This cover story explored the role of the media, which was under continual attack in the Trump administration. I had the opportunity to interview the publisher and editor of The Dallas Morning News, president of D Magazine, and a regional editor for The Wall Street Journal to glean their perspectives on how the media serves as one of the pillars of democracy.

This is a column accompanying the “Mind over media” cover story. After editing three newspapers, I felt I had good insight into the role our newspaper plays on campus and I wanted to stress the responsibility all staff members and I acknowledge when we plan stories, interview sources and present story packages for our readers.

This story was the lead story in our second Focus magazine of the year, which hoped to prove that “everybody has a story.” Through a random number generator, our school nurse, Julie Doerge was selected, and I got to write this piece. The story of how she and her husband met accidentally and were engaged two weeks after meeting (which has led to a 46-year marriage), was one of the more popular stories in the magazine.

This was a major piece of our October issue’s focus on women. This story profiles two of the longest tenured staff members at St. Mark’s who, together, have more than 98 years combined service to the school. It was a pleasure for me to get to know these two interesting ladies, since I enrolled in St. Mark’s as a freshman, and most of their work is done in the lower grades.

This is a sports column I wrote in which I lament the state of high school athletics, namely football, in the era of COVID-19. Despite my size, I played football junior and senior years, only to find that our normal ten game season was, at first, cancelled; then, two games were carefully scheduled...leaving me with a deep sense of the “what could have beens.”

When we learned that a woman would be assuming the presidency of the school’s Board of Trustees for only the second time in our 110-year history, I knew we had to profile our new leader prominently. This gave me the opportunity to have conversations with Kathy Crow about her vision and priorities as she was beginning her two-year term.

Personal columns allow the writer to inject some of his personality into the piece, and I’m not above a little self-depracation from time to time. Here, I tell about my (embarrassing) attempts to dance — in public, yet, at summer campus in front of more than 200 campers.

This was the first cover story I coordinated as editor-in-chief and, as one might expect considering its timing, it centered on the challenges of the pandemic. In this piece, we explored the impact of COVID-19 to date and interviewed the headmaster and other campus administrators on what they felt school would look like in the future.

With school continuing to be remote for the remainder of the school year, one big question was: What will we do about Commencement? To find out, I wrote this story which detailed alternative plans and possibilities for this most revered school tradition, which is held outside (weather permitting) in the school’s 200-yard Quad.

We had long resisted the opportunity to write about the use of marijuana, simply because we could not find a compelling angle to localize the story for our readers. However, with the increase use of medical marijuana, I felt it was time to write an explanatory piece on this, which explored the possibility of legalization in Texas. This was a coupled with a companion piece on the growing trend of farming marijuana plants as a business venture.