I didn’t think I’d get to write one of these again. Regular readers of this section might remember that in our Summer/23 issue, Laura Demanski, AM’94, announced my departure from the Magazine. But after a year at an institution with a slightly different view of Lake Michigan, I turned right back around.

My accidental sabbatical up north was the longest continuous stretch I’d spent away from the University of Chicago since I first arrived here as a student, extremely anxious and with bangs I now regret, in the fall of 2005. Leaving and coming back allowed me—for the first time, really—to see the University and Hyde Park through eyes at once fresh and full of nostalgia.

Everything familiar felt wonderfully new: Look, it’s Jimmy’s! Look, a Doc Films poster! Look, the terrifying moving bookshelves on the B level of the Reg that I still believe, against reason, might squish me! At the same time, everything new felt familiar: the freshly renovated Botany Pond, the new centers and institutes and majors and faculty members, the latest crop of students (who may, in 20 years’ time, regret their own bangs). Plus ça change, as they say.

In the early months of my return, I found myself thinking about something I heard John Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, say at convocation in 2010: “Time, at least for an historian, is a powerful and an inescapable thing—it has its own reasons and its own cunning, and it brings changes that often enrich and yet never fail to complicate our lives.” I take this to mean that it’s OK for things to turn out differently than how you imagined, and that both the past and the present have something to teach us. (Then again, it’s also possible that Boyer was actually making an important point about the Habsburg Empire, and I completely missed it.)

I hope you will consider this my enthusiastic letter of recommendation for revisiting a place you once knew intimately and seeing it anew—with a sense of appreciation for both what it was then and what it is now. Conveniently, for anyone who might like to experience UChicago this way for themselves, Alumni Weekend is May 1–4, 2025. I am living proof: You can go home again.