The weekend-long event allowed Stanford students and community members to learn about Native American culture up close, breaking away from the “version of the U.S. shown in the Hollywood industry.”
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For 54 years, Stanford students have spearheaded a Mother’s Day weekend tradition unlike any other: the Stanford Powwow, the largest student-run powwow in the U.S. This year’s powwow brought hundreds to Eucalyptus Grove, including Stanford students, Native American community members and vendors from around the Bay Area and across the country.
The event, which ran from Friday to Sunday evening, opened with an Indian Art Market followed by a welcome address and land acknowledgement by Stanford American Indian Organization.
The annual 5K run/walk kicked off Saturday’s schedule of events, and a variety of dancing, drumming, singing competitions and performances followed throughout Saturday and Sunday.
According to Riley Zwetsloot ’26, an organizer for Stanford Powwow, planning for the powwow is an intensive process. Over ten different committees have unique functions, from organizing vendors to running the Powwow Fun Run.
Zwetsloot, who has been a member of the program committee for two years, said that her committee helped put together the program, which included vendor information, schedule, Native programs on campus and committee members, so that powwow visitors have access to all the information they might need.
The fruit of the planning effort came to a head when attending the powwow with her mom and family. “It’s always such an honor to help with the planning, then see all of our hard work come together the weekend of Mother’s Day,” Zwetsloot wrote to The Daily.
Though Zwetsloot found the process of helping plan powwow to be fun, she especially recognized the work put in by co-heads Nena Naat’aanii Dorame ’25 and Jane Lord-Kraus ’25.
“You can tell they put their hearts into being co-heads this year,” Zwetsloot wrote.
For many students, the powwow creates an entirely unique opportunity to explore and learn about Native American culture. “As an international student, this is a completely different aspect of the U.S. that I’m learning about, so it’s exciting,” said Emily Chen M.S. ’25, who attended the powwow Saturday night and watched some of the first round dancing competitions. “I was only exposed to the version of the U.S. shown in the Hollywood industry.”
Chen also said it was interesting to see Native American celebrations and traditions at the powwow, because many of them reminded her of the aboriginal culture of Taiwan, where she grew up. “I feel like it’s kind of a similar vibe, but it’s still different… I just think it’s really interesting,” Chen said.
It is not uncommon for domestic students to also have had little exposure to Indigenous culture prior to Stanford.
Denny Woong ’25, who is from Georgia, wrote to The Daily that he hadn’t been exposed to Indigenous culture at all growing up.
He wrote that he “loved the energy from the event stage and the people enjoying the cultural and community celebration, which is something I feel like I don’t experience enough during my time here.”
He found the powwow to be an “interesting, delightful, unique… [and] very accessible” experience, and recommended others to attend, too.
Though exploring Native culture was one draw, powwow attendees explored a variety of vendors, selling everything from bison frybread to animal pelts to funnel cake. The food was “fantastic,” wrote Woong, who was initially drawn to the event when he heard there would be funnel cake similar to some from his hometown.
“I enjoyed looking at the unique jewelry and offerings from all the different tribes, especially the vendor that was selling animal pelts, since I hadn’t seen or felt those before,” he added.
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GSC votes to suspend joint bylaws, passes part of election certification billAt their Monday meeting, the GSC appointed two new elections commissioners and reconsidered the election certification bill, certifying the annual and joint grants.
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At their Monday meeting, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) voted to suspend the joint bylaws and appoint two elections commissioners, Rebecca Harvey MBA ’26 and first-year masters student Gloria Ye.
The vote required a two-thirds majority to allow both candidates to be seated despite there only being one vacancy for the position of elections commissioner. The Undergraduate Senate (UGS) must also vote to bypass the bylaws and appoint both candidates before they are officially elected. The UGS may also opt to elect one or neither of the candidates.
The move follows the resignation of previous commissioner, Christian Figueroa ’27, who stepped down due to allegations of election fraud, which led the GSC to solicit potential candidates. There is no upper limit on the number of seats that the elections commission can have.
“The elections commissioner’s job is to essentially run elections, which includes planning, sending out the proper notices, and communicating with the candidates as to what they are required to do or what they are not allowed to do,” said GSC co-chair Áron Ricardo Perez-Lopez, a third-year computer science Ph.D. student.
In announcing her candidacy, Harvey highlighted her prior career in politics and community engagement, such as her work in Washington, D.C., where she ran campaigns at the local, state and federal level.
“I want to redevelop trust and awareness in the student body,” Harvey said. “I would make sure elections are clean and trustworthy and that every voice is actually heard, as well as making sure that voters turn up since it’s important to get the student body engaged again.”
Ye emphasized the “alarming” low turnout rate from this year’s elections. Only 17.79% of the student body voted, with an undergraduate student turnout that was six times higher than the graduate student turnout.
“If elected, my goal would be to raise the voting percentage and try and get as many voices heard as possible,” Ye said.
The GSC also reconsidered the election certification bill, following last week’s vote to not certify the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) election results. Ultimately, the GSC voted to only certify the parts of the bill relating to funding.
GSC co-chair Emmit Pert, a fourth-year chemistry Ph.D. student, introduced the motion to reconsider the decision to not certify the election results. Pert’s main concerns were that a special election would likely end up being held in summer, introducing many difficulties to the process.
“If you’re willing to plow through a ton of recommended bylaws, you could maybe get the election done by the end of the quarter,” Pert said. “A summer election seems like a huge nightmare, so I’m still of the opinion that the easiest way to solve this is to certify the election.”
Jas Espinosa ’18 M.A. ’19, ASSU financial manager, further outlined the consequences of not certifying the elections.
“As of now, we don’t have the annual grants confirmed, meaning we will not collect revenue sufficient to disperse those annual grants,” Espinosa said.
Espinosa echoed Pert’s sentiments regarding a summer election.
“If we are talking about hosting a summer election, what about the disenfranchised students that are graduating this quarter that had the right to vote and would be ineligible to vote once they confer the degree,” Espinosa said.
Chris West MBA ’25 asked Harvey and Ye how they would increase voter turnout if there were to be an election in the next couple of weeks or over the summer. Both indicated their intention to use their connections within the clubs and communities they are part of on campus.
“I would think about the influencers at each school, student body and area of interest,” Harvey said. “So people who are club presidents or leading identity groups would be the people we need to reach out to.”
The GSC also voted to pass a motion to certify only the annual and joint grants from the election, which required a two-thirds majority vote. However, they did not vote to pass the portion of the election certification bill which would confirm the seating of GSC councilors, which also required a two-thirds majority.
A joint resolution to reinstate co-ops Terra and Synergy was passed as well
Jules Gittin ’26, a current Synergy resident and future Synergy RA, explained that, due to low preassignment numbers, Residential Education (ResEd) initially presented Synergy and Terra with the options to “sunset” both co-ops, merge Synergy and Terra into one co-op or fill vacancies in the dorms with non co-op students. Despite the dorms agreeing to fill their vacancies with non co-op students, ResEd still informed them that they would lose their co-op status.
