everyone applauded her, except Harvard University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 and President Drew G. Faust, who sat “stone-faced,” just like Gardner.

“They were embarrassed. You know, it’s an embarrassing situation for everybody,” says Gardner.

Nonetheless, Holmes “didn’t seem embarrassed,” she says. Instead, Holmes spoke in her trademark “low voice,” which Gardner believes was “cultivated,” as it differed significantly from the tone of voice she remembered her having at Stanford.

“It was a very fraught moment. And

of course, I was supporting Harvard, but I was not supporting Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos because I had knowledge that a lot of people didn’t about what was happening,” Gardner says.

Several hours into the meeting, Holmes left and didn’t come back, according to Flier. She was expected to return for a large dinner reception that night, where the seating arrangements would place her at the head of the table next to Flier. But as rumors swirled about Theranos, Holmes’s chair remained conspicuously empty. Only after the appetizers and main course were served did Holmes arrive and take her seat next to Flier. He says they exchanged pleasantries and she apologized for missing the rest of the meeting, citing several television appearances she had to attend that day.

“It sounds like this is a major complication for you,” Flier recalls saying to her. “And she said something like, ‘Oh it’s really nothing, it’s all gonna blow over. It’s a very uninformed article.’”

Throughout the dinner, Flier says Holmes “defended herself” and “behaved as normally as you can imagine a person behaving.”

When Gardner saw Holmes at the head of the table, she says she thought it was “par for the course” to see her “leaning in, sucking up to a powerful older white man.” Her behavior reminded Gardner of how Holmes had defrauded dozens of Theranos investors who, blinded by the allure of her empire, “fell for her” and failed to do due diligence.

‘Getting Burned by the Hot Iron’

In the aftermath of the exposé and months of investigations that followed, the Board grappled with an

internal debate about whether to keep Holmes “on the board for a while out of fairness and due process” or request her resignation in order to “limit potential institutional reputational damage,” Flier wrote in a blog post.

Gardner says that despite mounting evidence, most board members were “not convinced at all” that Holmes was a fraud and should resign. “They didn’t do due diligence,” she says.

Some women on the board even asked Gardner if she was “embarrassed” about being quoted in the Wall Street Journal exposé and expressed concern that it would be “embarrassing” for them not to support Holmes on the Board as a female entrepreneur, Gardner recalls. “How could you not support a woman?” she says they asked her.

“I’m totally women-oriented, but not for her, not for a fraud! And by the way, I was proven right,” Gardner says. “She was a fraud. She is a fraud.”

At first, the majority of the board opposed requesting Holmes’s resignation, Gardner says. But as

more information became public, Flier wrote in a blog post that “the balance decisively swung,” and he asked a trusted friend to quietly ask Holmes to resign from the Board of Fellows.

“In retrospect we made a mistake in asking her to join despite her winning awards and gaining broad attention, we corrected the mistake in a reasonable time period allowing facts to emerge, and there was no harm to the school apart from understandable (and brief) embarrassment that this happened,” Flier wrote in an email.

Just three years ago, Flier, now retired, wrote in a blog post that his involvement in “Theranos-gate” taught him that more due diligence is needed, even for non-fiduciary boards like the HMS Board of Fellows.

In the same post, Flier also acknowledged the challenge of balancing due diligence with expediency when recruiting desirable candidates. “On the other hand, convincing great people to join such boards is critical to the health of many not-for-profit institutions, and

sometimes you must strike while the iron is hot to engage them,” he wrote.

“To avoid getting burned by the hot iron, both diligence and good fortune are required,” he added.

“Though this was never before a problem, and in most circumstances like it would not have been — she might have become the next Steve Jobs — broader socialization of new members and greater deliberation is important, perhaps more than I had realized.”

Today, when asked if any changes need to be made to ensure that a Holmesian imbroglio doesn’t happen again, Flier responds, “No, I don’t think any more steps are needed. I think the process — other than what happened with her — the process that I had to name 10 or 15 people to the Board worked out exceptionally well.”

“It’s a great board. It’s dedicated. The new dean is terrific. It’s a great board. I have no regrets, other than that aberration,” Gardner says.

Elizabeth A. Holmes’s legal team did not respond to a request for comment.

The Harvard Medical School, where Holmes briefly served on the Board of Fellows.

Photo by Pei Chao Zhuo

Dropping Out and Cashing In: The Rise of DAOHQ

TALIA M. BLATT AND ISABEL T. MEHTA

It’s all but impossible to talk to Lucas Chu and Emmet A. Halm at the same time. During our last attempt at a joint conversation — a Zoom call on Halloween — Lucas was in Lisbon for a cryptocurrency conference, Emmet was in Los Angeles, and we were in Cambridge. Understandably, Lucas bungled the time zones and missed our call.

Lucas and Emmet, both 21, have been traveling the world ever since they “dropped out” of Harvard last winter to build their startup, DAOHQ — though, as they both tell us, no one ever really drops out of Harvard; they are both technically on indefinite leave. By the end of last spring, they had raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding for DAOHQ. Mark Cuban was among their investors.

Hundreds of DAOs are launched every week, and the market is worth billions of dollars. A DAO — which stands for decentralized autonomous organization — is an online group that makes decisions collectively, without a central authority. DAOs are like companies, but all DAO members are equal, and all decisions are programmed in computer code called smart contracts.

Emmet and Lucas saw a problem within the DAO landscape. Aside from coming across a DAO on Twitter or seeing it mentioned on a Discord server, it is hard to find, evaluate, and invest in DAOs. This is where DAOHQ — a marketplace for DAOs that aggregates and standardizes them in a directory for users to browse — comes in. By streamlining DAOs and making them more accessible, DAOHQ envisions a world economy where anyone — regardless of their race, their education, their nationality, their gender — can have a stake.

