Harvard Discriminates Against Everyone
Making sense of discrimination in the college admissions process
Articles By: Max Novendstern 
Max Novendstern is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Political Review.
Google’s Creepy New Search Isn’t Anti-Competitive
With "Search Plus Your World", Google finally tips the hand it's been holding since the summer.
The Art of Life
When I first opened The Art of Fielding, an American novel that happens to be about baseball (and that happens to have been written by a Harvard alum, Chad Harbach), it was 2 A.M. in the middle of a school week, during what Shakespeare might have called a “long, dark night of the soul,” if Shakespeare had cared about the ... Read More
Occupy and the New Economy
Nietzsche once said that all “great philosophy” takes the form of “involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” Philosophers try to give us Truth, he said, but in the process, they betray their vantage points, their specifics fears, their peculiar hopes. “To understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at,” Nietzsche continues, “first ask oneself: ‘What morality do ... Read More
Queen Bachmann
Obama has revealed to us our great subconscious desire: we want our president to be King.
Google Sells Out
The meaning of Google+ When I first encountered Google+, I was delighted. And then, shortly after that, I was bored. Like so many American cultural events – like the premiere of The Hills or the release of George W. Bush’s memoir – Google+ manages to evoke delight and boredom simultaneously, to give one the feeling of beholding something beautiful and ... Read More
The Rise of the Arab Authoritarianism
Anyone who’s inclined to blame Islam for Arab authoritarianism ought to read these two passages. The first is from Bernard Lewis in “Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East”: Some critics may point out that regardless of theory [that Islam has a strong tradition of governance by consent and rule by elected leaders], in reality a pattern of arbitrary, tyrannical, ... Read More
Groupon Wants to Change the World
Cynics will look at the Groupon IPO and see a seminal event in the history of the second tech bubble: the day the bubble floated to Main Street. Here’s how the story goes: Groupon’s business model isn’t defensible, because anyone can set up an email list with coupons; its business practices aren’t profitable, indeed they’re losing the company so much money ... Read More
Harvard Blogging Heads: Anthony Weiner & Human Nature
An impromptu conversation between HPR Editor-in-Chief Max Novendstern and Campus Blog Editor Caroline Cox:
In Defense of Harvard Senior Gifts, Cont’d
Matt Yglesias’s critique of Harvard’s “Senior Gift” provoked an interesting debate across the Ivy-league-osphere. I responded here; Emma Saunders-Hastings, a PhD student in the philosophy department, out-classed us both at The Utopian; then Yglesias responds; and now, once more, I offer my thoughts. Here’s a copy of my response, cross-posted from The Utopian: Matt Yglesias and I agree that giving $10 to ... Read More
Matt Yglesias Doesn’t Know Why We Give Gifts
Matt Yglesias recently took to his blog to decry one of the great evils of our time: Harvard students who donate $10 to support their school. To make his case, he sets up a straw man — namely, the idea that we give Senior Gifts primarily to “promote social justice”: [L]ook, if you’re considering giving $10 to Harvard or lighting a ... Read More
Is Facebook Revolutionary?
The best thing ever written about Facebook was probably a single line in Lawrence Lessig’s review of The Social Network: “What’s important here,” Lessig says, in his characteristically vehement way, “is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone.” To ... Read More
The Edwards Middle School Writes About Politics
For the past ten weeks, writers from the Harvard Political Review have been meeting with 6th graders from the Clarence R Edwards Middle School in Charlestown, MA to talk about politics and the fundamentals of journalism. Together, we’ve taken on some of the biggest issues facing our country — from health care reform, to education policy, to high-stakes international politics. We’ve ... Read More
