Boston and a trip to a newspaper

Walking around Harvard, you wouldn't think that one of the most famous student newspapers around is all that credible. Not because it looks unappealing, reads badly, or is disparaged by students. None of that is a problem. You just can't find it anywhere.

We asked a few students outside one of the cafeterias where to find the Crimson. Their answer: a shrug of the shoulders. What!?

Turns out the Crimson e-mails every edition to all students. Stop the presses! (Literally)

OK, I'm not one to advocate for the death of the print edition, but an electronic version in the inboxes of every student seems not only to be a great way to spread information, but is also cheap. Crazy cheap.

The Crimson, you've done it again.

But I still wanted to find a copy of the paper. All the stars aligned, we turned the right corner, and there was Crimson HQ. Not only does the staff occupy their own building, but the name of the newspaper is engraved in cement. In a word: badass.

For the record, the design staff seemed weirded out by my excitable request for one of their newspapers. And they were really young, which terrified me.

Spend an hour walking by people you know are eons brighter than you and you start to feel a bit uneasy.

Boston and a trip to school

The downtown core and near suburbs of Boston all share one thing in common: beautiful, well-dressed, clearly wealthy people. Everyone on the subway reads. Not the city's trash tabloid either, but real books. Everybody. And it smells, well, not bad—anywhere.

At the hostel, Thirty Days encountered its second guest cameo: Dr. Javier Vera, a TV producer who lives and works in Orlando. He also attends conventions all over North America to do with new media and the future of the business. There was one rolling through Boston, so that explained his presence.

Javier and I took a trip to Harvard, a small college just north of the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. By the way, everybody refers to the state and all of its subsequently titled hospitals, schools, and streets not as Massachusetts, but simply as "Mass".

When we walked by the main church on campus, Javier and I noticed several hundred or maybe a couple thousand chairs set up. Turns out Al Gore spoke there yesterday. It was almost enough for me to stay in Boston for an extra afternoon, until I remembered that Al Gore is the most boring person in the world. But it's all part of a new initiative to green the school.

This picture, by the way, is of MIT Building Ten: The Great Dome. Two incredible schools, thousands of terribly smart people, minutes apart.

Wow.