Our dear Herald readers,
Last week, I accompanied a friend as he walked around the Branford courtyard, green crayon and sketchbook in hand. Putting its pages to brick walls, plaques, engravings, and even the trees and blades of grass, he preserved the texture of each ridge and crevice. I marveled at this attempt: to take something so specific to its medium and render it in another.
A professor once remarked that trying to write is like trying to tell a friend a dream: it’s real to you, but difficult to conceive for those outside of your own mind. And so I imagined trying to recreate the texture of a building was not so dissimilar. Our project, as writers, editors, and creatives at the Herald, is to capture moments of joy, introspection, grief, and of course, daring, within the textures that characterize our lives, and render them viscerally in prose.
And while we are on the theme of texture: this is our first print issue! Everyone reads online: why do we need to keep printing? There are costs (money, time), but we think it’s worth it. We want to feel it, hold it, heck, underline and highlight and annotate it if we want. We want it to develop a provenance and pass through many sets of hands.
While our first online issue premiered last week, there is a certain special sanctity to the print issue. With Volume 80, Issue 2—yes, that’s 80 semesterly volumes since our founding in 1986—we make our entrance into the physical archive. We may be biased (we’ve collectively taken three different classes with “archive” in the title), but we love material histories. We’ve studied our own predecessors, learning about the Herald’s evolution from newspaper print style to magazine formatting, and understanding how the publication has kept its pulse on campus culture for four decades.
We hope you hold this issue in your hands, appreciate the doodles and marginalia by our talented design team (led by the fearless Michelle Vong), and consider these deeply-thought pieces. Our first print issue heralds a new school year—pieces on dressing up for FDOC, advice for first-year students, musings on a first-year orientation program, and campus novel recommendations. But you’ll also find some of the lesser-known textures of our everyday lives and communities: a profile of a quirky piano tuner, a meditation on grieving morally gray male celebrities, a review of a canine art exhibition, a study of the politics of a Yiddish slang term, and creative writing about fish, body wash, and The Cure.
So please, flip the page; Yale’s most daring prose awaits you.
Thank you so much for reading.
Most daringly,
Hudson and Angel
