Dear readers,
The time? April 2015. The place? Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Dazed by the floodlights overhead and the pearly-white smiles of our high-achieving peers, we wandered the extracurricular bazaar at Bulldog Days. Ballroom dancers besieged us. We could have become stars of the polo team. Every single improv group wanted us, bad. Instead, we each ended up at a table in the back staffed by scruffy-looking representatives of an unregistered organization who had snuck their way in. The nice people at The Magazine About Yale & New Haven poured us the Kool-Aid: smart, people-centered storytelling about the place where we’d spend the next four years.
They had quite a legacy to point to. The oldest longform magazine at Yale, TNJ has been pumping out stellar journalism for fifty-one years. A few weeks ago, we put our entire archives up online: 250 issues, thousands of stories, a massive trove of Yale and New Haven history. (Read away at issuu.com/thenewjournal.)
In our latest, we’ve got some truly great reads: an investigation into alleged negligence by one of New Haven’s largest real estate companies, the madcap world of hot air balloonists, everything you need to know about Connecticut’s fiscal crisis and New Haven’s plan to fight global warming, plus a century-old hat store and literal human brains, Yalies who just want to be good people, and Yalies who just want to get drunk at Union Station.
Thank you to the members of our alumni board for their wise advice, high standards, and unfailing faith in this publication. And eternal gratitude to the members of our editorial board, who each spent 180 (!) hours of the past year locked in the living room of 216 Dwight St., feverishly inputting edits on a diet of pure coffee and carbs. Together, we’ve birthed five beautiful issues. As an independent, nonprofit magazine, TNJ is completely made up of its people –– and you guys are the best.
Finally, thank you, readers, for reading. We hope you’ll write. Can’t wait to see what’s coming down the pipes.
Signing off,
Annie and Mark
[email protected]
[email protected]