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Once upon a time, everyone knew where everyone was, or at least was supposed to be. The jocks were in Mather, the aristocracy held court in Eliot, and the nudists frolicked in the tunnels of Adams. Nowadays, with randomization, Harvard's efforts at the "small college community" are thwarted by the random collection of students in each House. While the system is an admirable attempt to mark out stratification, what has resulted is a loss of House individuality, spirit and unity--incidentally, exactly what makes communal living worthwhile...
...easy availability of guns may be a necessary component of the Littleton phenomenon, but it's not a sufficient explanation. After all, firearms have been widely available for decades, but random mass shootings by high schoolers are a comparatively recent phenomenon. And in a country such as Israel, where a large proportion of the population is almost permanently armed from its teenage years, gun crime is almost negligible. A second common explanation for alienated teenagers' venting their anger in shooting sprees is the glamorization of violence in American popular culture. "Hollywood, TV and and videogames have spearheaded a cult...
Dotalk through possible topics with professors, TF's, other students and friends. Even consider keeping a thesis journal as you go. Don't scan aimlessly through old magazines and random books looking for inspiration to strike. I tried it, and it was an entertaining waste of time. You're much more likely to run across a topic while researching a paper for a class in your area of interest. Which brings up an important method for choosing a topic...
...take seminars, tutorials and lecture courses requiring research papers early on in your Harvard years in fields that interest you. That is, don't fill up your sophomore schedule with Cores and other random large lecture courses--when thesis time rolls around, all that cocktail-party knowledge will seem more useless than ever. Once you have a topic...
Natural selection, Orr points out, applies beautifully to random processes such as gene mutations but would fall apart if animals could deliberately upgrade their young. Ideas, on the other hand, are often consciously modified before they're transmitted. Meme evolution, unlike gene evolution, isn't random. "When Newton invented calculus," says Orr, "he didn't do it by generating a million random ideas and choosing the best one." Darwinism, say the critics, has no relevance under these conditions...