Someone told me, once, that location always precedes content. That where you are makes who you are. In other words, each space we pass through builds us as much as we build it. Places change, and we change with them. Do you remember your first day of classes here? Where you were? Who you were? What about November of your first semester? April of your fourth?

Without a physical point of reference, it is easy to forget the intermediate time between those distinct moments we might call The Beginning and The End. Matriculation and Graduation.

The Observer is a project of memory as much as anything else. The magazines are objects, are tools we can use in order to remember in-between time that is no less special than the Big Moments that bookend our time here. We write, draw, take photographs, and put it all on paper so that sometime soon we can remember what it was to be here, now, at this school, with each other.

And let’s not pretend that where we are—Tufts—is always an easy or kind place to be. Often, the Observer has been documentation of the ways students here have been ignored, silenced, and just plain fucked over by the school administration, this country’s government, and each other. I have seen people I love hurt immensely because of this school that puts profit over students, profit over workers, profit over education, profit over everything. I am proud to have been a part of a publication that refuses to let those truths be quieted.

The Observer is also a record of student joys—triumphs! Of student artwork, poetry, and stories that serve to remind us that together we have created ways to thrive. This semester, I hope to curate a magazine that is both honest and celebratory, that holds both hardship and victory together. I wish for the Observer to be, at its core, a space to communicate and commemorate the nearly inarticulable emotional textures of where and who we are.

I’ll admit I am afraid of forgetting these textures, always have been. I journal, draw, record my own interior world every day, but this only goes so far. For an enunciation of collective experience, all the shit that is happening not only in my own head but also outside of me, between so many other people, I turn to the Observer. And I hope you can, too, for there is such triumph in remembering those pieces of life that may have otherwise been lost to generality, obscured in larger, foggier categories of time.

I have always been, am, and will continue to be amazed by the staff of this magazine, who make all these triumphs possible. Through the Observer I’ve found role models who’ve become my best friends and classmates who are now my family. O Staff, I have learned something (probably many things) from each of you. And I am better for it. Thank you.

Thank you for reading our magazine. I can’t begin to imagine what this semester will bring, but someone else told me, once, that even the unthinkable can unfold in an instant. So let unfold what will, and we’ll be here to write it all down.

Emmett Pinsky