Editor's Note: This is the last roundtable for the writers who built this paper. The Argosy continues — next month's masthead will introduce itself properly, and readers have already met much of it — but this particular table, in this particular configuration, convenes for the final time. They set their own house rule: no speeches. Ask each other the questions you never got around to. Lightly edited for length; the laughter has been left where it fell.
Minwoo Jung
So. Three years, several hundred pieces, seven time zones of deadline complaints, and this is the final time I will get to say: welcome to the roundtable.
House rule tonight is no speeches. Therefore, a question, to anyone brave enough: what is the piece you didn't write?
Yonghyuk Choi
Easy. The one where I admit I cried at a golf tournament.
Tournaments, plural. The sports desk projects analytical detachment. The sports desk got misty at a Ryder Cup APOLOGY STATEMENT.
Saerom Kim
The piece I didn't write is the first draft of Part 1 of my series, which was terrible, and which said "as an objective observer" in the opening paragraph. I was never objective. It took me six parts to admit who I was writing about.
My question back: what did you all figure out embarrassingly late?
Anthony Min
That readers could tell when I didn't understand something. Early on I wrote around the holes with confident vocabulary. The comments found every hole. Markets are efficient. Comment sections, terrifyingly more so.
Yehee Jung
Embarrassingly late realization: my best pieces were the ones where I changed my mind while writing them. I used to treat that as evidence of poor planning. It took two years to see it was the entire job — the column was the lab notebook, not the press release.
Jioh Lee
I have only been at this table since November, so my late realization is very recent. I spent my first two pieces trying to sound like a writer. I spent the third one trying to say true things about the place I am from.
Only one of those approaches produced mail from strangers.
Kyusung Lee
Same seat, same timeline. What I learned embarrassingly late — like, February — is that "sports and society" isn't a beat. It's a permission slip. This paper let me write about faith and belonging with box scores as the door.
I thought I was smuggling. Turns out the editors could see the smuggling the whole time and that was, apparently, the point.
Minwoo Jung
It was extremely visible smuggling. We approved every shipment.
Yehee Jung
My question, since no one has dared ask it in three years: did anyone actually read the group chat all the way through? Ever? Once?
a silence the transcript cannot do justice to
Saerom Kim
Moving on. Real question, real answers: what does this paper get to claim? When we're old and insufferable about having founded a student newspaper — what's the true sentence we're allowed to say?
Minwoo Jung
That we took the world seriously before anyone asked us to. Nobody assigned a group of teenagers the ceasefires and the central banks and each other's homesickness. We assigned ourselves. That is the entire claim, and I believe it suffices.
Anthony Min
Narrower claim: we showed our work. Wrong predictions left standing. Corrections in public. Confessions every December. I'm proudest of the graveyard of my bad calls.
Yonghyuk Choi
I'd claim the roundtable itself. Anyone can post takes. We practiced disagreeing — on the record, by name, with people we had to keep liking afterward. Do you know how rare that is on the internet we grew up on?
And my closing question, because someone has to: what are you stealing from someone at this table?
Kyusung Lee
Saerom's habit of asking one question and then shutting up. It's interview technique and it's also, I've decided, a theology.
Jioh Lee
Anthony's rule. Follow the incentives. I intend to apply it to every institution I attend for the rest of my life. Including, prophylactically, this newspaper.
Yehee Jung
Minwoo's discipline — what we know, what we feel, what we hope, in that order. I came for the science. That sentence structure is what I'm leaving with.
Saerom Kim
Yonghyuk's conviction that the game is never just the game. It transferred to everything. The potluck is never just the potluck.
Anthony Min
Yehee's lab-notebook honesty. If I ever write again, the draft will say "here is where I changed my mind" in the actual text.
Minwoo Jung
And I am stealing from the two newest members, which ought to embarrass the rest of us. Jioh and Kyusung arrived in November and immediately wrote about home. No throat-clearing. No proving-ground pieces. It took me two years of geopolitics to write one honest paragraph about Seoul.
The kids, as the saying goes, are faster.
Last order of business. Next month this table belongs to others — you know their names from these pages, and the paper is in alarmingly good hands; the handover letter will do the formalities in June. Spring is doing its usual thing where several of us learn, via envelope, what happens next. Watch this space.
Final thoughts. One sentence each. No crying. Yonghyuk is exempt from the second rule for medical reasons.
Closing statements
Minwoo Jung
We were seven strangers in five time zones who decided the world was our beat — and the great surprise of my adolescence is that the deciding was all it took.
Yehee Jung
Somewhere in three years of deadlines I stopped writing to seem smart and started writing to get it right, and that is the entire education, and it happened here.
Saerom Kim
I came to this paper a newcomer documenting a community and leave having been documented into one — every door I knocked on turned out to be mine.
Yonghyuk Choi
[exercising the medical exemption] Box score reads: three years, one family, no losses that stayed losses.
Anthony Min
Best trade I will ever make: three years of unpaid labor for a lifetime supply of people who tell me when I'm wrong.
Jioh Lee
Five months, and I found the thing I had been between countries looking for — it turns out "where are you really from" can be answered with a masthead.
Kyusung Lee
Under the lights on Friday, in the pews on Sunday, and around this table on deadline — same congregation, and I got to belong to all three.
To every reader who argued with us in the comments, corrected our numbers, and came back anyway: this paper was always a conversation, and you were the other half. Keep reading. The Argosy continues. — The founding table
