To complete a marathon, you have to run 26 miles and then some. The number of steps taken depends on your stride and your stride depends on factors such as height and pace, but it averages out to be in the tens of thousands. No step is without consequence.
We all know what it looks like to run, but what might it mean? You can run in a race but you can also run in an election. Last evening, eight Republicans convened in the city of Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum to debate one another. They made strides — or backsteps, depending on how you see it — in a presidential race each wants to finish only when she or he has reached the Oval Office. They ran with their words, their rhetoric, their campaign trail promises, and their ideas about what this country stands for and who it ought to serve.
This issue of our quarterly magazine asks what it means to traverse great distances of progress and how to keep the faith when that progress is unmade. If you listen closely to the arguments and subtext of each article in “It’s Only a Matter of Time,” you can hear different thinkers voicing the same question: “Haven’t we been here before?” As the original pitch reads, “In our day and age, it can be easy to feel like time is circular, that progress will always be met with regress, and that nothing really changes.” Our frustration stems not from a lack of distance, but from a directional confusion. We want to move forward, to advance our cause, but too often that cause is pushed back to where it began by those whose definition of progress is antithetical to our own.
“So what does it mean to live in a world where the past is always present, and where the same battles keep being fought over and over again with so little progress?” the pitch asks. How, in other words, can we derive meaning from our lives when our life’s work is perennially vulnerable to what others understand to be a step forward?
To ask this question, you first have to make an admission of doubt. You would not inquire if you were absolutely sure of what you did and why, and whether the sum total of your efforts can withstand the test of time. It is how the contributors of this magazine engage with doubt and salvage meaning from what seems redundant and futile about our politics that makes this cycle a feat of journalistic athleticism. Our writers lean on the surety of facts, of who did what at which hour of the day, but they also scale the more conceptual terrain of meaning-making. With each word and thought, the pieces that constitute this issue renew our resolve and prove that what is often written off as purposeless by cynics and pundits is in fact the precise opposite.
In “The Politics of Prayer: John Luther Adams and Reimagining Climate Change Through Art,” Lea Wang ’26 profiles an activist-turned-composer whose latest work, “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” uses sound to speak of nature. Adams through his music and Wang through her words remind us that beyond “man-made political quandary” lies a wild and organic world whose magnitude confounds our rhetoric of right and wrong and us and them. Layla Chaaraoui ’26 levels her gaze to the “eco-anxiety” of her peers and calls upon elected officials to fulfill their roles as indispensable parts of a united, multi-generational effort in “Young People are Worried About Climate Change, and Rightfully So.” Chaaraoui urges her readers that “If you will not do it for yourself, do it for your children, grandchildren, and all those after them who depend on action to happen now.” In “The Future of Protein,” Nicolette Reale ’26 and Harvard’s Dr. Sparsha Saha have a candid conversation about meat politics and the “interconnectedness of animal agriculture, food accessibility, and climate change.” Reale’s carefully-constructed questions offer general readers an entry point into a niche whose value only grows as we continue to deplete traditional sources of sustenance.
Associate Covers Editor Nurayn Khan ’26’s “The Influencer Revolution: Increased Accessibility & Super Fast Fashion” weighs the promising and problematic legacies of social media icons and the brands that sponsor them. Khan’s argument is two-fold: If influencer fashion celebrates aesthetic novelty and sustainable self-expression, it has also “normalized a mindset of overconsumption.” In “The Social Contract Between Human Rights and International Sports Tournaments,” Evan Hsiang ’26 envisions what “humane” and “responsible” host country practices ought to look like, and how “temporary publicity” can shed critical light on “hidden violations.” Hsiang’s feature places a troubled history of administrative missteps in conversation with contemporary injustices witnessed at tournaments such as the 2016 Rio Olympics and the 2022 Qatar World Cup.
Staff Director Naomi Corlette ’25 draws upon deeply personal reflections in “The Power of a Name,” weaving together insights about her mixed ancestry and Harvard’s practice of naming buildings after affiliates with “devastatingly harmful legacies.” Corlette argues that names are arguments unto themselves, decisions that spell out what and who we value: “As someone who knows very little about their own name, I can attest that history matters, legacies matter, and names matter.” With a keen awareness of the tired Democratic-Republican binary, Bobby Cupps ’26 zeroes in on what differentiates Joe Manchin from his colleagues, and whether “his uniqueness is purely due to circumstance” or he is “innately different from the rest.” Cupps uses Manchin as a launching point to interrogate what senators ought to do with their terms, how personas and parties may disrupt those obligations, and how those disruptions may alter who Americans vote into the presidency.
Aidan Scully ’25, one of the four staff writers who wrote and pitched “It’s Only a Matter of Time,” rounds us out with this magazine’s endpaper. “Future Perfect” expands our understanding of the apocalypse from the singular to the plural, from the yet-to-happen to the presently-happening. In doing so, he disquiets our very conception of time: “The After looks like the Before.” It would be remiss not to mention that Scully is a former Senior Local Editor. In fact, the three students who proposed the theme alongside him — Jay Hong Chew ’25, Ethan Jasny ’25, and Imaan Mirza ’25 — are former Senior World, Associate U.S., and Senior Culture Editors, respectively. Thank you to each of them for demonstrating how an enduring commitment to our publication need not look the same each year, that the way we engage with an institution, a place, a cause, a person, can and should evolve, and that sometimes, it is a rather happy occasion when things come full circle.
Heartfelt thanks to Senior Covers Editor Liana McGhee ’25 and Associate Covers Editor Nurayn Khan ’26 for being a coach and a companion to each writer as they traversed the distance from idea to outline to draft to complete work. Huge thanks also to Publisher Allaura Osborne ’25 and Senior Business Manager Mac Martens ’26 for their consistent efforts to publish and spread the word about our pieces. Last but not least, much gratitude goes to Managing Editor Fawwaz Shoukfeh ’24 for his attention to the big and little things that enable our publication to run as it does.
