April 2026 Letter from the Editor

New York State announced this month that it is now (mostly) safe to eat (some) fish caught out of the Hudson River. Obviously, many anticipate some uproar from our sister school under-the-Hudson, Carpumbia. The television news crews have relocated from the islands in Broadway to the river’s muddy shores, all eyes on our intellectual brethren under the surface. 

To get a better understanding of the cultural ripple effect, I arranged a rendezvous with my counterpart at Rivermud, Carpumbia’s favorite underwater magazine. If this is the first time you’re hearing of Rivermud Editor-in-Chief Tina Anchovy, you are living under a rock. She is a senior in the Amphibious Dual Degree Program, which means that she already did two years at Columbia, where she was a mover and shaker in the liminal space between land and water. She is brilliant, and she knows it. We met at a riverside bar. I waited for an hour, my tired eyes on the New Jersey coastline, before I caught a glimmer in the doorway. As always, Tina was decked out in something sleek and shiny, yet casual. Since I had seen her last, she had pierced her lip—a bit performative, I thought. She made eyes at the bartender, and ordered a dry martini. While we talked, she ran the delicate edge of her left pectoral fin along the rim of her glass. I led with empathy.

“I can’t imagine how scary this time must be for all of you,” I held space for her experience by taking a long sip of my drink, pulling the liquid slowly through all the bends and loops of my curly straw. 

“What do you mean?” she said, flaring her gills. 

“A hook can come out of your sky at any moment. What stress you must be under!” 

“Natalie, you are so naive,” she batted the air with her fin, accidentally flinging a small strand of fish-goo onto my leg. It was glittery. “In the last 50 years without human contact, the larger Hudson River community has made so many innovations. No one is going to be thoughtlessly lipping big metal hooks anymore. We’re too busy reading Proust and writing plays about pre-industrial aquatic psyche. We’ve got nightclubs and seaweed bars. We’ve got things to do. Do you think the intricate estuary genome is just going to map itself?” 

“I suppose not.” I said, flushed, I tried to change the subject.“And how are things going at the Rivermud?” 

“Well,” she said. “We plan to make quite a splash this month with a feature exposing the dark underbelly of New York Harbor sailing. And a savvy young sturgeon wrote a scintillating essay about animal print streetwear in the freshwater muscle community. For our At Two Swords Length: Will this Hudson Fish Kill You, the answer is yes,” She chuckled. “And how is that little…duotone shtick you do?”

“Things are going fantastically at The Blue and White,” I said, defensive but truthful. “We cover some real ground in our April issue. Our prodigal staff writer, Caroline Nieto, teamed up with Talia Reiss of the Brown University’s student magazine, The College Hill Independent, to bring a dispatch from Spain. They cover the lead-up to the Global Sumud Flotilla’s departure for Palestine earlier this month. Luke Zinger brought his reporter’s notebook, his camera, and his copy of Susan Sontag out West, furnishing his essay on perception and photography with expansive landscapes. Sayuri Govender writes about the lasting echoes of the Barnard Sex Wars. Sepp Zammuto sells out and applies for a job at Enron.” 

She was unenthused. We departed on cold terms. On my way inland, I passed an old man with a fishing pole walking down to the water. I had that frumpy, dejected look, so he asked me what I was fishing for. 

“Respect,” I said. “I’m fishing for some goddamn respect.” 

Natalie K. Buttner

Editor-in-Chief