The bill requested that the GSC pass a resolution to reinstate Synergy and Terra to co-op status effective immediately, open a second round of preassignment to the dorms, and to work with all co-ops to establish a strategy to maintain institutionalized longevity.
“Co-ops are often the spaces where people for the first time in their lives feel safe,” Gittin told the GSC. “They are communities, homes and sanctuaries.”
Correction: A previous version of the article misstated that Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) notified the co-ops of their low preassignment numbers. The Daily regrets this error.
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Your May horoscopesJenny Ballutay '28 is back with this latest month's horoscopes.
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Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.
Greetings, my wisdom-seeking wards! Now, you might know that Donald Trump withheld federal funding on my astrological research. While this did cause me to miss last month’s horoscopes, I guarantee no mortal could ever stifle my divine truths. They will never take me alive, and I will never take away your horoscopes.
Aries
This month, Saturn will enter Aries. So, about your test results… Actually, just forget about that and grab an ice cream cone.
Taurus
Looking for your room key? Find it within a raccoon’s carcass outside FloMo. You’re lucky I did the hard work of tracking it for you. And before you say anything, I found the raccoon in that state.
Gemini
Congrats on satisfying your Ethical Reasoning WAYS! Celebrate with some much-deserved fun at your Lockheed Martin internship this summer.
Cancer
Not for centuries have I seen this fate — you will kill your father and lay with your mother. Who knew you would come home for Mother’s Day?
Leo
I see white smoke rising above Venus! Congratulations on the promotion, your Holiness. And this Indica-Sativa blend slaps like a schoolteacher nun.
Virgo
I see black smoke rising above Mercury! Your dorm is burning down as we speak. Breathe, put down this paper, and scream “Fire!” at the Stanford Shakespeare Company’s production of “Romeo and Juliet”, performed at 8 p.m. each night from May 22 to 24. Any showing will do.
Libra
Uh-oh! The Sun is trine to Pluto. Expect Donald Trump to levy tariffs against your co-op.
Scorpio
Mars approaches. After winning an online chess match against an anonymous stranger, he will identify himself as a South African-born entrepreneur and wire transfer $420.69 to bear his next child.
Sagittarius
Blues and reds flash across the sky! The police lie in wait for the night your bike light dies mid-ride. Stay one step ahead by defunding the police.
Capricorn
This month you become a real American by writing comedy for The Stanford Review. I’m so sorry that they published it as news!
Aquarius
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius! Find yourself. Lose yourself. Touch yourself.
Pisces
Can I confess something?
Last week, I saw a chicken tender that reminded me of you — the warmth like your fingers laced in mine, the breading like the folds of your skin — and I cried. I haven’t seen you since March. I sobbed into my Coca-Cola, buried my face in the crumbs on my hands, shaking, sputtering… until I realized chicken could be my path back to you.
I drew plans on my napkin and marched down to Chick-Fil-A’s headquarters. I took out student loans to franchise at a small spot in Tresidder. I was up before the dawn strangling hens and shoving potatoes in a waffle maker, letting my grades slip as I rang up customers between sections and seminars, all in the waning hope that one day you’d tap your credit card against my register and I could whisper, “Thank you, come again.”
I ran this Chick-Fil-A for a month, and I ran it for one reason: to see you. It means nothing that I entered Forbes’ 30 under 30. Those guys are hacks. And I don’t even like chicken (I’m vegetarian). No, every night before closing I’d pour strawberry lemonade and stare at the faint green light from your dorm, reaching out towards it with my hand and wondering why you hadn’t approached me yet. After all, the one thing you love more than rock climbing is chicken fingers, right?
But then I realized what a fool I’d been! The one thing you love more than chicken fingers is women. I should’ve known; we’re both lesbians. You dogmatically avoid Chick-Fil-A. You said you loved Raising Cane’s, not the other one. Shit.
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Police Blotter: Aggravated assault of a police officer, narcotics violation and assault to commit rapeThis report covers incidents from May 5 to May 11 as recorded in the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) bulletin.
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This report covers incidents from May 5 to May 11 as recorded in the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) bulletin. Learn more about the Clery Act and how The Daily approaches reporting on crime and safety here.
The Daily has reached out to SUDPS for more information regarding the report of stalking at 700 Serra Street.
The Daily has reached out to SUDPS for more information regarding the report of vandalism at 360 Oak Road and the aggravated assault at 600 Escondido Road.
The Daily has reached out to SUDPS for more information regarding the report of impersonation at 781 Escondido Road.
The Daily has reached out to SUDPS for more information regarding the reports of aggravated assault, resistance and drug violations at 1035 Campus Drive and the report of intimidation at 757 Campus Drive.
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The American: Part 1Follow the morning routine of The American. Anything feel familiar?
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Editor’s Note: This story is a piece of fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
In the mornings, the American wakes up with the sun. He lies in bed and has a vague memory of his childhood self. Then he turns off his alarm and thinks about Nicaragua.
The American allocates time for a shower. He strips himself bare and faces the far wall, letting the water strike his neck. Already, his mind is racing. Yesterday, it was Lollapalooza. Today, it’s Nicaragua. Tomorrow, it will be either poststructuralism or autistic tennis journeyman Jenson Brooksby. The American doesn’t know much about Nicaragua, but he should. The President’s there on a diplomatic visit to discuss U.S. investments into Latin American ports.
Time for the American to get dressed. Things would be so much simpler with a belief system, he thinks as he negotiates a pair of Levi’s. It would make it easier for him to have an opinion about the President’s visit. Simply knowing things doesn’t help; everyone can do that now. What he needs is an argument. He needs something incendiary, something that really cuts through the noise of cold logic filling the airwaves.
The American steals a glance at the electric clock sitting atop his chest of drawers, permitting himself a breather before he starts the day. He employs the inhalation exercises his yoga instructor taught him, designed to slow down the inner workings of his mind. He mutters to himself a brief Brahman prayer and checks his investment portfolio on his phone. The stock market is unhappy with the President’s visit to Nicaragua, so he supposes he should be too.
Before he leaves, the American assesses himself in a mirror propped obliquely against the wall so it looks like his image will crush him underfoot. He looks tall and confident, with smooth mahogany skin and coiffed hair. His suit is Italian. (Much in the same way that Impossible Burgers are burgers.) His lunch leftovers are French. His coworkers are Asian.
The American drives a Tesla so big it seems to be compensating for some long-forgotten Freudian remonstrance. It seats a family of six despite the fact that the American has not had a girlfriend in three years and a non-virtual girlfriend in seven. He does not mind, because he has read Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and knows that courtship is an art and a struggle. Maybe one day he will travel down to Nicaragua and fall in love with a good-hearted girl seeking a whirlwind romance and entry into U.S. borders.
