The Editorial

The young mom sitting next to me, while sleep-deprived, seemed entirely put together and to the point. She had me at "derailed careers" and explained why she had created Neighborhood Villages to help young mothers and parents of young children thrive in today's modern economy. Unbeknownst to me until we exchanged cards, I was speaking with Lauren Kennedy, a graduate of Harvard Law and married to U.S. representative from Massachusetts 4th Congressional District and current candidate for Senate Joe Kennedy. Lauren whats to formalize childcare for children ages 0-5 so both parents can thrive in parenting and careers.

GenX entrepreneur and social impact leader Diana Yousef, Founder and CEO of change:Water Labs, is bringing waterless toilets to refugee camps. One of the drivers for this Harvard graduate is that young women are often assaulted in the dark when they need to use the facilities at refugee camps around the globe.

I sat down with Yousef to hear more about the waterless toilet she is prototyping this summer, and what she sees as opportunity and barrier in the social entrepreneurship space at this moment in time.

As Americans loudly hammer out partisan views on the world stage these days, colleges and universities have been drawn into the fray as campuses, with speakers and their mobile-enabled audiences, become venues for audio and video that has a propensity to go viral. What was once considered healthy student debate can easily become a political inferno with a viral international following. Factions have formed, aligning people into either diversity or free speech advocates.

This bifurcation is something John Palfrey sees as mistaken. In his new book, Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces published by MIT Press, Palfrey says diversity and free speech share much more than not and argues both are imperative for a modern education and the promise of educating our youth in the American ideal. The former Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School offers clear examples of where the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of both diversity and free expression and he breaks down the trajectory of the past few decades that led to the fanning of these flames by provocateurs and by the emergence of a highly-interconnected world of viral platforms like Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook.

Hillary Chute is the Author of Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere and a Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. Her new book focuses on the maturing field of Comics, as she likes to call it, with the popularity of the graphic novel form. In this interview she breaks down the chapters of her book into Why Punk? Why Sex? Why Suburbs, and weighs in on the political power of comics, their cultural place in American history and the power of the drawn line. Heidi Legg dives in with Comics expert, author and Professor Hillary Chute in this compelling interview around a maturing field long nascent in America covering everything from superheroes, comics classics, graphic novels, sexual harassment, free speech, the emerging comics in the form of editorial and journalism and more.

Heidi sits down with Dr. Jennifer Childs-Roshak, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, to debunk some of the myths that are being propagated in this country while all other developed nations and allies such as the UK, Canada, Sweden, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Finland, and (even Russia!) fund abortions using taxpayer dollars and see women's right to choose as a private matter between a woman and her doctor.

Michelle Kuo taught English at an alternative school in the Arkansas Delta for two years. After teaching, she attended Harvard Law School as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and worked legal aid at a nonprofit for Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California, on a Skadden Fellowship, with a focus on tenants' and workers' rights. She has volunteered as a teacher at the Prison University Project and clerked for a federal appeals court judge in the Ninth Circuit. Currently she teaches courses on race, law, and society at the American University in Paris.

For the past seven years, independent documentary filmmaker Elizabeth O'Brien Gardner has been filming a young evangelical church planter, David, and his wife, Betsy, in Boston – a city Gardner says the evangelical movement calls 'The Preacher's Graveyard.' Her 72-minute documentary, The Frozen Chosen, follows the journey of David and Betsy as they build a congregation of fellow millennials looking for salvation. We meet a young ballet dancer who struggles with his homosexuality and looks to the church for guidance, another young man who is a seeker of sorts, baptized by David and born-again in a dramatic scene of speaking in tongues and what looks like physical possession, and a cast of other millennials in search of community. Many of the youth live around the Fenway and Brighton areas and meet regularly. In a time when fundamentalist religion dominates our news cycle and the country seems more divided than ever, Gardner's documentary takes a neutral look at how evangelicals are growing their following while asking us to consider how this differs or is similar to the dogma of other movements or building of dreams.

As we spent time scouring the city for GenX voices bringing us emerging ideas, Marieke Van Damme's name kept popping up as a change maker. The irony is that she is the Director of a the Cambridge Historical Society, headquartered on fabled Brattle Street, but a few houses away from the poet Henry Longfellow's house where our first President, George Washington, camped out during the revolution. The Hooper-Lee-Nichols House, under her stewardship, where we met for this interview, is a place one might think would be draped in old Cambridge. Aesthetically speaking, it is – I swear I see an old cat up in the top window when I pass by on my way into the Square – but for her, the historic homes are only the launch pad. Van Damme is stirring things up by bringing this vintage society into modernity with annual themes that have sparked conversations around the housing crisis, the changing face and development in Harvard Square, and the emergence of Kendall as the poster child for change, all with a historical context of what it means for city-building and culture. She understands the power of competing for dollars and attention in a digital world, and we discuss new models of funding that will be required to give cities the pillars we have long understood create vibrancy and civil connection.

Meet our first subject in our 20-part Generation X series where we hope to discover emerging ideas around us from the generation author Douglas Coupland called "Fantastical Creators and Heartfelt Storytellers" in his sleeper novel, GenerationX: Tales for an Accelerated Culture – those born between 1965 to 1980. You know, that tiny but mighty band of irreverent, anti-hero makers and doers hovering around their forties. These, the ones suffocating between the Boomers and their Millennial offspring, who absorb most of everything. At this moment in time, we think GenX idealism – grounded in a reality that bites – may just save us.

Jess Shattuck's much-anticipated third novel, The Women in the Castle, revolves around the lives of three wives of resistors in Nazi Germany during World War II. Shattuck, best known for her novels The Hazards of Good Breeding and The Perfect Life, grew up in Cambridge with a German-born mother who had immigrated to America, shunning her nation and her own parents' dark past as Nazi sympathizers. Memories of her mother's shame have stayed with Shattuck long after her mother's sudden death left many of her questions unanswered when Shattuck was a teenager. It has taken her seven years to research and write this novel, with years spent traveling to Germany and combing through material to research this historical piece of fiction in which she explores the normalization of fascism in a society, and the moral fiber it takes to stand up to it and hold on to what is humane and true.

Ron Sullivan is a Harvard Clinical Professor of Law, the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute, and a Senior Fellow of the Jamestown Project. His ideas around bias and the destruction of our black and brown men's lives fold into his thinking for how we move forward from the past, how we work to think collectively as "We" in our nation. He says that what has played out in the past few weeks demonstrates that our democracy was built to survive one person. He also cautions that this requires everyone to participate, to be open to conversation regardless of our baggage.