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.
Articles By: Max Novendstern 
Max Novendstern is the Editor in Chief of the Harvard Political Review. Originally from Westchester, NY, Max writes primarily about the American left, U.S. civic culture, and the meaning of social entrepreneurship. Both critically removed and “hyper engaged,” Max’s default mode is diatribe and his poet of choice is Walt Whitman. Before entering Harvard, he spent a year organizing a cooperative of artisans in the highlands of Peru and has since gone on to found an American community engagement and technology company called CommonPlace. Max concentrates in Social Studies and lives, proudly, in Currier House. He aspires to spend his life building “civic institutions” and making lots of mistakes.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 surprised and delighted, and then, shortly after that, I was bored. Like many American cultural events – like the premiere of The Hills or the release of George W. Bush’s memoir – the launch of Google+ managed to evoke surprise and boredom, at once. It’s technically very fine, and [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Why do we read the news?
James Fallows’ awesomely-titled article on the future of journalism – “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media” – is well worth reading in full, like almost everything he writes. It’s one of those articles that validates its central thesis by virtue of its existence: Fallows is a perfect example of what the future of journalism might look like. To [...]