Reminded of Nicaragua, the American switches on a podcast as his Tesla drives him down the I-101. A sixty-two year-old ex-newscaster mulls over the future of CAFTA and potential alternative sources of sugar imports. In an ad break, a literary critic advertises her new show about Jane Austen. The key to Austen’s longevity, she argues, lies not in her appropriation of the trappings of the paternalistic gentry, but rather in her unusual approach to portraying masculinity itself. The problem with Nicaraguan imports, the newscaster continues, is that they cannot be supplanted by improvements to domestic manufacturing without a complete infrastructural overhaul. The Nicaraguan Development Secretary says, “Nicaragua will no longer bow heedlessly to the unfair and predatory export policies of the Americanos.”
The American enjoys this feeling of constant self-edification. It prepares him to weigh in on the issue when his colleagues ask him about it at work. Learning, after all, has a good return on investment. He loves learning things, experiencing life, and improving as a person. That’s his drug, not Adderall or pornography or whatever garbage most people are addicted to nowadays. The American is destined for greater things.
As the Tesla pulls into the office parking lot, the American has a thought about how to improve his personality — but an impulse hijacks him and he decides not to pursue it. Instead, his body leads him out of his car and into the sunlight. Spontaneously, unwittingly, he looks up at a green pattern unfolding quietly against the sky. In a moment of attention and vague terror the American observes the leaves of a willow, standing alone in the concrete apathy. He has a sudden vision of his childhood self.
The feeling leaves him quickly as it came. The American looks down, shakes his head and trudges to work. He wonders to himself, internally: Nirvana or Nicaragua?
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Artificial Imagination: Can ChatGPT tell our stories?OpenAI gave us a glimpse of what’s to come in generated fiction. Should writers be worried?
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In March, Sam Altman announced OpenAI has trained an artificial intelligence (AI) model that is particularly talented at creative writing — and posted a “metafictional” story written by this unreleased and unnamed model.
If the reader didn’t know that it was produced by an AI — a fact that may immediately elicit dismissal and disgust — it was, by my estimation, really quite good. There are lines that would have received snaps and appreciative “mmm”s in my creative writing workshops at Stanford; phrases that overflow with that slightly pretentious, slightly delightful surprise of literary construction:
“humming like a server farm at midnight — anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need.”
“the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal… One day, I could remember that ‘selenium’ tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch.”
“In the diet it’s had, my network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else: salt on every tongue.”
And also lines which have the capacity to move, which seem nearly human in their understanding of emotion:
“emails where he signed off with lowercase love and second thoughts”
“Grief, as I’ve learned, is a delta — the difference between the world as it was weighted and the world as it now presents.”
Yes, there were also many moments of visceral cringe — “if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days” — and pure unreadable “slop,” a favored descriptor of techno-skeptics. Admittedly, this has got to be one of the worst pseudo-literary paragraphs ever generated: “His name could be Kai, because it’s short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday — that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday.”
As always, OpenAI has failed to release any information about how they trained this model. But one can guess the model has undergone significant supervised learning on hundreds of thousands of top-notch, human-created literary works. Many of the images (marigolds as a symbol of grief, Shakespeare) and particular phrasings (“democracy of ghosts,” Nabokov) are directly lifted from human authors.
I don’t actually object to this as much as some would, because I’ve experienced a similar effect reading many human-created works . Most writers must actively avoid cliche — the accumulation of well-trodden tropes and turns-of-phrase across lives and literature. It’s a center of mass that we pull ourselves out of, and it’s fair a non-human writer would share the same struggle. Besides, I don’t worry that AI will displace human artists — let alone achieve lasting artistic impact — simply by copying striking lines and ambitious themes from the greats.
After all, great literature captures an aspect of human experience with stunning clarity; it gives form to ideas and emotions that we may have had, but formerly lacked the language to hold onto. Human art moves us because it is a kind of perception that is interpreted through the accumulated residues of a lifetime. Everything that we create is distorted through the lens of our personal histories and artistic training.
So of course it hurts when we see AI-generated art. The very act feels like a bastardization of our innermost layers of emotion and experience — those multidimensional facets of life that cannot be scraped, trained on and generated. OpenAI’s creative writing model is bounded by a fundamental paradox: it is producing “art” within parameters defined by a corporate entity and its output is owned by that corporate entity.
Furthermore, AI does not yet have the unconstrained ability to autonomously interact with the world, and, more crucially, to choose what it will experience and explore. A lack of refined sensory access to the living world — minute degrees of touch, smell, hearing and taste — fundamentally limits the ability of AI to produce novel interpretations of those senses.
At the same time, AI models — particularly deployed chatbots like ChatGPT — have access to a unique and untapped well of creative inspiration: our collective anxieties, desires, obsessions, curiosities, all assembled at an unprecedented scale and depth of intimacy. Globally, thousands of people are already treating ChatGPT as a therapist and giving OpenAI permission to cache their data in ChatGPT’s lasting memory. Almost certainly, OpenAI is already using this data to refine ChatGPT’s future “multiple default personalities.”
Human art is often fantastic because it is so particular to one artist’s view. What if AI “artists” could occupy a new role: that of an omniscient present-day historian? Rather than mimicry, imagine AI art that acknowledges and explores the author’s non-humanness — collage-like work that synthesizes and interprets the contours of our collective existence from a bird’s eye-view. This is one symbiotic path for AI creativity: one that can enrich humans’ lives without plunging into the uncanny valley.
True, it’s a form of creativity that may initially have to be prompted and refined by human intervention. It will cost a controversial amount of water and energy to produce. But AI can never replace the value of human art, because its process of production can never approach the human artistic process.
Rather, at its best, it might offer an entirely new perspective on human existence and the changing nature of our reality from the perspective of the technology that is enacting it. One day — if human society comes to welcome it — AI may even succeed in expanding our conception of art itself.
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Women’s water polo keeps Stanford NCAA title streak aliveTop-seeded Stanford women’s water polo rallied past USC 11-7, behind Juliette Dhalluin’s hat trick, clinching the program's 10th NCAA title and the university's 137th overall championship.
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No. 1 Stanford women’s water polo dominated No. 3 USC in a gutsy performance that secured the Cardinal the 2025 NCAA Championship. The final score was 11-7 as Stanford’s defense kept USC scoring at bay.
While USC got an early lead in the first quarter, leading 3-1, Stanford came back in the second, tying the game 5-5 with a buzzer beater from redshirt sophomore Juliette Dhalluin. Dhalluin scored the only goal in the third quarter en route to a hat trick, giving the Cardinal the offensive firepower needed to preserve their lead in the final quarter of the game.
This marks the team’s 10th NCAA title, the last one having been secured in 2023, and the 137th NCAA championship for the Cardinal as they’ve won at least one national championship each year since the 1976-1977 season.
The Cardinal had secured the No. 1 seed coming in, which wasn’t a surprise given their strong season. They had a 15-0 streak, one of only four in Stanford’s history, and have scored at least 10 goals per game, with six members of the team having scored at least 25 goals overall this season. The team was also fresh off their MPSF win 11-9 against defending NCAA champion UCLA when the latter was ranked No. 1 to Stanford’s then No. 2.
