Editor's Note

Dear Reader, This week we were blessed with what might be the last few days of warmth for several months. With the sun shining down on trees whose leaves are just beginning to turn yellow, orange, and red at the edges, campus has never looked more beautiful. Appreciating campus’s beauty is also easier when you get to scrut edit from a room with a river view on the 9th floor of Leverett Towers. Working away at that scrut was SEW and RHDN, who wrote this week’s scrut about the calls for a Southeast Asian Studies department at Harvard. This year, Harvard is offering Filipino (Tagalog) and Indonesian for the first time. Proponents of Southeast Asian studies celebrate these offerings but explain that, ultimately, more classes and professorships are needed. At the moment, there is only one class at Harvard that centers Southeast Asian studies, and no professors whose primary interests lie in Southeast Asia. For Southeast Asians at Harvard, this historical neglect of Southeast Asia raises the question of who has a place at institutions like Harvard. VX goes to “Exchanging Notes,” an event showcasing the culmination of months of collaboration between Georgian and American artists. MGB interviews Vijay Iyer about the neuroscience of music and how time is really a measure of motion. SWF writes about Mount Harvard, Harvard’s past astronomy observatory in Peru, and about how its work relied on the labor of indigenous workers in Peru and underpaid female astronomers in Cambridge. SZB writes a beautiful reflection on Susan Sontag’s relationship to Harvard and how she saw her writing career as incompatible with academia. In another beautiful endpaper, KSG writes about finding home when there’s no physical place to anchor yourself to. Tbh it was fantastic to have the compers join us for their first writer’s meeting this week, thanks for coming! Thank you SS, SET, SCS, MHS, MQ, JH and JJG for your visual talents and for accommodating some last minute requests. Thank you to BLK and MX for proofing (and for giving yourselves a much needed break at news retreat). And thank you to SWF, HD, and GRW for proofing the last three scruts — y’all were truly fantastic scrut fairies. Thank you to FM execs for all the work you do for this magazine, and, this week, for becoming team “So Many Issues” at Queen’s Head Pub Trivia Night. Though we typically like to do things in 15s, this time 14.5 points was enough to score us some pretty snazzy caps. And, as always, thank you AHL for insightful scrut comments, proofing marathons, and teaching me about the history of Washington Square Park (and how to say Allen Ginsberg in Chinese). FM Love, IYG and AHL