Their idea was innovative enough to impress several high-profile investors. “Emmet and Lucas blew my mind and it was a no-brainer to invest,” unicorn entrepreneur and angel investor Andres Bilbao told Forbes for a profile of DAOHQ that came out in April.

DAOHQ and its investors are part of a brave-ish, new-ish world of decentralization — a much-contested alternative to traditional finance that some herald as the future of a more democratic economic order and others see as a fraudulent, speculative craze.

DAOs run on cryptocurrency, a digital financial medium that removes the third party (banks and governments). Cryptocurrencies rely on digital transactions that are protected with cryptography and decentralization. They use blockchain technology, a public ledger on a network distributed across computers. (This means that all users can see all transactions.) By eliminating the third party and providing security and transparency, crypto, its supporters argue, is a solution to the distrust that has pervaded financial institutions since the 2008 recession and Occupy Wall Street movement.

Emmet emphasizes how cryptocurrency reverses the barrier to entry typical of financial institutions. Traditional banks require accreditation, and place limits on how and when people can invest, Emmet says, “versus crypto, you just do whatever you want.”

But without the stability of centralized institutions, cryptocurrency has seen dramatic booms and busts in its barely decadal life span: The market was worth a staggering $3 trillion in 2021, before $2 trillion were erased in a crash this past summer.

Designs by Michael Hu.

Lucas and Emmet see themselves as part of a new vanguard of entrepreneurs entering this uncertain space. They present themselves as distinct from the familiar archetype of the elite college drop-out turned wunderkind entrepreneur, modeled and tainted by people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elizabeth Holmes. In dropping out to pursue a cryptocurrency-dependent startup, Emmet and Lucas have exited institutions twice-over: they’ve left both Harvard and the realm of traditional finance.

We met with Lucas and Emmet through the fall as they embarked on

their second round of fundraising. Along the way, we spoke with other young entrepreneurs, professors, high school students, Harvard Innovation Lab members, and investors in an attempt to understand what Lucas and Emmet are doing, how and why they’re doing it, and what’s at stake. We also visited the first “Dropout House,” where Lucas and Emmet crash periodically with a group of other drop-out (or drop-out adjacent) entrepreneurs in Somerville. More such Dropout Houses are on the way. As the website for dropout.club, a network of dropout community houses Lucas is trying to found,

reads: “Whether they help start a new country like Alexander Hamilton or save the rap game like Kanye West, dropouts change the world.”

“‘I’m free from ‘Daddy Harvard’ and ‘Daddy McKinsey,’” Emmet says. “I’m in control of my own fate, and it could blow up. It could blow up and go up, it could blow up and go down. But I’m just here relying on my skills and not relying on other people or institutions. I think a lot of that’s the crypto ethos as well.”

But Emmet makes sure to mention that the “value-add” in taking a leave — his sentences are often peppered with this pseudo-economic language

Emmet Halm (left) and Lucas Chu (right) announced in April that they had raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding for their startup, DAOHQ.

Photo courtesy of Lucas Chu and Emmet Halm.

Kaledora Fontana ‘22 is one of several student entrepreneurs living in a house in Somerville.

Photo by Marina Qu.

“They’re thinking about how to support grandmas and their pensions,” Lucas says, “and that’s something we support as well.”

But Waldo and Schneier are less sure that DAOs are secure enough for, as Lucas puts it, grandmas’ pensions.

“Notions of smart contracts are attempts to replace things that we have actually worked for a long time to understand and put into a framework that works for everybody, like contracts, and replace them with software, which is generally unreliable and unproven,” Waldo says.

***

Their successful pre-seed fundraising enabled Lucas and Emmet to start recruiting employees. Lucas says they received over 1,000 applications.

In some DAOHQ recruiting emails, Lucas offered to compensate people for applying. “We’ll pay you!” one reads, in bold. “I’ll venmo you once our recruiting round is over.” Their rate: $5 for applying and signing up, $2 for every referral, and $10 for every successful referral.

By the end of the spring, they had hired six full time team members across the world. “It’s kind of cool, because every call is multiple time zones, countries, nationalities,” Lucas says.

In March, Emmet and Lucas set up headquarters in Miami, a major crypto hub.

“We got an Airbnb that was actually like sharing a bed, because Miami is so expensive,” Lucas says. (Emmet corroborates the bed-sharing on a phone call.)

Then in the summer, they watched the crypto world burn around them.

In early May, the price of Bitcoin dropped, and Coinbase, a major cryptocurrency exchange, plunged in value. A staggering $300 billion were lost as cryptocurrency prices collapsed.

“Terra went from 50 billion to zero in a few days. It was very cool,” Lucas says, referring to the cryptocurrency token Terra (LUNA), the disintegration of which precipitated the broader collapse. “Actually I was up at 2 a.m., looking at this. Before my eyes, I saw it go from 69 cents to 30 cents.” (On a later phone call, he says he used cool in a “morbid” way to mean “not cool at all.”)

For crypto critics, the crash seemed to validate characterizations of the currency as speculative and unsustainable, prone to inflationary bubbles and collapses.

“All currency is a consensual hallucination. But cryptocurrency is a consensual hallucination without the backing of any major government,” Waldo says. “Currencies are not speculative devices. Crypto is a speculative device.”

Luckily, DAOHQ closed its preseed round before the crash, and Lucas and Emmet were not planning on fundraising over the summer. Now this fall, despite the volatility of the market, Lucas and Emmet are pushing on undeterred.

“If you’re bullish and excited long term, there’s no reason to really fret that,” Emmet says. “The worst parts about crypto were generally flushed out — the people that were just in it for the really high highs, or building scammy projects. There’s not enough oxygen and hype to thrive. And so right now, it’s just tons of people building who are solving real problems.”

When we first spoke with Lucas in early September, DAOHQ was about to launch its next round of fundraising — for which they set a $3 million target. Attempting to reach their goal would test the viability of the company, and would require weeks of constant domestic and international travel — from Seoul to New York City, Toronto to Los

the Dropout House as an escape from institutions, at times its value seems more dependent on proximity than distance.

