Contributing writer

Ciana J. King

Latest Content


Fifteen Questions: Naomi Oreskes on Climate Change Denial, Apolitical Scientists, and Her Favorite Rocks

The historian and her dog sat down with Fifteen Minutes to talk about disinformation, climate change, and rocks. “Generally people don’t act — especially if you’re asking people to change how they're living, how they’re behaving, how they’re thinking — if you just give them dry scientific information,” Oreskes says.


Goodbye, Beloved

To me, Sethe was the literary embodiment of womanhood — the queenly woman with blood on her hands and a tree scarred into her back. She was the personification of repression and “rememory,” the manifestation of a traumatic past into the present.


‘That Class Shut Harvard Down’: The Founding of African and African American Studies

In the late 1960s, Black students's advocacy led to the creation of what is now Harvard's African and African American Studies Department. What does the campaign to found Black studies have to teach people discontented with the university, society, and world they find themselves in?


The Universal Design Playground — A Space for Children of All Abilities to Play

With its grand opening in December 2021, the playground is the first in Cambridge to fully incorporate Universal Design — the concept that an entire play structure should be accessible for all.


(Comic) Stripping Down the Patriarchy

These scenes are from the panels in “Breaking Out,” one of the stories in the July 1970 edition of “It Ain’t Me Babe Comix,” in which popular female comic characters revolt against the men dominating their lives and defy their creators. The “uprooted sisters” team up “into small groups not unlike witch covens” and go picketing for women’s history and self-defense classes. They consider if they should “take that acid we’ve been saving and commune with the moon,” while Supergirl frees the inmates of a women’s prison.


A Centuries-Old Papier-Mâché Octopus Swims Northwest, Finds a “A Second Life”

After decades of collecting dust in a Harvard Museum of Natural History classroom, a life-size papier-mâché model of an octopus has found a new home. With each of its looping tentacles stretching out about eight feet, it lies suspended above a grand staircase in the spacious, modern, glassy foyer of Harvard’s Northwest Building, home to labs, classrooms, and offices for Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.