In January 2011, the editor-in-chief of this publication began her first Letter from the Editors by writing, “Welcome to the future!” The joy and open-armed optimism of that hook bubbled up beneath each line which follows, with a natural ease that jars our modern minds, plagued by the cynicism and exhaustion of the past fifteen years, but that certainly surprised no one who knew its writer. The friends and colleagues of Tatiana Schlossberg, TC ’12, remember her as someone who “practiced true humility,” who was “brilliant, bitingly funny, and a spectacularly talented writer,” and who was “the most clear-eyed person I met at Yale, and possibly since.”
On December 30, 2025, after a year and a half spent in treatment for leukemia, Tatiana passed. In honor of her devoted love for her friends and family, and her countless hours contributing her brilliance and wit to the content and people of this magazine, we welcome you to the Family Issue.
Family is, has always been, and will continue to be the foundation of our lives. Whether you think first of the warm embrace of a father, or the comforting grin of a mother, or the soft cardigan wool of a grandparent, or the tireless devotion of an aunt or uncle or a friend so beloved, family is the roof over your head and the softness beneath your sleeping form. Family, treated with the kindness it deserves, should bring clear-eyed peace. This truth seems to be slipping away with the recent onslaught of a pervasively malevolent world order. Small towns in Australia and Brown University were rocked by deadly violence. From Iran to Palestine to Ukraine to Minnesota, governments have used weaponry against citizens who wish only for safety, autonomy, and the right to protest. Oil we know we should not burn spurred U.S. intervention in Venezuela and will postpone even farther the climate devastation to which Tatiana was so attuned. Things are frightening.
But in honor of that stalwart optimism permeating every word of Tatiana’s Letter from the Editors, reprinted in these pages, we raise our heads in this new year with her enthusiasm pointing us forward. “Welcome to the future!” she wrote. She knew not what that future held, nor the world she would leave behind, but in that cheery declaration she struck a torch of magnanimous hope. It is with this hope we continue writing. Seven members of our Herald family who worked alongside Tatiana have written the stories and memories of our Feature, “One More Thursday Night.” We have two stories about traveling home for the holidays and yearning for both the past and future, and a few more about how heirlooms hold tight their histories.
Read with us. Hope with us. And hold us to our word—we won’t disappoint you.
Most daringly,
Will and Oscar
