Ah, the last gasp of summer. A final chance to achieve escape — however briefly — before life’s routines take over. Exiting your traditional orbit, however briefly, brings perspective, renewal, and sometimes initiates change. That’s why it’s important to do some summer wandering, visit places you’ve never been, whether on your feet or in your mind.  

In this issue of ITF, we ponder pathways, where we’re going, where we’ve been, and what keeps us where we are. Francis Raven’s interview with Sasha Cagen, the founder of To-Do List magazine, investigates the quirky objectives that we jot down on the back of envelopes and what they say about us. “A good list raises questions and tells a story, but it’s elliptical” Cagan says. Lists, like a slice of our tissue under a microscope, illuminate the mystery of who we are, by showing who we hope to be.

To know where we’re going, it helps to know where we’ve been. Columnist Afi Scruggs examines the recent trial of Edgar Ray Killen to explore our country’s shameful history of racist violence and gauge the extent of our progress. To understand the current atmosphere in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, and where Scruggs, in 1989, still found signs of segregation, is to realize how far America has come.

Finally, teacher Tara Horn discusses what it means to be a foreigner in her essay about her Shan students in Thailand. Hounded out of Burma by the ruling military dictatorship, but not officially recognized as refugees, immigrants from Shan survive in Chiang Mai by keeping a low profile, and hiding their national identity. Caught in political limbo, young men and women study in secret, in hopes of getting a say in their own future — and that of their homeland.  

The importance of going somewhere new is often what it reveals about all the old places your return to. Whether you stay home or go abroad, see where summer takes you.

Nicole Leistikow
Managing Editor
Baltimore

Nicole Leistikow