“We can put houses there right next to Harvard, and then you get all the community from them,” he says. “So you can go to the classes, you can hang out with your friends. And you don’t have to pay $60k a year.”

As we sit at their table in Somerville — a nine-minute Uber from Harvard’s campus — we can’t help but wonder how far they’ve really gone. When we leave the house, Marco is looking at a box of Barilla pasta, checking the cook time. It’s such a college kid thing to do, we think to ourselves: learning to take care of yourself, but being new to it, still following the instructions.

Cryptopia, or Smoke and Mirrors?

All of this branding and selfpromotion around “exstitutions” is not just about dropping out of elite colleges — it’s part of a much bigger utopian vision facilitated by crypto and DAOs, in which DAOHQ could serve as the essential platform.

We get this vision when we meet Emmet in person for the first time, on the second floor patio of the Smith Center. He arrives a little late, wearing a black turtleneck, light wash jeans, and a brown leather belt. We ask if he’s deliberately evoking Steve Jobs. He’s not, he says, although he does cite Jobs’s book later as a major inspiration.

Emmet describes cryptocurrency as “hard money” as opposed to “fiat money,” or government-issued money not backed by a commodity like gold.

“The goal is to have this international reserve currency that’s not controlled by any government. So that’s exstitutional, in the sense of exiting the fiat system, going back to

a digital version of the gold standard,” he explains. It’s a surprisingly historical-looking analogue for such a modern platform.

Reaching even further back, he describes the DAO as a kind of “experimental governance” akin to early American history — where Alexander Hamilton from the Dropout Club branding reappears.

“If you’ve watched ‘Hamilton’ the musical, they’re just making this stuff up as they go,” Emmet says. “They’re just debating, how should we govern ourselves?”

And his answer is: through the blockchain. “You can have this completely international, decentralized, censorship-resistant, very democratic way of organizing people and money,” he says. He invokes people living under authoritarian regimes, able to join a global, underground economy without fear of persecution under their country’s institutions.

Lucas, Emmet, and Kaledora all cite Balaji Srinivasen’s “The Network State,” published in July, as a foundational text to this democratic vision. Srinivasen, an entrepreneur, investor, and former chief technology officer of Coinbase — a cryptocurrency platform that plunged this summer — advocates for a world of competitive governance through DAO-style states: highly aligned online communities that crowdfund territory and eventually gain diplomatic recognition.

Publicly available, “The Network State” appears to be written with the document preparation software LaTeX, like a problem set, and lays out its future in pithy aphorisms like “Our idea is to proceed cloud first, land last.”

One of the key elements of network states, Srinivasen argues, is a recognized founder: “A state, like a

company, needs a leader.”

DAOHQ could be the platform on which DAOs become network states. Emmet uses the terms “libertarianleft” and “progressive” to describe the ideological tenor of this vision: “Very much just live and let live in terms of social issues. Let people do what people want to do.”

Where do welfare and the other material functions of the nation state fit into the network state?

“Think of it like if Amazon Prime also provided housing and childcare, or something,” Emmet says.

We ran this vision of the network state by James H. Waldo, the HKS professor. “Yeah, good luck on that. I have science fiction on all sorts of things,” he says. China and most other governments are regulating, not recognizing, cryptocurrencies, he argues, so there’s little chance of DAOs receiving any kind of extraterritorial status.

Emmet does clarify that he doesn’t see Srinivasen’s vision materializing completely anytime soon. “I wouldn’t bet on nation states going away,” he says. But he emphasizes that the idea of competitive governance remains “really exciting.”

“We’re going to hopefully see more of that,” he says, and suggests one way forward might be a possible reorientation of American political parties, with one embracing crypto.

“I’d be curious, even in the next election cycle, if any party tries to lay claim to the crypto Web-3 crowd,” he says.

Waldo remains skeptical of even a smaller political shift. “Talk to the crypto bros — and I would claim that most of them are bros,” Waldo says.

“What value are they actually adding to society? I haven’t heard a good answer. Very pie in the sky, handwave handwave, bubble bubble, smoke and mirrors.”

To Waldo’s “bros” claim, indeed, only 17.7 percent of venture-backed crypto and blockchain companies have a woman on their team of founders, according to a 2019 report released by Blockworks, a blockchain non-profit. On the investor side, Gemini Exchange’s 2021 State of U.S. Crypto Report revealed that women make up only 26 percent of investors in the space.

Rosen speaks of an antiinstitutional, “value-creating, risktaking hero adventurer” image of masculinity that has found new representation in young male tech entrepreneurs. The democratization of “smartness,” the idea that anyone can be an expert and it doesn’t matter how old you are or whether you went to college, is strongly tied to the male conception of “mastery” — that the world simply exists for them to conquer it, Rosen posits.

While Emmet doesn’t see entrepreneurship as inherently gendered, he acknowledges that “masculine traits like competitiveness, persistence, confidence, and risk taking are generally rewarded.” He also mentions a “Women in Web3” event DAOHQ participated in, aimed at “getting more women involved in the Web3 space as developers, community managers, founders, investors, just across the board.”

As for the makeup of DAOHQ’s own team, Lucas says: “I wish I worked on a startup where we can say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna make sure 50 percent of hires are women,’ but that doesn’t maximize our chances of success currently, based on the applications we’re seeing.”

“Crypto is an extension of cyberpsychedelic, tech, and libertarian culture, all of which is dominated by men,” he later wrote in a text. “So it seems that the crypto logos, pathos, and kairos are generally more

appealing to men. That being said, the crypto ethos itself aspires to be person-agnostic.”

Waldo synthesizes the criticisms of this abstract, libertarian ideal.

“I understand that a lot of people don’t like where the power is centralized,” he says. “But most of the work on these DAOs or NFT organizations or other such things are not an attempt to democratize. They’re an attempt to switch the set of people who have monopoly power from the ones that currently have it to the ones that are doing Web3 applications. And that’s fine, if they want to try and do that. I understand greed.”

