Dear Readers,
Over the past year, The New Journal has been produced in classrooms, coffee shops, and airplane terminals; between phone calls and snack interludes; sometimes standing, often sitting, occasionally lying on the floor. Untethered to one physical place, this magazine has found a home in idiosyncratic corners and ordinary moments. We, too, have found a home in this magazine. During our final production, hugging each other goodbye in the Silliman seminar room, we realized we would carry an indelible piece of TNJ with us.
In Volume 57, Issue IV of The New Journal, writers hunt for truth. In our cover story, Mia Rose Kohn ’27 untangles the contradictory history of the birth control pill. Exploring suspected accounts of drink spiking, Odelya Bergner-Phillips ’28 uncloaks a darker underside of campus party culture.
We wrote our first letter to you last May, amid nationwide campus protests over the war on Gaza. One year later, the Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of international students, some connected to those protests. The targeting of students based on their background, protest activities, or speech lends unique urgency to our mission as a magazine. At Tufts University on March 25, plain-clothed officers arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student, as she was walking to Iftar dinner to break her Ramadan fast. Öztürk’s legal team argues that she was detained because of an op-ed she co-wrote in The Tufts Daily supporting pro-Palestine protests on campus.
At the end of our term, we write to you from a world very different than that in which we started. Last year, TNJ covered the U.S.’s first state-mandated Black and Latino ethnic studies elective courses, right here in Connecticut. Two months later, the magazine documented the beginnings of a national refugee resettlement program based on New Haven’s Integrated Refugee & Immigration Services (IRIS). But today, the U.S. Department of Education has urged school districts to eliminate any initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion or risk losing funding. IRIS recently announced that it would be shuttering its doors in New Haven, reeling from the Trump administration’s budget cuts. As the world shifts, it demands more stories.
In our board’s last issue of The New Journal, join us in looking ahead.
Signed,
Outgoing Managing Board
Maggie, Chloe, Aanika, Sam
