MIT staff blogger Chris Peterson SM '13

the blogs turn twenty 👴🏻 by Chris Peterson SM '13

the posts start coming and they don't stop coming

It is a venerable tradition of the blogs to begin a post by apologizing for being late, and whom am I to reject tradition? So let me first say that: the blogs actually turned twenty on August 6th, 2024. But as you get older, time has a way of sneaking up and past you, the way that, for many people, one’s birthday shifts from being a moment of annual celebration to a puzzling punctuation in the calendar. Hmm! I say to the mirror, looking at nearly forty-year-old man in the mirror, where a bright-eyed twenty-three year old MIT Admissions officer used to be; how did that happen? 

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me

Twenty years of blogs! When the blogs turned ten, I wrote that I knew we’d keep blogging, but wasn’t sure if the audience would remain for the Class of 2019 as it had for the Class of 2009. And yet it has, as we sit here working to admit the Class of 2029. We still have writers and readers.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—

When the blogs were created in 2004, the iPhone didn’t exist. Neither did Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, tumblr,  Snapchat, Uber, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Github or Google Maps; or for that matter, most of our applicants. Netflix was a subscription service that mailed physical DVDs to your house. The Higgs boson and gravitational waves were a decade away from discovery. Multiple Mars rovers have landed, explored, and died on the surface of the red planet in the time we have been posting Online.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

So today, the twentieth of the first calendar month of this, our twentieth year, I wanted to let you know that we’ve asked some of our crufty distinguished alum bloggers to come back and share some of their memories with us. Over the next week or so, if you see posts from them, do not be alarmed! Treat them kindly, help them cross the street, and hang out in their comments. They are here to visit from the past, to tell you about what it was like when your present was their future, as is the fate of all of us.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.