In sum: Lucas and Emmet see themselves and DAOHQ as an “exstitutional” step towards a digital, more free world. But this vision is weighed down by a miasma of gender, technological and economic realities.

***

All of this is to say — Emmet and Lucas chose to leave Harvard, and they stand by this decision with conviction. It is hard to chart an uncertain path. Most people don’t do it. It’s much easier to be skeptical of their worldview, and the terrain in which they stake their venture, than it is to respect them for their guts.

It’s also worth noting that almost everyone we talked to who was excited about crypto is under 30; almost everyone who was pessimistic about it is over 30. Like many youthdriven, anti-institutional movements, it’s possible the older generations are just cynical or unable to see fault in the institutions in which they are embedded.

Ironically, though, the youth might not have distanced themselves much from these institutions. The Dropout House is less than 10 minutes away from Harvard, with three Harvard alums as tenants and the Harvard

door always ajar to those on leave. Many of them have finance and big tech jobs on their resumes.

And crypto — DAOHQ especially — was constantly trumpeted to us as something meant to remove barriers to entry, to improve the accessibility of economic institutions, and to reduce power concentration among the wealthy and the important. But it’s not clear that this highly technical, highly volatile, male-dominated, abstract, and elite institution-adjacent world is really open to all.

Every iteration of the internet has bred and lost a utopian vision. Led by a vanguard composed primarily of the elite, Web3 might not be any different. Web3’s material and ideological attempt to leave institutions — an attempt at “exstitution” — risks re-entrenching opacity and inequality as much as it promises transparency and egalitarianism.

We don’t know what success DAOHQ will see in the future. Lucas and Emmet are trying to raise another $3 million right now, but did not disclose their progress so far.

Outside on the second floor patio of the Smith Center, late on a Friday afternoon, we finish up a conversation with Emmet. The Owl Club blasts EDM in the background. Emmet tells us he’s heading to Toronto. He’ll be back in town soon for the HarvardYale football game.

He compares himself to some of his Harvard peers: people who ended up in consulting, entrepreneurs who stayed a little closer, a little longer.

“It just maybe takes them a while to get to the point where they want to escape the matrix,” he says. “I realized that much sooner.”

We ask if he thinks he’s escaped the matrix.

“I don’t know if I fully evaded the matrix,” he says. “I feel like we can’t fully, fully know.”

Leaving the Church, Keeping Its Ties

Until my eighth birthday, I thought every single person in the world was Mormon.

Justin Bieber had just released “Baby” and Bieber fever was sweeping the nation. I remember being dazzled by “Never Say Never” — a documentary about Bieber’s rise to fame that was showered with love from my elementary school and slander from IMDb. But as I left the theater, a burning question stayed in my mind. “Never Say Never” was supposed to be an all-encompassing window into Justin Bieber’s life, right? But not even once had it mentioned him going to church. How could that be? I asked my mom. When she told me he wasn’t Mormon, I was floored.

In my home state of Utah, Mormonism is more than just a religion — it’s a lifestyle. Wards — local Mormon congregations — are centers of community and social life. Growing up, I met almost all my friends through my ward. Many of my parents’ close friends were ward members as well, and all of my parents’ friends were Mormon. My ward would celebrate birthdays together, host group barbeques,

and take regular camping trips into the Utah wilderness. Church was just as social as it was religious.

While my initial revelation was fueled by Bieber, my eyes were fully opened to the world outside Mormonism two years later. When I was 10, I transferred out of my neighborhood school to attend a school for gifted students. While my old school was composed almost completely of children from my ward, my new school was much more diverse, and I was now one of only four Mormon kids in my class. We didn’t learn about the Church’s founding in history or say prayers before eating lunch.

As I glimpsed a world outside the Church, I began to question parts of life I had simply accepted. I had always opposed the Church’s stance on social issues but, until then, had never been presented with an alternative.

The Church has yet to fully grapple with its history of racist rhetoric. It continuously condemns gay marriage. Its enforced gender hierarchy and history of polygamy perpetuate misogyny. The rest of my family was able to compartmentalize, separating their faith from their

ADELAIDE E. PARKER

unease with the Church’s complicated practices and legacy. I could not.

The more I learned, the more restless I became. I questioned Church doctrine constantly, often to the point of contention. I struggled for years to reconcile the Church’s views with my own. I never could. Eventually, I decided to leave Mormonism altogether.

Fully leaving the Church has taken me years, and has completely transformed my relationship with my community. My family doesn’t understand my decision. Though they have become more supportive over time, they still look for every possible opportunity to convince me to rejoin. During the pandemic, I moved in with my grandparents in order to attend school in person. Each week, my grandfather would invite me to church with him. When I chose not to go, he’d spend hours writing speeches about doctrine to deliver to me himself.

Throughout high school, all I wanted was to get away from Utah, away from Mormonism. But being on the East Coast has yielded mixed results.

Living in a place with so many different types of people and belief systems has been incredibly refreshing. Yet even 2,000 miles away from home, it’s difficult to avoid being associated with Mormonism.

Because I’m from Utah, most people assume I’m part of the Church. I’ve been asked all sorts of questions: Am I barred from attending public school, like Tara Westover writes about in “Educated”? Does everyone in my family really get married by 20? When I met one of my best friends at Visitas, the first thing she told me was that she’d just watched a Netflix documentary on religious cults and was dying to know if I was neighbors with polygamists.

I still don’t know what to think when the Church comes up.

Sometimes, I feel it shouldn’t matter at all if others think I’m Mormon. After all, I’ve left the Church. The assumptions people make about me seem completely benign, and even when they do rub me the wrong way, I know my discomfort means little in comparison to the experiences of those who face more harmful forms of stereotyping. Still, being associated with Mormonism can be frustrating. I’ve worked for years to distance myself from the Church. It’s upsetting to think that no matter what I do, that perception of me may never fully go away — that Mormonism will keep pulling me back.