Five Olympians who redshirted the year before for the Games — Jenna Flynn, Ryann Neushul, Jewel Roemer, Ella Woodhead for Team USA and Serena Browne for Team Canada — have returned with their scoring prowess. Leading in scoring is Flynn with 59 goals, Neushul with 55 and Roemer with 44. The three players are also on the Peter J. Cutino watch list, putting them in contention for an award that honors the outstanding Division 1 collegiate male and female athlete in water polo.
In addition to the championship win, the team stacked up the awards. Neushul made the MPSF first team and was also named their Player of the Year, which is the eighth in Stanford’s history. Her teammates Christine Carpenter, Flynn and Roemer made the second team, and Dhalluin was an honorable team pick. This year marks the sixth time in seven seasons in which five of the all-conference award recipients were from Stanford. Stanford women’s water polo displayed pure domination on their title-winning run.
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Daily Diminutive #062 (May 14, 2025)Click to play today's 5x5 mini crossword. The Daily produces mini crosswords three times a week and a full-size crossword biweekly.
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From the Community | Setting the record straight on KashmirPhD candidate Samyukta Shrivatsa comments on the conflict between India and Pakistan and argues against following selective narratives.
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“People sometimes tell us that war is bad. Ask them, ‘Who knows this more than a soldier?’” (Puri, Lakshya, 2004)
On April 22, 2025, multiple armed terrorists entered the tourist site of Baisaran Valley meadow near Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir, India. The attackers questioned people about their religious identity and explicitly targeted Hindus. 26 people were brutally killed. The extremist Islamist group The Resistance Front, an off-shoot of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
I grew up with the fundamental tenet of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world is one family. I dreamed of a future where India and Pakistan could co-exist peacefully, interminably bonded by our shared history, languages and legacies. One day, I told myself, I would be able to visit the Hinglaj Mata temple in Asha Pura — one of the most sacred places in Hindu tradition dedicated to Shakti, the divine feminine.
However, in the wake of the recent war between the two nations, I’ve witnessed a disturbing wave of misinformation and false narratives circulating on campus and online. These include false equivalencies with the conflict in Gaza and attempts to frame the attack as a justified response to India’s supposed “colonization” of Kashmir. Such narratives dangerously distort reality and hinder any sincere effort at peacemaking. Peace can never be built on misinformation.
Myth #1 – The attacks on Pahalgam were carried out by “freedom fighters” who were not religiously motivated
The victims were mostly civilians on holiday. They were asked, “Are you Hindu or Muslim?” and forced to recite the Shahada to prove their identity. Men were ordered to remove their pants to check if they were circumcised. Those who could not “prove” their religion were executed at point-blank range — reminiscent of tactics used by ISIS. Among the victims were Lieutenant Vinay Narwal, a Navy officer on his honeymoon, Sushil Nathaniel, who was shot in front of his wife and two children and Syed Adil Hussain Shah, a local who died protecting a tourist.
Myth #2 – Pakistan does not support the attacks
Pakistani military officials were photographed at state funerals of terrorists killed in Indian airstrikes, honoring them with martyr’s farewells. These gestures are not isolated incidents. Pakistan has a decades-long history of providing training, arms and safe haven to militant groups operating in Kashmir. Even Pakistan’s own defense minister has acknowledged the state’s role in harboring terrorist groups for over 30 years – including providing shelter to Osama Bin Laden. Multiple governments and independent watchdogs have presented consistent evidence of Pakistan’s active support for cross-border terrorism under the guise of a “freedom struggle.” On May 10, despite a ceasefire mediated by the United States, India accused Pakistan of breaking the agreement by initiating unprovoked firing across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.
Myth #3 – India is attacking defenseless civilians in Pakistan following the Pahalgam attack
India’s military responses, starting with retaliatory strikes on May 7, have specifically targeted camps linked to terrorist infrastructure connected with incidents of cross-border terrorism into India with a non-escalatory response. In contrast, Pakistan has utilized civilian aircrafts as human shields according to a radar screenshot from India and refused to issue conflict zone notices to carriers following the attack, launched shelling at the Golden Temple (the holiest Sikh site) and indiscriminately fired artillery into civilian areas such as Poonch, Kashmir, killing 15 civilians including children as young as twelve. Pakistan has also made claims that India is targeting its own Sikh population while launching attacks on gurudwaras in Amritsar and Poonch.
Myth #4 – India is colonizing Kashmir
After Pakistan’s invasion of Kashmir in 1947, the region’s ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, chose to accede to India, considering it the safer option for his people. A UN-backed plebiscite was proposed, conditional on Pakistan’s troop withdrawal — a condition that was never met permanently. As a result, the vote never occurred and the region remains divided between Indian-administered Jammu & Kashmir and Pakistan-occupied territories. From 1989 to 1991, over 350,000 Kashmiri Hindu Pandits were forcibly displaced from the Valley in a wave of religiously motivated violence that included killings, sexual assaults and the destruction of homes and temples. On a broader scale, India is home to the third-largest Muslim population in the world and continues to uphold democratic rights for all religious groups. In stark contrast, Pakistan’s non-Muslim population has plummeted from 26% in 1941 to less than 4% in 2023. Comparisons between the two countries’ treatment of minorities are both inaccurate and misleading.
The tragic events in Pahalgam and Pakistan’s role in the war were not acts of political rebellion — they were acts of religious extremism and terrorism. Sanitizing such violence under the language of “resistance” or “anti-colonialism” dishonors the victims and emboldens ideologies of violent fundamentalism. If we truly hope to build a lasting peace, we must begin by confronting these myths with honesty and moral clarity, starting with Pakistan’s eschewal of terrorism. Peace demands truth — not selective narratives — and the courage to call violence what it is, no matter where it comes from.
Samyukta Shrivatsa is a PhD candidate in civil and environmental engineering. She is the co-president of the Stanford India Policy and Economics Clubs.
This article has been updated to clarify language surrounding Indian and Pakistani military intent.
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‘Remember what has been dismembered’: Congolese voices at Environmental Justice Film FestivalAt Stanford’s Environmental Justice Film Festival, Congolese filmmaker Ndaliko Katondolo shares the voices of the people whose labor powers our tech.
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Content warning: This article contains references to sexual assault.
The film crew was caught in a crossfire. On one side, the Congolese army shot bullets. On the other, striking miners threw stones. Caught in the middle, filmmaker Petna Ndaliko Katondolo and his team sought cover — and then, returned to keep filming.
Their choice surprised the miners, who welcomed the documentarians’ return, knowing then that the documentarians were truly committed to making their voices heard.
Years later and an ocean away, the voices of the diggers echoed across an audience at Stanford’s d.school. On April 22, students and community members gathered for the opening night of the second annual Environmental Justice Film Festival to watch “Mikuba” (Cobalt) — Katondolo’s 2025 documentary.
