I am one of five graduating staff writers from The Sun’s Arts & Culture department, and as I reflect upon my two years with the paper, I can honestly say that I’ve found my time to be very productive. It was through writing for The Sun that I found an authorial voice, came to appreciate the importance of artistic criticism (my focus area) and learned to seriously consider every word and punctuation mark. The Sun has an incredibly organized editing process that made this type of development possible. The problem is that at The Sun, all of these stages of development are immortalized in publication.

I initially hesitated to end my time on The Sun on a critical note, but during my tenure in Arts and Culture, I’ve come to believe that while criticism can be negative in substance, its purpose is not negative. The New Yorker book critic Becca Rothfeld once said, “I regard my criticism as a demand for the perfection that novels, in virtue of their magic, owe us. Simone Weil once wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘It seems to me certain that this constitutes a serious imperfection in you. And why should there be any imperfection in you? It does not suit you in the least to be imperfect. It is like a wrong note in a beautiful song.’” 

Similarly, The Sun’s editor-in-chief, Sophia Dasser, recently wrote that the biggest threat facing the University is “surrender to the darkness of mediocrity that dims us. The Sun burns to resist that dimming.” With the........

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