This article, in a sentence, is designed to answer one, relatively simple question: Why should “The Weekly” exist?

I am drawn to this question nearly 12-months to the day after I first applied to be a columnist. A year later, I am still curious about what exactly drew me to writing weird reflective pieces read by few with little pertinence outside of the Parker bubble, why I gave consent to three of my classmates to send me angry emails about deadlines and obligations, why I wanted to go through the charade of pretending to edit my pieces when really I just marked my editors’ comments as “resolved” on Google Drive without removing a comma or changing a word.

I am still unsure whether my dozen of hours or so spent writing was worth  an ounce  to myself or the world. Yet I can say one thing without a doubt: I am glad “The Weekly” exists at this school.

I began my path towards this realization at the end of first Semester, during the first moment that I realized exactly how finite my time at Parker is, while speaking with Ms. Jurgensen, my third and final Upper School Principal and my second and final Assistant Principal, about censorship and “The Weekly” as a part of a final for my English class. At the meeting, she told me and a classmate that, long-term, writing news articles about student trips and editorials about attendance policy shouldn’t be the focus of Upper School student journalists.

She suggested that we as Upper Schoolers should be writing about our city and the world, challenging struggles so much more vital than the mere happenings of a hundred or so largely self-contained, non-reflective teenagers. We should not simply be institutional record keepers or announcers, she suggested––a role perhaps well-suited for Middle Schoolers––but should speak truth to actual figures of power, not just well-meaning administrators.

Mostly, I agreed with what Ms. Jurgensen was saying. Of the few times I have read “The Weekly,” the handful of articles that have stuck with me are the ones that involved something tragically gone wrong––some incorrect phrasing, some dramatic mischaracterization of facts, some harmful or malicious opinion––and for my own writing, I have only heard anything about my articles in so far as they made bold claims.  Few seemed to really mention my writing or my arguments as things in themselves.

This is to say that “The Weekly” has a fundamental problem in that it too often strives to recount the unimportant or the obvious and too rarely showcases new, valuable insights into the world we live in, nor is its writing ever good enough to justify its existence as a literary thing.

But it would be a mistake to think that the answer to these problems is for “The Weekly” to retreat from the happenings of this building. We will never be The Atlantic, for good reasons, which is to say we are unlikely to see some profound story about the country that we can write better than the surplus of journalists, professionals and amateurs, flooding the pipes of the world wide.

But we can be our own The Atlantic. We can see profound ways in which the issues of the day, of the world, seep into us in ways that transcend the the traditional lists of topics our editors flush on us as they try to get an issue worked out in a twenty-five minute period. We can provide a medium for students to find clarity, or at least a sense of themselves and their peers, in this weird world of privilege and pressure. We can capture how the world seeps into us and how we seep into the world, for better or for worse.