Press
"Harvard—Not as square as we remember it.”
--Playboy, “The Year in Sex,” January 2005
“a frisson to the fusty realms of Harvard”
--The Guardian, February 13, 2004
“un magazine hédoniste, libertin, mais aussi sérieux”
--Playboy, French edition, December, 2004
“una rivolta delle menti e dei corpi”
--Vanity Fair, Italian edition, January 27, 2005
“ H Bomb isn't Girls Gone Wild by way of Playboy —it's more like Nerve 's younger, nerdier sibling.”
--The Boston Phoenix, May 28, 2004
“While tamer than we all imagined (and than the drooling media had hoped), the mag is sharp and thoughtful; it captures a specific Harvard brand of sex on the brain and yet can still be enjoyed by an outsider.”
--Tristan Taormino for The Village Voice, June 11, 2004
“The Best of the New” in the section “Ideas”
--The Boston Globe Magazine, March 13, 2005
“After months of breathless anticipation, that school ‘in Boston' finally has its own sex mag. Does anybody care?”
--Newsweek, June 7, 2004
Also featured on Inside Edition, The Tyra Show, CBS, FOX, MSNBC, ABC, New England Cable News, the Comcast Channel, and CNN2.
Sophomore year at Harvard, I started H Bomb magazine.
Harvard slang for the moment you tell a stranger you go to Harvard, dropping the H Bomb can either impress or repulse a potential love interest. "H Bomb" sums up the sexiness, nerdiness, and sheer strangeness that is the Harvard experience of sex in college.
H Bomb magazine began the spring semester of 2004 when I met Camilla Hrdy and we discovered we had similar visions for a campus magazine about sex and sexuality. When we proposed a sex-themed lit and arts magazine full of articles, creative writing, and artwork by students, the Committee on College Life voted unanimously to grant H Bomb the status of an official Harvard student organization. Little did we know that a frenzy of controversy and media attention awaited us the next day, when the Harvard Crimson ran an article announcing the publication of a Harvard "porn" magazine.
Although we insisted we weren't interested in publishing pornography, we found ourselves debating the difference between art and porn with the college deans, journalists, and other students. Despite criticism from conservative alumni and administrators, the college didn't censor the magazine. Meanwhile, the student government offered us generous support in the form of an unusually large grant.
With a staff of designers, editors, writers, artists and business team we raised $10,000 to print 8,000 copies of the 48-page, full-color magazine containing essays, short fiction, poetry, interviews and art by Harvard students and alumni. 3,000 copies were distributed to the Harvard community free; the rest sold out.
We published 10,000 copies of the second issue in 2005, and the organization is still going strong. Before I graduated the Harvard Archives requested two copies of each issue. You can check out my photography in the second issue here.
Current TV produced this segment on H Bomb in 2007 before I was hired.
Articles
The Guardian, “Harvard Women Deny New Illustrated Sex Magazine is Porn,” February 13, 2004
The Boston Globe,“Harvard's Sexy H Bomb Magazine Drops,” May 25, 2004
The Boston Phoenix,“H Bomb Brings Campus Coitus,” May 28, 2004
The Village Voice, “Porn on Campus,” June 11, 2004
The Washington Post, “Bared in Boston,” January 8, 2005
The New York Times, "The Student Body," April 23, 2006
[The New York Times, "Campus Exposure," March 4, 2007**I take issue with many of the statements in this article. It is worth noting that it focuses on the editor who took over after we graduated. She never published an issue in the year of her tenure, and eventually the College asked her to step down and revoked the magazine's official status. Luckily, the next editor successfully lobbied for official status in 2007.]