The Circuit: From the Archives

Dear readers,

The Circuit is The Wire’s annual end-of-year magazine where editors, staff members and students have the opportunity to contribute to any section of the paper they want no matter their job title. Following the publication of 20 print newspaper issues this academic year, The Circuit allows experimentation with magazine-style journalism as well as new forms of writing under an important umbrella theme.

In a few days, you will be able to hold the physical version of this magazine — a massive undertaking as it has been out of print for five years.

Putting this magazine back in the hands of our readers was one of our priorities as a leadership team, and assembling it with no institutional memory informing what this process would look like feels very fitting with this year’s theme: from the archives.

As an almost 130-year-old publication, our literal archive spans generations of students and showcases what was important to each of them in their own moment. Although the structure of those pages has changed drastically over the years, student life remains the same. In our coverage this year, we’ve pointed out those similarities through archive pulls, links to old articles and reprinting the occasional photo.

Some of the work that we are most proud of from this year never made the pages of our paper, but informs the way it functions as an institution. We inherited an organization still in recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and hope that we have created a sustainable future for The Wire. This year, one of our primary goals was re-establishing The Wire’s external advisory board. After a five-year hiatus, we’re proud to have it back in place – an exceptional team of Whitman community members and alumni working in industry. We’re so grateful for the support they’ve offered us and their generosity.

The Wire wouldn’t be what it is without the work of the dozens of people who write, photograph, illustrate, copy edit, distribute and design each of its pages. Their hard work is always worthy of celebration. We also want to thank the Associated Students of Whitman College for funding The Wire and ensuring that we are compensated for our work as journalists.

We would also like to express our gratitude for the Spring 2019 production team who produced the most recent print copy of our magazine. With your assistance from a distance, through the inDesign files left behind in our Dropbox archive, you have made this process possible.

Our time at The Wire’s helm is rapidly coming to an end. It’s been an indescribable year, and we’re excited to see the direction it goes in the future. We want to thank our readers and everyone who supports the important work of student journalism. We love The Wire and we hope it shows.

Best,

Kasey Moulton & Rachel Husband

Commentary

Losing the Will to Watch: The Soulless Rise of Live Action Remakes – Keathley Pinney Brown ’24

Logging back On: Using Nostalgia to Explore the Virtual Worlds of the Past – Alexa Grechishkin ’25

Primary Sources – Kasey Moulton ’24

Feature

The Legacy of Borleske Stadium Shaping Whitman Baseball Today – Nat Lange ’24

Preserving Memories Through Cooking – Natalie Comerford ’25

PFAS: Transcending History – Sebastian Squire ’25

In preservation of history: a look inside the home and collection of Fred L. Mitchell – George Groebner ’27

Opinion