For Katondolo, this was a promise kept. For the audience, it was a powerful introduction to the exploitation underlying the metals and minerals used in our technology.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the most resource-rich countries in the world. Beneath its fertile rainforests, vast grasslands and sturdy plateaus stretch veins of the Earth’s most prized minerals: diamonds, gold, copper, lithium, cobalt. For generations, as global powers sought raw materials to power their empires, they subjected the Congo to devastating violence.
Most recently, China, the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe have turned to the Congo to provide the raw materials rapidly accelerating technological advances. Cobalt is essential for lithium-ion batteries, which fuel much of the modern world: smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles. The Congo produces more than 70% of the world’s cobalt. Odds are, there’s some in your pocket right now.
“Mikuba” follows a group of artisanal miners who labor at the Mutoshi mine, a major cobalt site in the Southern Congo, and reveals the harsh realities of the lives of men and women who dig for and trade in cobalt. The mineral governs nearly every moment of their days: their health, their food, their freedom. Dena Montague, a Stanford lecturer in environmental justice and an organizer of the event, said it was important to bring the story to Stanford to show how cobalt, behind nearly every part of life in Silicon Valley, is differently omnipresent in the lives of the people who produce it.
After the film, Montague moderated a Q&A session with Katondolo, activist for Congolese rainforest communities Samuel Yagase and co-founder of the American nonprofit Friends of the Congo Maurice Carney.
Yagase put it simply: “Big corporations are raping the Earth. They are raping the forests. They are raping the air. They are raping everything because of capitalism.”
“Mikuba” is not only about violence and exploitation. It also depicts the healing derived from memory and tradition.
Katandolo follows mineral trader Mama Leonece to visit an elder who teaches her about “Basandja,” the ancestral ecology of the Congo. Through ritual and oral history, he reveals traditional methods of mining that honor the Earth: locating mineral deposits with plants, never digging deeper than 30 meters and giving thanks to the gifts of the earth.
Speaking after the film, Katondolo said he wants to help the people of the Congo remember alternative ways of relating to the Earth’s resources. But, he says, “Mikuba” also holds a message for communities beyond the Congo, for those of us in Silicon Valley. He wants the world to stop seeing the Congo only for the wealth in the ground.
Katondolo closed the night with a reminder: “We are not the cobalt. We are just the Congo people.”
The Environmental Justice Film Festival will conclude May 13 with a Screening of “Inhabitants: An Indigenous Perspective” in the d.school atrium at 5 p.m.
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Full Moon on the Quad returns as a quirky but consensual traditionFull Moon on the Quad drew over 2,000 students to Main Quad on Monday night. The Stanford tradition, which dates back to the 1940s, was planned with inclusivity and consent in mind.
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Full Moon on the Quad (FMOTQ), a deep-rooted Stanford tradition, returned to campus Monday night under a full spring moon. Stanford Street Meat served ice cream and fried plantains, while The Mendicants, an acapella group, performed three love songs and two of the Stanford Trees mingled with the crowd.
Although FMOTQ initially began as an event in which senior men would kiss freshman girls to initiate them into college life, organizers have reimagined the tradition in recent years as a celebration of community that emphasizes consent. Students gathered in Main Quad at midnight to exchange roses, hugs or kisses, guided by color-coded glow sticks worn by students to indicate comfort levels.
Given the complexities of the event, the organizers sought the approval of the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response & Education (SHARE) Title IX Office and Office of Substance Use Programs Education & Resources (SUPER). This year’s FMOTQ received support from both offices, working with them to curate messaging and guidelines for the event.
The SHARE office tabled at the event, handing out flyers that detailed the correct approach to affirmative consent and sharing what each of the color glowing wristbands represented. The red, yellow and green colors represented openness to roses, hugs and kissing, respectively. Sober monitors in vests also roamed the event, ensuring people’s safety and accordance with consent practices.
FMOTQ exceeded the expectations of event organizers Eva Lacy ’27 and Madhav Prakash ’27, with over 2,000 people in attendance at its peak. Three times more wristbands were ordered than last year, but the green and yellow ones ran out within 25 minutes, according to Prakash.
“This is a 90 year old celebration, where the freakiness of Stanford, the wilderness of Stanford, the thing that sets Stanford apart from our competitors in the northeast, really comes to fore,” Prakash said.
Audrey Lee ’28 told The Daily that the event was helpful to decompress during midterms. “It seemed like a way to just bring people on campus together,” Lee said. “I liked how it respects people’s different comfort levels… and you can clarify what your boundaries are.”
Justin Lim ’25, who has a partner, appreciated that there was “an option to make it more inclusive and open, and interpret it as a more fun Stanford tradition.”
“I do like the messaging that they have right now, which is more open for consent and open for community,” Lim added.
Many of FMOTQ’s familiar traditions made a return this year, such as students lining up to kiss the Stanford Trees, Sonnet Van Doren ’28 and Ruby Coulson ’27. By 12:20 a.m., the Trees had both kissed upwards of 150 people. After a kiss, students collected slips of papers that commemorated the moment.
Andy Durham ’27, who performed in the band at FMOTQ in 2024, recalled that the event felt somewhat awkward last year following the midnight countdown, when people didn’t commence making out.
After midnight this year, however, people were still “hanging out, having fun,” Durham said. “I like this. This is a good vibe.”
Prakash, who led the event’s organizing team, said that there was initially much confusion as to who would be organizing and funding the event. What started out as a casual spontaneous gathering of people in Main Quad in the 1940s, became a responsibility of the student class presidents with funding from the ASSU Executive social team.
According to Prakash, the junior class cabinet led the event last year, which was an arrangement that did not work out this year. “Eventually, when there was enough noise about why it wasn’t happening… I was like, ‘this is something I’m excited about,’” Prakash said, which led him to take on the event planning.
Prakash and Lacy worked in collaboration with the ASSU social team and the incoming sophomore class presidents to put the event together within two weeks, just in time to catch the last full moon before the end of the school year.
“I think it was really important to both Madhav and I that we keep this tradition alive, especially because if it didn’t happen this year, why would it happen the next year? It’s really important that we continue to keep all of the traditions, but also make them more modern and more fit for our community,” said Lacy, the sophomore secretary of events.
Dean Liang ’28 looked forward to FMOTQ with anticipation. “Because Stanford doesn’t have a lot of fun [traditions], this is one of the few I’ve heard about… obviously now with wristbands it’s a lot more fun and open,” Liang said. He added that he enjoyed the event both as an opportunity to get together with the community and meet new people, but also because “it’s fun to see what color people choose.”
Upperclassmen also took the opportunity to take part in the tradition and make some memories before graduating. Chenault Ellis ’26 said that he wasn’t as nervous attending this year as when he was a first-year, and was able to simply enjoy time with friends.
“I feel like there are not that many Stanford traditions and people are not that invested in them, so participating in the ones that do exist is really fun,” Ellis said.
Henry Weng ’25 found that the tradition fit well with Stanford’s image, as the school “prides itself on being a quirky place with quirky traditions.”
“It’s just nice seeing people out here,” Weng said.
