Awarded Best Student Magazine in the Country by the Society of Professional Journalists in 2021!

A Year in Review (Sort Of)

Congrats! You’ve reached the end of our February issue—the last issue ever to be produced by The New Journal’s 2019-2020 Editorial Board. It has been a wild and wonderful year of friendship, carbs, and thirty-six hour production weekends. To close out our last magazine, we collected some of our favorite lines from the previous four issues we worked on and presented them below, now totally out of context. Enjoy! 

No one even noticed the explosion. “All the students slept through the night with a smile on their face.” 

“Yale clientele are not necessarily dying; they’re not necessarily from here; and they come here very temporarily.” 

When I asked Becky if her llamas are sexually frustrated, she hesitated—not because they do not encounter any difficulty but because I had misnamed her alpacas as llamas for the fifth time. 

“I don’t think I’m the best person [to be mayor]. Barack Obama would be better than me,” he said solemnly. 

I don’t have the nostalgia, the tinkering mindset, or the self-confidence required to go around telling people you collect decapitated snowmen, Supermen, and Rutherford B. Hayeses. 

“Throwing away books is a very important thing,” he tells me. 

Elicker wore his signature cornflower-blue shirt and held a Klean Kanteen gingerly with both hands as we spoke. 

Wars brought shortages, and at times, the students found the food so unbearable that they threw the boiled beef on the floor and the rancid butter out the windows. 

I prayed that the Shiru Cafe Bot wouldn’t find out. 

“I’m sure that men are attacked too,” she said. 

The Yale truck parks in Quantum’s reception bay and empties the day’s load into a murky brown pool that the company’s vice president Brian Paganini calls a “really gross milkshake.” 

A sign hung above the pen: You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy an ALPACA, and that’s kind of the same thing. 

Ip remarked that certifying to be a drone pilot is “like going to the DMV.” 

I’m here for journalistic investigation, I reminded myself as the tour finally began. I did NOT sign up through Match.com. 

“Lean into it,” he said. “It’s supposed to feel like a washing machine.” 

By some bizarre alchemy, a car ride through a “long tunnel” during that trip inspired Kakimoto to conceive of a coffee shop that, instead of making a profit by selling coffee, would gather data from students and sell it to companies looking to recruit them. 

As he was getting out of a silver Buick, I recognized his bearded face and shouted, “Doug!” 

Burton reflects that unlike in Hadley, where his store is surrounded mostly by fields and cows, in New Haven “there’s some quirky people walking the street. It’s been fun.” 

Pings are comforting; gurgling is not a good sign. 

As more participants arrived, it became clear that the ghost tours are typically a couples, or perhaps aspiring couples, event. 

A little girl with a ponytail trailed curiously behind her teacher, hoping he would make the small blue robot move again. 

Briefcase in hand, he halted his beeline towards the municipal building at 200 Orange Street and turned to face me. 

My Toblerone bar had arrived; the drone flew away, arching over a line of buildings until it vanished from view. 

“Racism, classism, elitism. Nah.” 

A blended reality utopia? Perhaps. 

More Stories
The Nanny Diaries