Letter From the Editor, December 2018

By Caroline Hurley

You think you know someone until it comes time to buy them a Christmas gift. You’re frantically browsing Oprah Winfrey’s Amazon gift guide, realizing that you actually have no idea what the perfect gift would be because you actually might not know this person well at all. And though Oprah probably does not know your friend better than you … she also might.

I don’t mean to generalize–maybe I am just bad at giving gifts.

Similar, but unrelated to the holidays, though, is when you think you know someone until you go through a rough patch, and the people who are there for you are not the ones you’d first expect.

You think you know someone until they are completely gone from your life. Maybe you didn’t know them at all.

I thought I knew a lot of things going into this semester, but it turns out I had a lot to learn. That’s cryptic, I know. It’s also kind of the point of education. But I’m talking on a more existential level than textbooks.

The realization that I do not know as much as I thought is one that I have experienced every day I have been a part of this magazine. From this issue alone, I learned about a building in SoHo filled with dirt (pg. 13), unaffiliated tenants living in the Barnard dorms (pg. 18), and the next mass extinction event (pg. 28).

This issue concludes vol. XXIV of The Blue and White. We tried to confront you with new perspectives– make you realize things you did not know–throughout this iteration. I don’t know if we were successful, because frankly, I don’t know how many of our issues actually get read, versus how many end up in the trash. So what does that leave me with? I guess it is time for me to go and find out.