Readers,
I awoke this morning with a pit in my stomach left over from last year. On November 5, 2024, I turned twenty, and Donald Trump won re-election. Dread underpinned all the delight. I entered my third decade on a day to be remembered as a low point of the century. What right did I have to celebrate? What reason?
This year I turned twenty-one, and awoke to a slew of Breaking News stories: two governors, some gerrymandering, and a democratic socialist mayor of New York City. I felt caught between that same dread and delight. Swapped, somewhat, but not quite entirely. My life, my birth, my age, still entwine with fate.
The political is always personal, and the personal political; we know this. This week is always a stark reminder for me, but even moreso this year, with our Herald cover made in tandem with the YCC. The Peanuts event was a delight to attend, and having our magazine adorned with the faces of so many cements ours as a publication for the people. It was a testament to connection, as YCC Events Coordinator Kingson Wills writes in his Opinion. But it’s all paid for by the YCC, an organization ripe with its own uselessness in the face of actual student concerns like the Sumud Coalitions’ referendum on Yale’s complicity in the genocide against Palestinians.
Our other pieces consider how to layer these political weights. Irene Kim writes about AI, and the burden of a given student’s choice about when, if, how to replace your mind with automation. Marissa Halagao and Janina Gbenoba work through the long history of advocacy for a Tagalog language program at Yale, and Yale’s complicity in the colonial genocides taken in the Philippines. Cameron Jones’ piece on the newly-opened Glaze and Grind is all tangled up—he’s spent over twenty dollars in support of an institution we’re all in the process of understanding. On the other side, however, Prentiss Patrick-Carter gives a short story about a fourth grader with a peanut allergy, and Mary Ghebremeskal walks to New York. The Herald is full of everything, both the personal and the political.
So how do we reckon? Wholesale ignore my birthday, and save my eyes only for the political? Slap away the fun of the Peanuts and the opportunity for a provocative issue of our notably daring publication? Submit to the boring answer of balance? Shove such contradictions aside, and opt to just live your goddamn life?
That’s your choice to make. Our writers made theirs; we made ours. The Herald writes to figure things out. Take a read, see if it helps.
Most daringly,
Will and Oscar
