Olivia Bye

Tufts professor Rani Neutill publishes first memoir, exploring familial past and a complex mother-daughter relationship

In 2015, Tufts English professor Rani Neutill received a message from her cousin, urging her to bring her estranged mother whose health was rapidly declining from India to the U.S. Neutill, who had not spoken to her mother for a year, suddenly found herself in her mother’s hometown of Kolkata, India after 48 hours of travel, forced to confront a complex and turbulent past while caring for her mother in the present.

Through the Looking Glass: What ‘The Wizard of Oz’ tells us about our current economic landscape

Last week, “Wicked: For Good,” the sequel to last year’s box-office-shattering film based on the hit Broadway musical, made its highly-anticipated premiere in theatres. The film was officially released in theaters in the United States on Friday. Once again, the wonderfully weird world of Oz has been brought to our cultural forefront, with the film already projected to earn a record $200 million its opening weekend.

Tufts literary lovers book it to Boston for the 17th annual Boston Book Festival

One Saturday every October, Tufts students can hop on the Green Line and, after 30 minutes, arrive at New England’s largest literary festival. The Boston Book Festival, located in the bustling Copley Square, is one of Boston’s biggest events of the year, drawing upwards of 25,000 attendees annually. The event hosts hundreds of authors, moderators and vendors to celebrate the city’s vibrant literary community. This year’s festival was held on Oct. 25 and saw more than 200 authors and moderators in over 70 sessions, including keynote speakers such as Geraldine Brooks, Patricia Cornwall, Kiran Desai, Maureen Dowd and Hafsah Faizal.

Through the Looking Glass: What The Good Place tells us about the government shutdown

No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum or how you feel about politics, I think we can all agree on one thing: this is certainly not “The Good Place.”

Epitomizing intellectual curiosity: The students behind Tufts’ 2025 Summer Scholars program

One day at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts this past summer, fifth-year combined-degree student Clara Davis took a box of 10,000 photos of legs from her locker and laid them out like a mosaic on classroom tables. This is just one example of what a typical day could look like for a Tufts Summer Scholar. The Summer Scholar program is a 10-week program that allows rising juniors and seniors to conduct independent research projects on campus under the guidance of a faculty mentor. 

Josh Johnson is redefining comedy for a divided era

Comedy isn’t always easy to laugh about these days. From “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” being briefly pulled off the air by ABC after Kimmel’s controversial remarks following the assasination of right-wing political figure Charlie Kirk, to “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” being canceled by CBS days after Colbert’s criticism of a multi-billion dollar merger with SkyDance Media that required approval from the Federal Communications Commission, it has never seemed more dangerous to be a comedian on a national stage.

Unpacking Kamala Harris’ political memoir: ‘107 Days’

In the late hours of Nov. 5, 2024, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, called with news that put a decisive and devastating cap on her past 107 days: “I don’t think you’re going to get there.”

After 3 years, the Indigenous Center is not just surviving, but thriving

When senior Vanessa John toured Tufts in the spring of her last year of high school, she was met with the very beginnings of the university’s newest affinity space: the Indigenous Center. The center, which had been approved in fall 2021 and opened during spring 2022, promised to be a welcoming, open space for both Indigenous students and anyone else who wanted to learn about Indigeneity. However, back then, the center still had a long way to go.

Escape the Library: Cambridge Public Library

In the reading room of the Cambridge Public Library, two murals face one another. The first is a triptych nestled within a curved, dome-like ceiling depicting ancient milestones in the art of printing. We see a king imprint his royal seal onto blocks of clay in Babylon, paper being woven from papyrus in Ancient Egypt and the first daily newspaper in the form of a piece of parchment in Ancient Rome. On the other side of the room, we see modern printing developments that led us to the world of literature we know today, from the invention of the first printing press around 1440 in Germany to the invention of the cylinder press in the early 1800s.

Crossword: Cryptic Cryptids