Vol. CXXXII · July 10, 2026
Since I was in kindergarten, Spanish Teacher Devon Angelini ’94, P ’27, ’30, then known to me as the mother of one of my classmates, has been a pillar of the Milton family. As a mother to two lifers, a daughter of a past faculty member, and an alumna her self, she has contributed countless hours of time, energy, and effort to the community, building an unbreakable bond with the school that stretches back decades.
According to the popular college-connection website Niche, over 50% of polled students and parents consider Milton a competitive environment, and reasonably so. Students vie for leadership positions, aim for higher grades than their peers, and generally look to “be the best,” whatever that means. Still, we feel like we don’t do enough—as The Milton Paper’s State of the Acad reported in 2025, 82% of respondents felt academically insecure at least rarely, despite 80.7% having an average grade of an A- or above. This imbalance begs the question: to what standards do we compare ourselves, and how should we set them?
On most Fridays, I go to school just like any other student, preoccupied with my next test or homework assignment and happy to learn new math in class or eat lunch at Forbes. On one particular Friday, though, once per year, I could not feel more isolated from both the student body and my beloved hometown of Milton.
In the United States, the top one percent by net worth holds 31.7% of the nation’s wealth, the highest share in almost four decades per Forbes. According to the 2025 “State of the Acad” by The Milton Paper, 43.8% of respondents’ families earn over $500,000, which sits between top 1% and 2% of household earnings.
In Stables on Monday, I rushed in a couple minutes late after finishing a last-minute biology reading. As I set my bag down and looked up to the announcement slideshow, a QR code stared back at me. Scanning it—with my phone, of course, along with everyone else—led me to a Google form and a brutal realization that administrative conversations on a possible phone ban were getting serious.
On the morning of January 3, I woke to excited shouts from the kitchen. My bleary eyes suddenly brightened as I heard the news: the U.S. had captured Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro Moros with no loss of troops or civilian casualties. My Instagram feed was flooded with “¡Venezuela libre!” and “Feliz Año” by Rawayana, and I couldn’t have been happier. Venezuela, I believe, will be free as long as the U.S. moves carefully in the leadership replacement process.
The worst part of hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail last summer wasn’t the blisters, the muddied shoes, or even the racoons who stole the food one night. By far, it was the car rides, where I sat almost losing my mind from frustration at the songs put on by the seven guys also on the trip. We worked at a Maine summer camp, where workers had three days off to take a break from the endless pains of scrubbing toilets and spraying dishes.
In elementary school, I could not stop writing; in my free time, I was etching out some story about a princess-warrior, and in school, I was daydreaming about her magic wand. Consequently, although my English teachers absolutely adored me as I read away—only the best, of course, like Corduroy and Strega Nona—my math teachers didn’t show the same appreciation, probably because I cared more about how Harry Potter was going to find that last Horcrux than what fraction of the Italian flag was green. In fifth grade, though, my mathematical disgrace pushed me toward studying extra hours outside of school until I could finally do algebra with ease.
The U.S.’s two-party system is no doubt very unique to the nation; so unique, in fact, that only about 30 other independent nations have that political structure, according to the World Population Review. Historically, benefits of this arrangement center around government stability, since the two main parties essentially overshadow any smaller party vying for power. While some, like Former President George Washington, have criticized this “alternate domination of one faction over another,” the benefits of two, well-defined parties outweigh the costs by far. As Doctor Trudy Mercadal of Universidad Rafael Landivar states, since multi-party systems lean away from the two-party structure’s “winner-takes-all” methodology, they provide pathways for additional, more radical parties, such as, for example, a socialist third party in Bolivia. If you know me, you know I don’t love socialism, but I also truly believe that in this particular era, any shift towards radicalism, including socialism, could send the country into a never-ending pendulum of extremism and demolish the stable aim of the two-party system. For this very reason, besides personal beliefs, I firmly believe that the Democratic Party should shift away from its recent socialist ventures—like universal healthcare, the Green New Deal, a guarantee of federal jobs, an asset cap, and higher taxes proposed by socialist-leaning leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and, more recently, Zohran Mamdani—and instead embrace the safe bet of moderatism.