May 2026 Letter from the Editor

It’s the end of the year now, and what do you have to show for it?

Personally, I am always shocked by how much paper I have accumulated—readings, flashcards, religious and political flyers, and other things I put aside during the week to thoroughly examine during the weekend.

Anyone who has stuck around on campus post-graduation knows the mayhem that follows our year of academic accumulation. Move-out exposes our material consumerism, one of many dark underbellies that is revealed as the University basks in these languid NYC summers. Seniors, seemingly leaving the realm of existence where they might need shower caddies, desk lamps, and clothes, create immense mounds of these mortal goods in lounges and hallways. The campus is overrun by scavengers, students, and strangers picking through the piles to keep and resell. I have heard legends of items of great value—laptops, TVs, the great texts of Western canon shoddily annotated by the great minds of tomorrow—being discovered by particularly vigilant foragers in the wake of graduation. The rest is sold back to the returning students at the beginning of the year, or carted away to the dump.

What about the items in your mind? What have you memorized? Dumping my flashcards into the recycling bin, I feel a little queasy. I can no longer remember the parent isotope for 207Pb. I understand more and more everyday, but the mental cupboard for things I have truly memorized is quite barren: a few Bible verses, the landline of a childhood friend, the states and their capitals, the beginning of a Robert Service poem, the Pledge of Allegiance.

Leave this year with memories, a great deal of understanding, a few things truly memorized. If you are honorable, leave campus now like a hermit crab, with all your worldly goods strapped to your aching back. And if you worry about forgetting, not the structure of the cell but the tenor of the moment: Be calm, reader, for you can outsource. Rest assured that The Blue and White will capture the present: May, 2026.

In this issue, Erica Lee worries about what she should leave with, while debating the final resting place for her google documents post-grad. Cecilia Zuniga reflects on the texts that were foundational to her intellectual development, creating an unofficial ‘Barnard Core.’ In his feature, Chris Brown details the descent of the peer listening service Nightline, and its likely subsumption into Columbia history. These are just a few of our brilliant Blue and White Seniors writers, who will not so easily be forgotten. Four of our most prolific illustrators—Justin Chen, Em Bennett, Ellie Hodges, and Jorja Garcia—will also be crossing the stage soon, after years of defining the look for our magazine.

Recently, I asked a friend what she had memorized, and she recited the Philip Larkin poem The Trees, about the leaves in springtime, considering the grief in the cycles of death and regrowth. The poem concludes: “Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May. / Last year is dead, they seem to say, / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”

We meet you afresh in September. Don’t be strangers.

Natalie K. Buttner

Editor-in-Chief