Dear readers,
We proceed from the cover letter of Volume 76 Issue 8 of the Yale Herald with stories that theorize and create alternative futures. We continue to believe in the enterprise of storytelling, the ways that our imagination, incision, and interconnectedness do not just remark on the state of the world—they reinvent it.
Our authors this week take the time to slow down, pay attention, and find connections to the people and places around them, tenuous or fleeting as they may be. Larry Dunn ’25 finds respite in the stillness and subtlety resounding through Haley Heynderickx’s sophomore album Seed of a Seed. In his hometown’s congregation, Richie George ’27 searches for what is tender in the extremities of religion. Mia Kohn ’27 goes to the Yale University Art Gallery to clear her head and strikes up a conversation with a security guard, who gazes into the abyss by day and goes to therapy by night.
The two features of this issue interrogate what’s left on the margins of Yale’s institutional history, which we hope can be put in dialogue with our call to support the Sumud Coalition’s Books, Not Bombs referendum. Daniel Yim ’28 talks to Assistant Professors of Ethnicity Race, and Migration Tarren Andrews and Deb Vargas about the completion of the new ER&M building, in the wake of the program’s long-fought history for institutional support. And finally, for the cover story of this issue, Amber Nobriga ’27 investigates how Yale PhD graduate Kenneth Emory spearheaded archaeological expeditions in Hawai‘i—an exploitation configured by the radiocarbon revolution and Yale’s emerging relationship with the Bishop Museum, with impacts still felt today.
Like Amber, we accept that the path toward the future is long and winding. The future may even ring apocalyptic. And as Daniel writes of the new ER&M program building, we ought to think of our habitats of community as a gerund, rather than a noun: “always in progression, not quite complete.”
We hope these stories are an architecture of the future—a window that many hands have built together, for you to climb through.
Yours most daringly,
Connor Arakaki and Madelyn Dawson