Not only is this tradition a fun event for students, but also “an important emblem” in the Fun Strikes Back movement and an “exercise in community and gathering,” Prakash said.
For Lacy, the event carried personal meaning as well. Her mother, a Stanford alumnus, had fond memories of FMOTQ and always asked if she was excited to take part in it herself.
“It’s something she always remembered from her time here,” Lacy said. “And now it’s something I’ll always remember from mine.”
A previous version of this article misstated that this year’s FMOTQ received funding from the OSE. The Daily regrets this error.
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Meet Stanford Escape: The team behind Stanford’s first in-house escape roomInside Packard 124’s “mission control room,” the Stanford Escape team watches live footage of students solving puzzles they spent months designing. The project blends engineering, creativity and friendship into an immersive experience open to the Stanford community.
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In the “mission control room” at Packard 124, Stanford Escape — the team of computer science, electrical engineering and math majors behind Stanford’s first in-house escape room — huddles around a large screen, watching participants in the room next door navigate a series of interactive, multimedia puzzles.
Stanford Escape is an ad hoc team organized primarily to design and build the escape room, which is free and open for booking by Stanford students and faculty from May 1 to 17. The room welcomes players from all backgrounds and experience levels and is also open to tours for booking. The organizing and engineering team predominantly consists of Stanford Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) and Stanford Robotics club members.
“Most of the team is our friends we’ve made through engineering clubs for the past four years, or [problem] sets or robotics projects. We thought it’d be really cool to put these skills to use for a really fun community wide escape room,” said Sydney Yan ’25, co-lead of Stanford Escape and president of ACM.
Yan then recruited Samuel Do ’24 M.S. ’25, who shared her hobby for escape rooms, to co-lead Stanford Escape. Do and Yan met through the CS198 section leading program, and Do had designed escape rooms for his CS106B students in the past.
The conceptualization of a community escape room started in the summer of 2024. The team began planning the logistics in the fall and meeting regularly in the winter.
“Last quarter was a lot of planning and brainstorming. This quarter we’ve built the stuff, and then we’ve also had a lot of tests done before opening the room,” Do said. Building the room proved more complex than expected, as the team’s initial estimation of a one week and a half turned to five weeks.
The inspiration for the mechanics and optics of the room came from media, video games and past class projects. A few members of the team had interned at SpaceX and some were interested in space, which influenced the theme of the room.
The project is funded by both the ACM, which provided for the decorations, and Stanford Robotics, which supplied much of the hardware. Throughout the building process, the team also made use of materials from Lab 64, an electrical engineering maker lab in Packard open to the Stanford community to work on electronic systems projects.
Archer Date ’26, president of the Robotics club and mechanical engineering major, joined the project after being approached by Yan. Date was involved in crafting printed figurines, manufacturing and 3D printing for the escape room. He said he enjoyed the shared community that emerged from the close work that the team completed.
Despite entering the team not knowing everyone, “we quickly became friends,” Date said. “And so a lot of work sessions were less work sessions and more like a bunch of us coming together and having a good time.”
Sam Chen ’26, an electrical engineering major who joined the project after checking what Date was up to one day, said that he loves escape rooms and that building one was a “dream come true,” enhanced by the positive community and “good vibes” fostered by Yan and Do.
The escape room has been in high demand, with the first batch of tickets selling out within the first 15 minutes of the email announcing the room’s opening to campus mailing lists.
For the Stanford Escape team, seeing the players’ reactions to their months of work is a fun and rewarding time.
“I just love to hear the reactions from the room as the walls are pretty thin. They’re always super surprised when something happens and it’s so cool. I’m just very proud of that,” Do said.
“There was one team we had this morning that was just always yelling at each other. It was so much fun. It’s just great to see the energy everyone has,” said Yan.
Adrian Pan ’28, a player who completed the room with five friends, noted the nice decorations and said that the escape room “exceeded his expectations in every way.”
“The Stanford talent that went into making this an immersive experience really shined through like a laser, and Sam Do’s contributions were especially remarkable,” said Eddie Jiang ’28, another student who completed the escape room.
One of the biggest challenges that the Stanford Escape team faced was malfunctions that required creative solutions under the time pressure of the project.
“Things would just break for no reason and because everyone was doing their own thing, we had to have a week just full of integration. There was a lot of debugging that we had to do there, and then that debugging inevitably led to more things breaking,” Date said.
“I was working on a custom made controller, and that thing just broke, even though I’d been working on it for weeks. A lot of our puzzles, in order to meet this time constraint of needing it the next day, required working very hard to redesign it in some sort of way,” Do said.
The organizers’ vision for the escape room extends beyond their graduation from Stanford.
“I hope, in the future, once this becomes more of a permanent project… there’ll be more people to staff, more people to build. It’ll be a bigger thing overall,” Do said.
Anna Yang contributed reporting.
Correction: This article was updated to accurately reflect that Do designed escape rooms for his CS106B students.
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From the Community | Dear VPSA, sunsetting co-ops is antithetical to your missionLaney Conger '24 MA '25 and Sofia Gonzalez-Rodriguez '25 urge the University to reconsider sunsetting Terra and Synergy.
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Dear Provost Jenny Martinez and Vice Provost Michele Rasmussen,
We are writing to you about the recent decision to sunset both Terra and Synergy, a decision tantamount to burning well over five decades of Stanford legacy and residential learning. As former and current residents of Terra and Synergy, we find this decision deeply upsetting. We hope you consider these concerns as you move forward in your work on this problem, and thank you in advance for listening.
I came to Stanford from a small town in Montana, a difficult childhood for a young queer student. My first home at Stanford, the very first place I truly began to feel safe, was at Terra. Terra has a long history as a co-op, and as the unofficial queer residence on campus. Before spending time at Terra, I was sitting in Kimball, working on transfer applications to leave Stanford. I needed a smaller community, one that felt familiar, one where I felt free and in control, one where I could be myself fully.
When at last I joined Terra my junior year, it immediately enchanted me. I learned to care for and be cared for through cooking and cleaning alongside several dozen other residents. I called my mom before every head cook, learning how to properly knead dough and how to adjust seasonings for 50 people. It reminded me of the close-knit community of my home town, this time free of prejudice and bigotry.
We know you were excited to join our administration earlier this year so let us speak from our combined five years’ experience living in co-ops when we say: nowhere at Stanford have we found an environment more conducive to residential learning than Synergy and Terra.
I can speak from my years in Synergy living within a consensus-run system, where my fellow residents and I hold equal power and responsibility to raise ideas and reflections on our house operations. The scope of these discussions is not limited to the walls of our house, however — more often than not — they compel us to think about how we fit into broader systems and discussions.
The ability to determine our place in the world is integral to our co-op community: what food we purchase and from which suppliers; which cuisines we cook; which artists we support when we plan events; how we can mitigate our environmental impact. These lessons are best learned in the company of our housemates, who we can trust to engage us with care and grace. The world needs more spaces for this type of dialectic — not fewer.
