Irin Carmon

Midshipman Follows Family Naval Tradition
Vivacious and emphatic, Stephanie H. Hendricks ’05 is the picture of a well-adjusted, unabashedly preppy Harvard student. Yet for the past four years, she’s risen at dawn to trek to MIT for Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) exercises. This fall, Hendricks will trade in the Lacoste for a uniform as she trains to be a Naval intelligence officer in Virginia.

The Guy Behind the Guy
“When Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean threw off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and let loose the scream heard across America, no one saw where the jacket landed. But Michael O’Mary ’99-’00 saw, because he was standing in the stage buffer the night Dean lost the Iowa presidential caucus, stretching his arms out to receive it.”

Elvis Mitchell Takes on Harvard
Elvis Mitchell likes to disarm. Even in person, the same arresting wit he unleashes on readers and fearful filmmakers in his New York Times reviews arrives untrammeled. “Am I keeping you up?” he quizzes me minutes after sitting down at the Carpenter Center’s Sert Gallery café. “You look like you’re dozing off. I can get you a cup of coffee.”

Shelter from the Storm: A night at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter
Ray Muldoon is from East Boston, and he’ll be 24 in three days. He says he left Boston with eight dollars and a bag of weed, and became a stripper in Ohio en route to California. “You know what I did today?” he says. “I sat outside The Garage and watched people fall on the ice.” He’s restless, fingering the tattoos of Japanese characters and a cross he has on either side of his neck. “Physically, my body is telling me to go to sleep, but my mind is telling me to stay awake because I’d miss something. Except nothing ever happens.” How long has he been awake? “Days. Weeks. Years. It never ends.”

The Brattle Hosts a Feast for the Eyes
Despite the cherished pretensions some of us may hold about ourselves-that we are artistically savvy, that we are cosmopolitan aesthetes-it still takes a hell of a lot to get Harvard students out of the house and into some actual cultural consumption. Even if said cultural consumption is just around the corner. If your roommate isn’t in it, if the temperature’s dropped and you have a hot Friday night date with your problem set, it’s too easy to pass on the wealth of opportunities right in the Square.

Gentlemen Prefer to be Blondes
“Back in the audience before the film starts, there’s a debate whether a post-makeover Campbell, who works the overnight shift at a chain hotel in Newton, can wear her current outfit of pink crushed-velvet turtleneck and black miniskirt to work tonight. “My manager is okay with mycross-dressing, but I’d probably have to wear a regulation white blouse,” Campbell reflects.

Standing By
“Awash in ritual and responsibility, the immediate aftermath of death becomes a series of obligations and forced situations, meant to cut through, or at least distract from, the numb and searing emptiness of loss. For us, anecdotes—about her and her sayings and doings, even about our various ordeals in getting to the funeral—become a canon of bittersweet memory, the only way to break the terrible hush. ”

There She Is
“Five-year-old girls are prancing around in sashes and tiaras, practicing their pageant catwalk. Their grandmothers have been coming year after year: “They’re all so pretty, how could you say anything bad about them?” The men who come up to contestants’ slow-moving convertibles asking for their phone numbers seem unaware that Miss America is a scholarship competition.”

Alums Wow, Fall Short At Pageant
Breaking records and shattering stereotypes, Harvard alums made a glittering double appearance at the Miss America competition last Saturday when two recent graduates made the top ten.

Down to Earth (a summer postcard)
Watching a man trying to buy a wife-a breeder, more accurately-made me queasy, cemented some of my suspicions about how some men are taught to regard women. But I could file it under the category of life experience, transmute it to racy anecdote status. This is what we’re supposed to get when we travel, right-good stories and a broadened horizon? A cultivated sense of nonchalance?