A few weeks ago, I flew out to Utah to attend my sisters’ baptism. I stared out the window on the plane ride there and wondered why I was going at all. I pictured myself at the baptism. A speaker would say something about the wonders of joining the Church. My family would give me a pointed stare, and I’d pretend not to notice. Afterward, they’d encircle me and ask all their tired, well-meaning questions. Did I know Harvard had a fantastic student ward? They’d heard the Church was way different on the East Coast — much less conservative. I felt out of place in Utah, sure, but I wouldn’t feel that way there. They’d mailed me a Book of Mormon a few weeks ago. Had I had the chance to read it?

I have no idea why I chose to go back to Utah. When my parents called me a few weeks earlier and asked if I wanted a ticket, I said yes on autopilot. Later, I felt dishonest. I was embarrassed to be flying home for a religion I was supposed to have completely disavowed. I told my friends I was going home for a family reunion.

At the baptism, my grandfather gave a speech about how proud he was that my family had chosen to become official members of the Church, and

sure enough, he started to look over at me. His eyes met mine. He broke down crying.

After the baptism, my grandfather came up to me. He told me he hadn’t been sure whether I would fly out at all. Now that I’d left the Church and was living thousands of miles away, would I even have time for my family? He told me that no matter whether I was a member of the Church, deep down, all he cared about was that I was there and that I knew my family cared about me.

It had been so easy to write this baptism off. To dread the pointed remarks my family would make and forget about everything else. But I knew they were only asking because they cared about me. I looked at all the people surrounding me — I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen this much of my family in one place. Later that day, they swarmed me just like I expected. Some of them asked targeted questions. Some didn’t comment on things at all. But every single one of them, without fail, told me how happy they were to see me there.

I wish I could hate Mormonism without reservation. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to. Although Mormonism is responsible for policies and doctrine I despise, it’s also the genesis of communities I care about. Its focus on the importance of family and emphasis on serving others are values I will always cherish. It deeply matters to so many of the people I love. Looking ahead, I’m trying to remember that the Church is more than its worst parts.

Identity is not something I can chop up and compartmentalize as I see fit. Although I am no longer a part of the Church, having grown up Mormon will always shape who I am, and as difficult as it is, I’m coming to terms with that.

UP CLOSE WITH REMY THE CAT

by Sophia S. Liang

PHOTOS BY BEN Y. CAMMARATA

Remy the Cat is one of Harvard’s biggest purr-sonalities. This eightyear-old orange tabby roams in search of sunny windowsills, plush armchairs, and fawning admirers all over campus, particularly near the (rather inaptly named) Barker Center. We asked his owner, Sarah Watton, to reflect on Remy’s hero origin story and his adventures over the years. Remy himself did not respond to a request for comment, so you’ll have to settle for these paparazzi photos instead.

Asa kitten, Remy was found behind a dumpster in Medfield with his mom and five littermates. Sarah Watton thought a pet could help her two young sons overcome their fear of animals, and she had a particular fondness for orange tabbies. She adopted Remy and his brother Gus from the shelter in September 2014. Today, Remy and Gus live with their (human) family on Sacramento St., less than a mile from campus.

WhenWatton first brought the kittens home, she tried to confine them to one bedroom while they acclimated to their new surroundings. Remy, however, managed to escape from the baby gate. He soon began dashing out from doors left ajar, leaving his owners to chase him down snowpiled streets in the middle of winter. His family even tried to walk him on a leash around the yard, but after six months, they gave up and acknowledged that Remy was meant to be an outdoor cat. “He just had that wandering free spirit which was extremely apparent from the beginning,” Watton says. “From the get-go, he was a cat you couldn’t contain.”

WhenRemy began venturing into Harvard Yard, Watton and her family were inundated with calls from passersby worried that he was lost.

“We could get 50 calls in a day — morning, noon, night, 2 a.m.,” Watton says. The calls have subsided now that Remy has become a recognizable figure on campus, and Watton has recorded a voicemail message for people calling about him. But “even now, we can’t clear all the messages on our home phone,” she says.

Remy frequently leaves home for days or weeks at a time. “When he is home, he basically comes in, eats a giant bowl of food, goes into one of [my sons’] beds or a couch, sleeps for like 18 hours, and then might hang around for a bit,” Watton says. “But after about three days is his maximum before he’s sitting at the door, waiting to go.” Watton’s sons are delighted to own a famous Harvard cat, but they get to spend more time with his “more conventional” brother Gus, who returns home with greater frequency. (Although, Watton adds, Gus often roams around the Divinity School and has “a small but growing fanbase” of his own.)

Watton describes “a couple of epic cat-napping incidents” that Remy has endured. One time, a man picked Remy up from Oxford St. and drove him away to Roxbury, intending to give him to his girlfriend before they realized they couldn’t keep him inside. When Watton’s husband went to pick Remy back up, he found the cat equipment already set up in their apartment.

In the summer of 2018, Watton grew concerned when she hadn’t seen or heard from Remy in over a month. She posted fliers all over campus and even consulted a “cat whisperer” who tried to track him down. Eventually, she found that a business located about a 10-minute walk from their home had taken Remy in as their office pet. In order to prove she was his real owner, she needed to drive one of the employees to the vet’s office and get Remy’s microchip scanned. “He didn’t actually want to give Remy back,” Watton says. “It’s just an indication of how Remy is able to ingratiate himself.”

Remy, too, spent more time at home during the pandemic. When the University drastically scaled down its on-campus operations, Watton says, “he was wandering around Harvard and couldn’t get into any buildings. He really suffered his own mental anxieties, because in an instant his community disappeared, and it took him a while to find his ground.”

