Well into my twenties, I’ll admit with some shame and to my own peril, I did not know how to properly tie my shoes. I could tie a knot of two bunny ears, but anything involving an adult rabbit being looped around a hole—or maybe he was meant to enter the hole—felt beyond my abilities. It was only a few years ago that, armed with knowledge gleaned from YouTube videos meant for young children, I began a week-long effort to become comfortable with what I now acknowledge is a more satisfying approach to tying shoes.

But I’ve come to wonder which solution I should feel better about: persistence over two decades in making a workaround work for me, or gathering the courage at long last to try to figure out something that most people master before middle school?

Often, doing it ourselves feels like the only way to do the things we want to do. And as our contributors this month discovered, this is true in organizing live music events, in learning to navigate the city, in puppetry, and—perhaps most importantly—in self-care.

It has also been true in putting together this magazine, a DIY experiment if nothing else, originally meant to answer the question of what might happen if we tried to put together a magazine without knowing how.

I’m excited to announce that the experiment continues: We’re coming back in the new year with something new and different. In some cases, we’ll still rely on the workarounds that make this publication feel as accessible as we hope it does. We reserve, for example, the right to continue encouraging the proliferation of amateur horoscopes. In other areas, we’ll try to be a little smarter (YouTube instructional videos are buffering as we speak) about how we put this project together.  

In the meantime, our print publishing arm is keeping tremendously busy, with multiple announcements on the horizon in the very near future.

As always, thank you for reading. We’ll see you in 2019.

Issue cover image: Lucia Buricelli. Issue back cover image: Victor Llorente.