From the Editor

Take a look at the magazine in your hands. Ask yourself: Why bother? What can “student journalists,” those youthful folks who put this magazine together, hope to offer our world?
I suspect that most campus publications, emulating their counterparts in the world of professional publishing, would prefer that this question never be asked. They might prefer that the “student” part of the phrase “student journalism” be surreptitiously removed, ignored like an open secret we’re all too polite to acknowledge.
We totally disagree. For more than forty years, the Harvard Political Review has explored the boundaries of what is possible in the area of serious student political journalism. In our recent large-scale shift of content production online (to our fabulous new website, harvardpolitics.com), we’ve brought on a bevy of new columnists, political cartoonists, photographers, and even fiction writers. Our record has proven-if there ever was a doubt-that a student-run forum for serious discussion of the world’s most important political issues can yield writing and thinking that’s truly worth engaging with. The issue in your hands is no exception.
Some have called the early 21st century “The Age of Facebook.” (On behalf of 20-somethings everywhere, you’re welcome!) The tools for creating and disseminating culture have been distributed to nearly every person on the planet. The existential questions that we face as a student publication are thus the same questions that all producers everywhere must face: why should our voices, in a world that’s already overfull with people talking, be listened to at all?
I’ll admit: the Harvard Political Review won’t give you any breaking news, and if you’re looking for insider political gossip, or the most gorgeous prose, or the best Freudian psychoanalysis of Charlie Sheen’s phenomenal id, you might consider any of the other dozen magazines on the rack.
What the Harvard Political Review can do, I believe—and what it does do, again and again, better than almost any other publication around—is speak to the conditions of our world from our unique position as students within it. What we offer our readers is our honest attempt at grappling with the biggest issues of our time. We’re not alone in doing this, of course. Our writers are representative of an entire generation of coolly rational and sometimes astoundingly hopeful young Americans who are attempting to answer the same big questions. War, depression, higher education, gender equality-this magazine is a record of our hopes. It’s a testament to what we, the future inheritors of the federal debt, the future leaders of this country with all its problems and promise, believe matters most. So make no mistake: we wear the term “student journalism” as a badge of pride.