The “Remy the Humanities Cat” Facebook page is managed by Jessica Shires, the History and Literature department administrator. Watton does not know who runs Remy’s Instagram account, though she often checks it to keep track of his whereabouts. She is surprised to hear he has a Twitter and LinkedIn as well. She is even more surprised to hear about the rumors of Remy’s death that swirled around Sidechat last semester: “That’s crazy!” “If he was ever taken ill, I would definitely get the message out to his community,” she reassures.

“I’ve seen inside of many Harvard buildings and met many, many people over the years through his wanderings,” Watton says. She’s talked to students, faculty, administrators, and staff who’ve all encountered and adored Remy. He’s visited dorm rooms, sneaked into basements, and attended multiple thesis defenses. People have returned him back to Watton in their backpacks and the basket of their bicycles. He was once featured in a wedding photo taken on campus — “he’s sitting in focus in front, and the bride and the groom are in the distance, sort of blurred out.”

Watton says she’s amazed by the number of people who meet Remy and instantly connect with him. “He’s our cat, but he’s every bit a cat that belongs to the Harvard community as well,” she says. “And I think we’re down with that. It just took us a while to come around. But there was no way — you know, this was really Remy’s will, not ours.”

The Radical Feminist Magazine You've Never Heard of

On a Thursday night in 1990, a group of women crammed into Adams House’s Coolidge Room. Above the din, they argued over the project materializing before them. In the coming months, their “emotional, historic, turbulent” discussions, the women would later write, would coalesce into “an atomic bomb of self-expression.”

A few months later, the bomb, in the form of a thin magazine, fell on Harvard. It was called “The Rag.” Around campus, students could flip through the first issue to find an essay considering feminist perspectives on lesbian pornography, a poem about performing fellatio on Uncle Sam, or an argument for a more equitable housing policy. Some readers were outraged, and others were inspired.

For the next two years, The Rag continued to publish essays, photography, fiction, and poetry. At weekly meetings, the collective of women pushed their artistic and intellectual boundaries. Members, who referred to themselves as “on The Rag,” formed a tight-knit community.

By 1994, however, those women had all graduated, and the magazine disappeared. Preserved only in a few articles from The Crimson and three issues in the Schlesinger

Library, The Rag otherwise slipped through Harvard’s porous memory.

Yet during the three years of its existence, The Rag played a powerful role in campus culture. The collective created a space for women to play with radical ideas and reckon with pressing issues, while the magazine added a distinct voice to the college’s fraught discourse. Despite its short life, The Rag expanded what feminism could be at Harvard. ***

The early ’90s was a “period of fierce political debate” on Harvard’s campus, as one article in The Crimson puts it. As students battled over problems large and small, new publications sprang up one after another.

“It was very easy to get funding for a new publication,” remembers Rebecca Hellerstein ’92, a founding member of The Rag. “You had this real sense of possibility.”

In early 1990, Sean P. McLaughlin ’91 left his position as a writer at the Salient because he believed it failed to properly represent conservative voices at Harvard; he then founded a far-right periodical he called “Peninsula.” The new journal’s controversial stances — anti-gay rights,

HEWSON DUFFY

anti-abortion, and anti-birth control — sparked campus-wide debates and outrage among liberal students.

Later that year, when Peninsula published a 56-page attack on homosexuality, the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Students Association responded by organizing protests and rallies and creating their own publication: HQ. Other students founded the Lighthouse, a women’s magazine, and revived the leftist journal Subterranean Review. Less seriously, a group of Adams House students distributed a satirical journal called the Little Friend which aimed to print ideas so ridiculous that everyone would disagree with them.

Within this tumultuous storm, The Rag was a bolt of lightning.

Although the Lighthouse was a journal meant for women, it was not explicitly feminist. Some of its members wanted to pursue a more radical vision.

“There was a really strongly felt need for a feminist magazine,” remembers Heather Love ’91, a contributor to The Rag.

“There wasn’t a venue for the expression of the kinds of ideas many of us were having,” says Tiya A. Miles ’92, a current professor in the History Department and another contributor. Instead, a different kind of venue dominated Harvard’s landscape. “The combination of elitism and sexism that made up the final clubs … took up prime real estate on campus,” Love says.

In October 1990, Sheila C. Allen ’93 and five others split off from the Lighthouse to form The Rag. ***

The Rag didn’t just espouse radical ideas — it actively embodied them. In an effort to reject tradition and hierarchy in all forms, The Rag eschewed a typical top-down leadership structure and instead was

organized as a collective. All decisions were to be made by consensus. “We have no editors or editing process,” a statement in the first issue reads. Rather, as Hellerstein put it at the time, the magazine would “evolve” out of a series of open workshops.

At the first meetings, “there wasn’t really someone in control,” Love remembers. “What the magazine should be... was very much up for debate.”

“We were really wrestling with new ideas… and our diverse socioeconomic standing in relation to these issues,” Miles says. The meetings “were not without tension.”

For some of those ideas, “academic context helped to plant the seeds,” as Miles puts it. The work of prominent Black feminist bell hooks, whom she first encountered in a literature course, became “a pivotal thinker for me and many in The Rag.”

But The Rag was no dull academic pursuit: “It was a huge amount of fun,” Hellerstein says. Instead of strictly adhering to any particular set of ideas, the collective felt “much more fluid, much more creative.”

“We were just brimming with ideas, emotions, energy,” Miles says. “It was the most exhilarating thing.”

The Rag also facilitated “the beginning of something like queer activism,” Love says. Indeed, Allen had previously co-chaired the BGLSA, and once described herself as “the paradigm of the Harvard lesbian.” Meetings could spark more than just feminist solidarity: as they workshopped a poem that described the curve of a lover’s neck, members might catch eyes or brush arms.

***

For all its theorizing, the goals of The Rag remained deeply rooted in the needs of women at Harvard. The discrimination and violence the members discussed shaped their lives

at college. “I always felt that Harvard wanted me to be a boy,” Hellerstein says. “It was easier to be in classes... if I erased any gender. Any femaleness.”