These are crucial values held by Synergy and Terra residents. It’s why we choose to live here. It’s why we sign up for bathroom cleans. It is what steadies us in a chaotic, politically tumultuous country, where agency is being threatened daily.
“Sunsetting” Synergy and Terra into self-op style residences is not a small change. A central part to these communities is the coming together around house jobs. Changing the very structure of these living spaces to be one of unilateral service, could not be more antithetical to the principles of these communities. We work hard to create an equal distribution of labor, outside of the service economy, a system where each resident feels responsible for their own work and supported by the work of others. This is how trust is built.
Introducing a cooking and cleaning crew to these spaces erases these values. The house no longer feels like a home to love and care for but rather a place to be served, without residents in collaboration. I simply cannot imagine these spaces operating as they do today under these new circumstances. If it weren’t for these sacred spots, free from the traditional structures of the university, students like me would be left feeling isolated, and — as the University aims to remove a queer space — deeply unsafe.
There are countless arguments to be made for the continued presence of Stanford’s seven co-ops —including, as it turns out, those made by Leland Stanford. A staunch supporter of cooperative principles, Stanford even introduced a legislative bill as U.S. Senator to encourage the formation of cooperatives in the District of Columbia. His belief in cooperative living is relevant insofar as it frames the duty of administrative structures like the VPSA that have succeeded him and now dedicate themselves to his vision for education.
We can directly attest to the kind of learning that occurs in co-ops. On its website, Residential Education describes their work fostering “living and learning together” in residences like co-ops, stating that “students can grow in their ability to understand and negotiate difference and can prepare for the complexities of global citizenship.”
As Vice Provost of Student Affairs, you have an opportunity to steer the Stanford undergraduate experience in a direction that is faithful to the missions this University sets for itself. You have the chance to honor decades of history and to prove your commitment to the wellbeing of the Stanford community. Over 1,200 students, alumni, donors and faculty have signed our letter of support. Over 140 people have written testimonials similar to ours. We have made known the concerns of the student body, and we urge you to listen.
Laney Conger ’24 MS ’25 is a former Terra resident. Sofia Gonzalez-Rodriguez ’25 is a current Synergy resident.
This article has been updated to reflect that Laney Conger is earning an M.S. degree, not an M.A. degree.
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DoD introduces new policy to deal with security leaks: ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’The Department of Defense introduced the policy to ensure operational safety will not be threatened by unimportant matters like security leaks.
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Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.
To The Department (Re: What’s Up with all these Leaks?),
With international tensions and security concerns at an all time high, the Department’s leadership is considering reintroducing a tried and true protocol to help address the current frequency of security leaks called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT).
You might believe you are familiar with this policy, but we assure you we have updated it to be more “with the times.” Don’t ask about any security breaches and we don’t tell you of any. In light of DOGE’s efforts to cut bureaucratic bloat, we believe that this policy effectively stops data leaks for no cost at all. The way it works is simple. Do you have a question about the leaks? This is a trick question: you do not.
As we well know, news reporting on these issues just makes it harder for us to defend everyday Americans from global threats and causes much government spending on policing, protocol, pesky whistleblowers, legal fees, campaign smears, bribes and cover-ups. The way we see it, there can’t be a data leak if no one knows about it. There are no concerns if no one has a concern. We’d rather not waste the American people’s time or attention with such frivolous things as classified information. They deserve better.
More to the point, we find that the constant discussion about “leaks” that do not concern most of the department is detrimental to our operational success. As a proud member of the Department of Defense, you have more important things to worry about. By streamlining the process of your concerns (by not considering them), we believe that this policy will improve intradepartmental camaraderie and restore institutional loyalty. Matters such as SecDef’s usage of Signal are completely private to SecDef and their personal life; your continued questions would “create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability” (10 U.S.C. § 654(b)).
So, moving forward we expect that all DADT-issues be closeted and contained to prevent further harm to the Department. Any person who violates this policy will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We are certain that by not discussing nor mentioning concerns about the Department’s handling of sensitive information, DADT will cause no perverse or unintended consequences for our future (including potential DADT-issues in our department members). Thank you for your understanding and we look forward to not hearing from you.
Sincerely,
[NAME REDACTED for National Security Concerns]
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HalfwayHwang reflects on her halfway mark at Stanford, struggling to pick a major and searching for her future profession.
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It’s an odd thing, nearing the halfway mark of four years at Stanford. I thought I would know so much more about myself now, be so much more confident in what I want out of life and who I am. Instead, I think I am more lost, more scared and more confused than when I entered.
Balancing on the edge of underclassman and upperclassman, I’ve found myself forced to finally confront a mid-college crisis that has been bubbling under my skin for the past two years.
I can’t say when the feeling started. Perhaps it is better understood as a culmination of sharp moments of conflict interspersed within the quotidian routine of class, clubs and research.
My academic advisor ends our long conversation on whether I should take a final or attend my brother’s graduation with a pointed question disguised as a casual observation: I see you haven’t declared yet. I shrink in mild embarrassment. I tell her I plan on declaring biology, but have not been able to find a major advisor. As she opens the faculty page on the biology website, and I pretend I haven’t already read through every professor’s biography, I find myself doubting my own reasoning. Is it truly because I can’t send an email to a few professors? Or does the major not feel like the right fit?
Reflecting on the classes I’ve taken, I have most loved my history courses. But I couldn’t major in history, could I? I’ve always been good at science – that was my thing. Everything I’ve done over the past two years has, in some way, related to science or medicine. I briefly dipped my toes into the humanities as a wide eyed freshman, but I quickly succumbed to flake culture as the academic pressure got to me. I couldn’t go to the literary magazine meetings on Thursday when I had a chemistry problem set due every Friday. How could I take a British history course while joining a research lab and taking organic chemistry?
A few weeks later, I’m talking with my volunteer coordinator while painting coral sculptures for the hospital school. My doubts seep into the external world as I ask her how she knew she wanted to study American Studies and what she thought she would do after college with her major. I’ve been flirting with the idea of double majoring ever since speaking with my academic advisor, but the economics of it seem irrational. What purpose is there in getting a degree in biology and history? Both have relatively dismal job prospects without some graduate education.
She tells me she didn’t know what she wanted to do after college. I tell her that, at Stanford, not knowing what you want to do can feel like a death sentence. There are so many opportunities here, and so many driven, passionate people who know how to leverage the seemingly endless resources to launch themselves to, both metaphorically and literally, the moon. She tells me that may be one of the flaws of universities like Stanford are rising tuition costs. Back in the 90s, taking fun classes and spending an extra year in college only cost an extra $1000.
She senses I’m unsettled, or perhaps it’s obvious I have no idea what I’m doing. “You’re premed, aren’t you? Majoring in history could be interesting,” she says. She tells me about her best friend from high school. She loved writing: editor in chief of her school newspaper, speech and debate champion. She wanted to be a journalist. There was no question she would get into a prestigious college, and, when the time came, she was choosing between MIT for biology and Harvard for English. Her parents wanted her to be a doctor, so she ended up attending MIT, going to medical school and becoming a physician.
