Written by Suji Paek
Photo by Blake Hamilton

One of the greatest pleasures of producing a magazine is watching its evolution. Over the ten weeks it takes our student staff to create the forty-eight-page medley of culture that is Ethos, prominent themes emerge and stories become inextricably linked by strands of community we didn’t even know existed. This web is much like a culture itself: The distinctive characteristics of one demographic are echoed in another, regardless of how far apart on a map the two lie.
In this issue we explore several communities battling prejudice: two vastly different populations affected by the perils of HIV (Driven to Medicine, HIV+), the Roma people who still struggle for international acceptance (Unraveling the Gypsy Myth), and German-Americans who were interned in U.S. camps during World War II (America’s Forgotten Captives).
What we’ve learned is that culture is not a measure of separation, rather the stitched together squares of a quilt that eclectically and collectively represent what we all share as human beings. Whether we are the square that faces prejudice, the square that fights for the environment and against corporate takeover (A Deal for Seven Devils, Pillaging the Sea, Redefining Radio), or the square of the millennial generation who are working their way into the adult world (Pillaging the Sea, The Next Vinophiles), together we shape the broader culture of humanity.
As you flip through the pages that follow, we invite you to examine the idea of cultural interconnectivity—you may not think you have anything in common with the Bhutanese maidens who perform the Reed Dance for solidarity, but if you look a little deeper, you’re sure to find an unexpected connection.
Editor’s Note: In the last paragraph of Shoot It, Skin It, Stuff It from our Fall 2010 issue, Brian Bradburn was repeatedly mistakenly attributed for David Clark. It was Clark, not Bradburn, who referred to his workshop as, “his little shop of horrors.” Ethos sincerely apologizes for this error.