That fall, students protested after administrators made comments regarding date rape that many perceived as victim blaming, especially at a time when the prevalence of sexual violence on campus could not be understated. “I had at least twenty friends with whom I talked about sexual trauma,” Rag contributor Rebecca Goldin ’93 says. “And I had exactly one friend who had not been technically raped.”

Meetings of the collective became a space where women could be honest about emotional and sexual trauma. Many members shared stories from their own lives. Sometimes “it was like a group therapy session, but there was no therapist,” Goldin recalls. “I just remember the weight of how hard it was to even have a conversation about it and how intense it was.” At each meeting, one person took on the role of “vibes watcher,” monitoring the tension of the group and intervening if necessary.

These discussions became essential to the women who participated. “What it did was validate the commonness of [sexual trauma]... People felt like ‘I can remove the sense of shame, or sadness, or confusion, and I can lay that at the feet of something that’s not my fault,’” Goldin says. “That was very powerful, not something people were taught anywhere else.”

“I remember developing a sense of feminist identity through those conversations, and of a Black feminist identity,” Miles says. During meetings, she wrote in a 1995 essay about The Rag, “I was first able to voice and begin to transform … my long-held belief that as a black woman, my hair and features were ugly.”

Through The Rag, the women felt

“liberated” from the constraints they felt Harvard placed on them. “In the absence of a Women’s Center,” they wrote in the first issue, “we have created a space for ourselves in which we are comfortable speaking out.”

***

Eventually, the conversations became consensus, and in February 1991, The Rag published its first issue. The women distributed the magazine to dorms across campus with a sense of triumph. “That was just the most tremendous moment,” Miles remembers. “The feeling was [that] we are going to tell all these people exactly what it is we’ve been thinking… No matter how much any of us was exposing herself, she would not be doing it alone. That was such a powerful feeling.”

Styled “a feminist journal of politics and culture,” the pages of the first issue included photography, poetry, fiction, and essays. The writing covered final clubs, eating disorders, racism in beauty standards, lesbian sexual politics, and more.

Of course, The Rag was more than just polemics. One article was simply a recipe for banana bread, except for the final line: “will there still be banana bread after the revolution?”

Indeed, The Rag did have a revolutionary impact at Harvard. In an event organized by the collective the weekend after the issue’s publication, over 50 students met to discuss the magazine, expressing “anger, relief, confusion, and frustration.”.

The Rag’s explicit accounts of sexual harassment and violence were met with especially strong responses — and, for many, a sense of recognition. Members of the collective had worried about the backlash when they chose to publish a personal story of date rape. Instead, the article inspired a flood of proposals from victims of abuse for similar pieces in

the next issue.

***

The Rag remained a polarizing force on Harvard’s campus for the next two years. Contemporary editorials praised its contribution to a flourishing campus discourse, while more lighthearted articles poked fun at it. One particularly salacious photo published in a 1993 issue inspired a host of satirical responses.

But within the collective, divisions grew. According to Miles’s essay, a “small group” of women handled the business and logistics of the magazine, and some resented that concentration of power given the group’s commitment to collective control. Disagreements related to the magazine’s socio-economic representation further strained the organization. One woman felt she was worth less to the group because, unlike some of the women, her parents could not donate to fund the publication.

To Miles, these tensions spelled the end of the collective. “We never recovered,” she wrote. The year after her graduation, she says, “the group dissolved.”

Other Rag alumni emphasize different reasons for the group’s demise.

Hellerstein points to a problem with funding. At that time, it was much easier to start an organization at Harvard than to sustain one. “You had a ton of funding for the first year and the second year, and then it died down,” Hellerstein recalls.

More importantly, The Rag wasn’t actively recruiting new writers. At the end of the 1993 school year, all remaining members of the collective, including Allen and Rebecca Goldin, graduated. The next semester, an op-ed lamented how students had let “the infamous Rag lapse into oblivion.”

However, the founders didn’t

grieve the magazine’s end. “We didn’t have a next generation of women [in the collective],” Hellerstein says. “It felt like it was a natural end.”

***

Although many outsiders saw the group as “extreme” for what it published, the women of The Rag mostly remember it for the community. To Goldin, the collective was “a bunch of young women feeling like they could finally talk about what had happened to them.”

“It was a kind of home for a lot of folks,” Hellerstein says.

“When I think back over my life and consider which experiences have been the most important to me, The Rag is the first thing that comes to mind,” Miles says.

Even today, such an organization could be seen as radical. Its antihierarchical structure required difficult discussions and consensus for every decision. In its pages, The Rag unabashedly interrogated taboos, explored pressing issues, and defended unpopular views. As Harvard students continue to confront many of the same problems they did 30 years ago, The Rag illustrates the possibilities for feminism on campus.

“There’s always a pressing need for a feminist movement,” says Love. “The Rag would be completely salient for me if it started right now.”

At the first meeting, when someone suggested The Rag as a title, Miles was initially aghast: “That’s direct, and bold, and maybe a little bit rude,” she recalls thinking.

But her opinion shifted after the discussion. “That’s what people thought we should go with, and I grabbed onto the coattails of their bravery in that moment,” she says. “That speaks to my experience on The Rag: being able to gather courage from the voices and words of other women.”

The May 1991 cover of The Rag, a short-lived radical feminist magazine run by a collective of Harvard undergraduates.

'1-2-3, A.D. Tree, That's How Easy Love Can Be'

It all began with a punch. One windy autumn night, a mysterious card with a stamped bull insignia was slipped under my door. I read the note. Wednesday, 7 p.m., 1 Plympton St. Cocktail attire.

I showed up at the A.D. on time. I knocked, and a man who looked like the type to peel the crust off a peanut butter and jelly sandwich opened the door and asked me for my last name. He seemed impressed when I answered: WASPington.

“I knew your brother,” he said.

“Which one?” I replied.

