Letter from the Editors

Issue 2, Winter 2025

Tokoyuni Utagawa, The Writing School, 1806. The Miriam
and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs:
Print Collection, The New York Public Library

Learning a language is an exercise in humility. At first, it’s like returning to childhood, slowly learning how to cobble together words and broken phrases until the vocabulary blanks are filled in and the grammar becomes second nature. I love it, though—finding shared etymological roots across languages, surprising connections across conventions, and the feeling of unlocking another world through the painstaking effort of putting the linguistic pieces of a puzzle together, one by one. There will never be a time when the puzzle is complete, not even in my native language, because the vocabulary keeps evolving—words that go to rot, words with new connotations, slang that keeps evolving. And accepting that requires humility, too. No one can learn all the secrets of language, but isn’t it fun to try?

We came up with the theme of this issue because language is something we as editors ponder on a daily basis: Is this word getting the right meaning across to this audience? How about the flow of this sentence? Language operates at so many levels, and offers endless topics for writers to explore—it is our chief medium, after all. We’re delighted by the range of topics we received for this issue, and hope you enjoy reading about them as much as we did: on the loss and inheritance of language; developing fluency and insights into other cultures; and building connections through travel and translation. Interestingly, we received not a single pitch on the “large language models” that are currently reshaping the world of work—at least in this sphere, it seems that people are still drawn to the human version of language, for all its flaws and foibles.

Language itself is an exercise in both power and humility. Its power plays out through conquest, connection, and emotional resonance (who hasn’t been moved to tears, anger, or joy by a simple handful of words?). The humility comes in with miscommunications, misunderstandings, exclusion, exile, and loss. Who gets to speak, and who has to hold their tongue? We don’t all have the same amount of power or platform, but we all have the capacity to use, hold onto, and share the language we care about.

Language is always changing: as with aging, and the writing of history, we both lose and gain over time. We learn more, we forget more. Here is our snapshot of language at this moment. Enjoy.

Warmly,
Annie & Apoorva

Apoorva Sripathi is a writer, editor, poet, and artist from Chennai, now based in London. She writes shelf offering, a newsletter weaving together food, art, memory, history, and politics. She is the co-founder and editor of CHEESE, the magazine of culture, and her writing has been published in Kinfolk, Vittles, Wellcome Collection, and Feminist Food Journal. She is also the co-founder and co-editor of chlorophyll. More of her stuff here.

Anne Wallentine is a writer, editor, and historian who focuses on intersections of arts, culture, and health. Her journalism has appeared in The Financial Times, The Economist, Smithsonian Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Slate, and Hyperallergic. She has also curated exhibitions on topics from LGBTQ+ history to the history of trees in Los Angeles. Having lived in various cities across the US and the UK, she is now based in LA. She is the co-founder and co-editor of chlorophyll. Find her at awallentine.com.