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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 book “Abundance” examines a pattern of rising costs in blue cities and states across the country. The cities they name — Los Angeles, Boston, Manhattan — are places thousands want to live, but far fewer can afford.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, is already one of the densest cities in the U.S. More than 121,000 residents live within its seven square miles, with thousands more still hoping to join.

Klein and Thompson argue that the housing crisis is not a failure of the market but a failure of governance. Complex zoning rules, lengthy permitting processes, and regulatory hurdles have bottlenecked new development — inflating the cost of housing as supply lags behind demand. They call on policymakers to enact sweeping reforms that stimulate growth. Create an “abundance” of housing, they argue, and prices will fall.

The book’s arguments are well-trodden in Cambridge, where debates over development have defined local politics for decades. As residents, policymakers, and advocates look to the future, questions of affordability, inclusion, and sustainability color different visions for the city. Beneath the pressure for continued growth, longstanding questions persist: Who gets to call Cambridge home? And what should that home look like?

Up on the fifth floor of the Harvard Art Museums, sunlight pours into a glass-walled conservation lab, where restoration is quietly underway. Frames and paintings lie across the workspace in various stages of repair, each requiring a different method of preservation and reconstruction. Moving carefully among them is Allison K. Jackson, an associate frame conservator at the Harvard Art Museums.

While a visitor might spend minutes analyzing a painting, the frame rarely commands the same attention. Jackson’s life work, however, suggests we should look again.

“Frames themselves were not always considered works of art in their own right,” Jackson says. “It feels pioneering to consider the frames as works of art themselves, about sharing the impact of frames on an artwork, and making sure they are treated as such.”

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/17/chinamaxxing/

When I read “Yellowface” by R. F. Kuang during my senior year of high school, I came to a troubling realization: I related more to June — the white writer who steals her Chinese friend’s manuscript about Chinese laborers during World War I, passes it off as her own, and publishes it under an ethnically ambiguous name — than I did to Athena, the Chinese author.

Oftentimes, when I talk about being Chinese, I feel like I’m putting on a mask — yellowface, if you will. Like June, I am not truly steeped in Chinese culture: I speak Mandarin but don’t read or write it, I would be hard-pressed to name one Mando-pop song, and I couldn’t tell you the cultural or symbolic significance of a single traditional new year’s dish no matter how delicious. But when opportunity arises, I feel I seize upon Asianness largely for my own benefit: to relate to someone in conversation, or to make a point about how capital-D-Diverse I am.

It’s discomforting that I can’t pinpoint the last time I existed as Chinese without performing it.

The notion that one could make a generative AI model that sounds like Bill Evans, that an act of such unique human creativity might be automized, is unnerving. To make an AI music generator “play like Bill Evans” is actually a rather strange thing to say, because how exactly does Bill Evans play?

It’s a Friday night, and the sun is setting over the Brookline horizon. A lanky man leans against a wall, fiddling with his saxophone. When he ducks inside the Veterans Post — an unassuming building shared by the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars — we follow close behind.

“Welcome to the POSTunderground, where it’s always 3 a.m.,” says John Purcell into the mic. “We believe that music is a human right.” We’ll learn it’s a spiel he gives between almost every performance.

At the POSTunderground, no one is turned away, and no one has to pay — except for drinks.

But as the space continues to attract larger crowds, subtle changes strain the venue’s mission. Amid an influx of new faces, the POST is trying to hold fast to two principles: that music is a human right, and that both audiences and musicians meet a high standard.

A student reporter for The Harvard Crimson spent three months getting to know Boston's chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.