An argosy, our founders liked to remind people, is a merchant ship: a vessel built to carry valuable cargo long distances, through weather. They chose the name three years ago with teenage grandiosity and, it turns out, decent foresight. Ships are defined by what they carry, not by who happens to be at the helm. This week, the helm changes hands. This letter is the log entry.
The Graduates
Graduation season has scattered our founding crew exactly as far as their bylines always suggested it would. With diplomas collected and group chats already renamed, the founding cohort of The Argosy sails on:
Minwoo Jung, our founding Editor-in-Chief and politics columnist, heads to Northwestern, where the elections of the world will find, I promise them, their most relentless reader. Yehee Jung, who built our science and health desk and taught this paper that a column could be a lab notebook, begins the pre-med road at USC. Saerom Kim, whose six-part "Koreans in Georgia" remains the best thing we have published, takes her one question (what did you carry?) to UC Berkeley. Yonghyuk Choi, who proved every week that the game is never just the game, brings that conviction to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Anthony Min, our economics desk and designated auditor of everyone's optimism, joins Vanderbilt. And our two one-year wonders, who arrived in November and immediately raised the paper's standard for honesty about home: Jioh Lee returns to Korea, to Sungkyunkwan University, and Kyusung Lee heads to UC Irvine, trading Friday-night lights for California, though we suspect the sociology of the bleachers travels with him.
Seven writers, five states, two continents, one masthead that will never quite reassemble. The comments section is invited to join us in refusing to be entirely composed about it.
The New Table
The Argosy continues — that was always the founders' one non-negotiable — and they built the bench to prove it. Going forward, the paper is led by an editorial board of four, all of whom readers already know:
Gawon Ryu becomes our Psychology Editor, expanding the desk she has made the paper's most-read. From doomscrolling to Olympic tears to the willpower myth, she has spent two years explaining readers to themselves. David Lee becomes Sustainability Editor, inheriting the beat I love most; since October he has covered basement batteries, broken storm statistics, and the solar century with the rare combination of engineering literacy and human scale. Patrick Kim becomes Culture Editor, succeeding Saerom with his own instrument: where she gave us the ethnography of belonging, he gives us the anatomy of attention, from the death of the monoculture to the halftime show that became the main event. And Olivia Kim, who joined us this spring from Pomfret, continues as our Science & Health writer; her debut on the biology of broken health systems announced, within three paragraphs, that Yehee's desk was in careful hands.
As for me: I've written the sustainability column here for three years, and starting today I serve as The Argosy's second Editor-in-Chief. I have exactly one qualification for the job that matters: I watched, from the inside, how the first crew did it.
The Cargo Manifest
Which brings me to the actual cargo. Engineers are trained to distrust any structure that hangs from a single component; the founders, without ever using the vocabulary, built this paper to that standard, and it is why the ship outlasts the crew. Institutions survive handovers by knowing what they refuse to change, so let me put ours in writing, where readers can hold us to it.
We take the world seriously before anyone asks us to. Nobody assigns this paper its beats; we assign ourselves, and the standing assignment remains everything: ceasefires and cost curves, group chats and Grand Slams, the small weathers of wherever our writers happen to live. We show our work: wrong predictions stay published, corrections happen in public, and the year-end confession ritual survives as long as I hold this job. We practice disagreement, by name, on the record, with people we intend to keep liking; the roundtable remains the heart of the operation. And we write about home without irony, because the founders' deepest discovery was that a paper filed from five time zones could still be about one thing: how people build belonging out of whatever geography hands them.
The founders started this ship as strangers in a group chat who decided the world was their beat. They hand it over as something rarer: proof that the decision was the whole secret. To the seven of them: the masthead is updated, the archive is permanent, and the comments will be watching your campuses for bylines. You are, forever, the founding table.
To our readers: the summer ahead is absurdly full, with a World Cup on this continent and whatever else the world files on deadline. New table, same ship, same heading.
All aboard, again.
Ethan Yang is the second Editor-in-Chief of The Argosy.