The hour passed by in a haze of Harvard introductions and clinking beer bottles. I met four guys named Sailor and befriended a taxidermied deer head. When the conversation died down, the president brought us out to the courtyard.

That’s when I saw you.

I’d seen all the tweets, but nothing compared to the real thing: There you were, leaning against the brick wall, a sly devil; tall, dark, and handsome. We locked eyes and it was like drinking from a cold spring. I looked away and it was like dying of thirst.

Two weeks later, I’d made it to round two. This one was less formal — a low-key, boozy kickback in the courtyard. I wore my finest salmon-colored quarter-zip. When I entered, chairs were arranged in a circle around a fire pit. Beers were distributed; eager punches sucked up.

That night we had our first conversation. I took the chair closest to you; at one point I leaned back against your trunk. You blushed in response; your leaves were turning red as the weather got colder. You dropped a leaf down to

me and I held it like a hand. We agreed that what we had was real — no situationship, no post-party hookup. We agreed not to see other people.

During the two weeks between rounds, I couldn’t wait to be on the other side of that brick wall. One day I thought about scaling it, but the barbed wire on top deterred me since I was wearing Burberry slacks and I was running late to de Blasio’s speech at the IOP.

It’s hard to tell your friends that you’re in love with the tree in the A.D. courtyard. The follow-up questions are where it gets most awkward — people want to know who pays for dinner, how we “do it,” who’s on top. I tell them that’s our business, but they have a point. Every night we spend together, I feel like we’re creating something entirely new.

As Héloïse of Celine Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” once wisely wondered, “Do all lovers feel they’re inventing something?”

Bad news, though. Last night, no third-round invitation came. I think I’ve been cut. I should be more worried — my dad said that if this happened he’d do to me what he did to my childhood dog Sparky (donate me to the Cornell Agricultural School). But I don’t care. All I can think about is you.

I have an idea.

Next Wednesday night. 10 p.m. 1 Plympton St. No attire. Just you. Me. The forklift that I am licensed to drive because Dad doesn’t trust non-WASPingtons to move his Egyptian sculptures between tax-free airport holding zones. I’m busting you out of there.

Tell me you’re in. I’m out on a limb here, baby.

CHASE D. MELTON

I’ve always had a thing for redheads. Design by Meimei Xu.

Lower Education

LoWER EDUCATION

ACROSS

1 Make waves?

5 Antifascist acronym (or something to hail ...)

9 Horrifying eldritch monstrosity (or something to hail ...)

12 "Planet Her" artist

16 Pulp genre?

17 T, e.g.

18 Kind of economy whereby companies like Uber and DoorDash "misclassify their workers as independent contractors, exempt them from basic rights or social welfare programs, and then pay them less than minimum wage," per Edward Ongweso, Jr.

19 N95s, for one

21 Mormonism initialism

22 Thai currency

24 Unit of wisdom

26 Some beers

27 California sch. close to the Mexican border

28 Discombobulated

29 "Oh my God, Becky, look at her butte. It is so big." (someone telling their friend Becky about the _____ that I own in this hypothetical situation)

30 Cleveland basketball team, for short

32 Mil. branch concerned with water stuff (no, not that one. Not the other one either)

34 "... or so"

36 Non-prescription, for short

38 Annoy

39 Genre for Steve Aoki, who is the heir to the Benihana fortune

42 City where bossa nova developed

43 Platter that might hold cups and a pot

45 24 horas

46 Have _____ for (be good at detecting)

48 Kind of rice noodle soup

49 Throat condition

51 Tennis champion Monica

52 Bled, fled, or led

53 Honks (but like in a cutesy way)

54 Like cis men, for short

55 Mathematical concept that can be countable or uncountable, for short. John Green tries to explain this in "The Fault In Our Stars" but gets the math wrong. Stick to your lane Book Boy

56 Moves (if you are a pogoist or kangaroo)

57 Thing I should do instead of write clues for this crossword

58 Hit the slopes

59 Downloadable fanfic, maybe

61 Fabulous writer? (not in a gay way this is a wordplay clue)

62 Letters on a battleship

63 Summa cum _____ 64 Earlier 65 "Sike"

66 Suitcase attachment DOWN

1 Verb with 268 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary

2 One half of rap duo Run the Jewels

3 Letter after pi

4 "Am I a man or am I a _____?" (Jason Segel, in his magnum opus)

5 Stick (to)

6 Speak lovingly ... or dove-ingly

7 Trio with the songs "Bang!" and "Weak"

8 "Kapow!"

9 Legendary NYC punk rock club that hosted Patti Smith and Blondie

10 Basic chord in Western music

11 *Star vehicle for Zac Efron [Go Bears!]

13 Many a tech entrepreneur ... or a hint to the starred clues

14 Mountain range home to vicuñas and some cock-of-the-rocks (cocks-of-the-rock? Anyway they're a kind of bird)

15 Actress Thompson of "Sorry To Bother You"

20 Faux _____

23 Your, in Italy

24 Thing kids should not have been eating in elementary school (I did not do this but I did eat paper once or twice)

25 Singer-songwriter Mvula

26 Theater chain that was a secondary target of the r/wallstreetbets guys during the Gamestop short squeeze. Does anyone else remember this? I never figured out how stocks work but I think Elon Musk tweeted "Gamestonks" and then they lost all the money they had made. Things are so bad out here

31 *Delegates one's ballot to a representative [Go Tigers!]

33 *"Dream bigger" [Go Engineers!]

34 Some savings plans

35 One who consumes a ritual meal to absolve a dead soul

37 Juice brand with a Pacific Cooler flavor

38 Symbol of ruthless control

40 Coke Zero or Pepsi Max

41 Hit Yeah Yeah Yeahs song that was later interpolated into Beyonce's "Hold Up"

44 *Early 2010s meme phrase said in response to inconveniences [Roll Tide!]

47 Personal watercraft brand

50 "That's rough"

57 Drain

60 Thing that can be drained

ScAN FOR SOLUTIONS