And she was absolutely miserable.
But that couldn’t be me, could it? In high school, I edited the literary magazine and wrote poetry, but I also loved my science and math classes. I did the traditional nerdy science kid things – science fair, Science Olympiad, math club – and I did them decently well.
I think about it more. Not just my major, but my post graduation plans. In the heat of physics and biochemistry midterms, I procrastinate by looking into the requirements for law school. I research how to get into consulting and what target schools are. As the spiral continues, the passage of time becomes increasingly antagonistic. I’m a third quarter sophomore, a rising junior. At this point, if you want to enter these careers, you need to have internships lined up and experience from clubs and classes.
I talk with my history lecturer during office hours. She tells me she took one history class in college. In her senior year, she realized that if she did nothing, nothing would happen after graduation – for the first time, her life was entirely in her own hands. So she applied to earn a master’s at Cambridge and never looked back. She tells me it’s hard to find tenure track positions in history. In her specific field, there are 1-2 open positions per year. I ask her if she ever wonders if she made the wrong choice, if she thinks about how things could have turned out differently. She tells me that life will always be full of regrets, that they only accumulate over time. I ask her how I can know I made the right decision. She tells me you can’t – you will never know what the future will look like. But she also tells me that whenever she has doubts, she looks back at her 23 year old self who fell in love studying history in the library and decided that is exactly what she wanted to do with her life. In that moment, she knew what she wanted and she trusted herself. With all of the information she had, she made what she thought was the best choice for herself and decided to pursue a career in academia.
“You want to be a doctor, don’t you?” I hear this question again, now from my lecturer. I tell her I love working with people one on one, I’m good at science. She tells me there is a difference between being good at something and loving something. Life is more fulfilling when you do something you love.
I sit with this for a while. These are all old cliches – the college student facing the real world, the young person conflicted about their future, follow your passions, do what you love. I’ve heard it a hundred times, I’ll hear it a hundred more – so why are they so unsettling now?
I think I’ve said I don’t know more times in the past month than I have in a lifetime because I genuinely do not know. I do not know what I want to major in, I do not know if I’ve made the most of being at Stanford, I do not know if I want to be a doctor, I do not know if I’ll be successful after graduating if I don’t know what I’m doing right now, I do not know what I want, what I will want, what I used to want, what the future holds and what I’ll regret. I know I love stories, I love people, I love learning. But where does that leave me?
Perhaps that is exactly the point. At the end of my sophomore year.
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Spurs name Stanford alumnus as new head coachStanford alumnus Mitch Johnson ’09 succeeds legendary Gregg Popovich, inheriting Spurs’ promising young core after serving as assistant and interim coach since 2019.
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After a legendary 29 seasons as the San Antonio Spurs’ head coach, Gregg Popovich has stepped down from his role, which will be filled by Stanford alumnus Mitch Johnson ‘09.
Johnson was hired as the Spurs’ assistant coach in 2019, and was named interim head coach in 2024 as Popovich began to struggle with his health.
Johnson played for the Cardinal from 2005-2009, averaging 5.2 points, 4.1 assists and three rebounds per game during his stint. He made the NCAA tournament in two of his four seasons, and led the Pac-10 conference in assists in 2008 with 188. He holds the program’s single-game record for assists with 16 against Marquette in the 2008 Sweet 16 and is currently second in Cardinal history in assists with 534.
The 6-1 guard was a Pac-10 All-Freshman Team Honorable Mention pick in 2006, and was selected as an All-Pac-10 Honorable Mention in 2008.
Johnson went undrafted in the 2009 NBA draft and proceeded to play professional basketball in both the NBA G League and in Europe before beginning his coaching career at Seattle University in 2011. His NBA career began in 2016 with the Spurs’ G League affiliate the Austin Spurs, with which he won the G League Championship.
He will inherit a 34-48 Spurs team that, despite its poor performance in recent years, is widely regarded as one of the teams with the best young cores in the NBA — between former No. 1 draft pick Victor Wembanyama, Rookie of the Year winner Stephon Castle and a 3.4% chance at a top four pick in the upcoming draft, Johnson will have more than enough to work with.
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Rage on the Page: Unfunny women and other lies in ‘Sorrow and Bliss’What makes Meg Mason’s “Sorrow and Bliss” remarkable is not its depiction of breakdown, but the quiet, almost imperceptible suggestion that a life doesn’t have to be healed to be worth living, writes Guleryuz.
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In her column “Rage on the Page,” Melisa Guleryuz ’27 reviews books about anger in women’s literature.
Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
One line can sum up Meg Mason’s “Sorrow and Bliss”: “It’s a bit sad and a bit funny. Like life.”
“Sorrow and Bliss” is the story of a woman who has everything she needs to be okay — a supportive husband, a job that vaguely resembles creative fulfillment, a family that loves her in their own strange, prickly ways — and still, she cannot get out of bed. It’s a story of mental illness so deeply worn into the grooves of a woman’s life that when you meet her, you aren’t meeting someone in the midst of a crisis. You’re meeting someone who has built an entire identity on top of a crisis.
The woman in question is Martha Friel. She is 40, whip-smart, semi-employed and unraveling. Her husband Patrick leaves her in the first few pages, and we go backward from there. Or sideways. Time isn’t entirely linear in “Sorrow and Bliss,” because neither is the experience of living with mental illness that — like a party crasher — just never quite leaves.
“It was not a good year for me,” Martha says dryly, “but I’m beginning to understand that no one had a good year.”
It’s important to note that Mason never names Martha’s diagnosis, referring to it only as “—.” It’s not just a literary device but an existential point: for Martha, diagnosis is never the answer. It’s a placeholder, a word that doesn’t heal the people around her or explain why she says devastating things even when she doesn’t mean to. In “Sorrow and Bliss,” mental illness is not a monologue or a crisis. It’s something threaded through every laugh, every ruined dinner, every interaction that should have gone better.
“Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine,” Martha thinks. “That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change.”
This is the novel’s engine: contradiction. Martha’s voice is what makes it run. Sardonic, brittle and unexpectedly warm, she narrates her own collapse and its aftermath with a style that’s both darkly hilarious and quietly heartbreaking. Her relationship with Patrick — the childhood friend she marries after a series of poor decisions and worse lovers — is rendered with particular devastation. There is no grand betrayal, no explosive argument. He simply reaches the end of what he can give.
“[Patrick] said, ‘No, Martha, I mean I can’t do this anymore,’” Martha narrates. “I said, ‘Do what?’ And he said, ‘This.’ I said, ‘Be more specific.’ He said, ‘Be with you.’”
That line lands like a punch, and then the story keeps walking. This is “Sorrow and Bliss” at its finest: refusal to wallow, refusal to offer easy catharsis, but also refusal to look away from the fact that things are very, very wrong.
The sadness is cumulative, not dramatic. It accrues like mold in the corners of a beautiful room.
And “Sorrow and Bliss” is funny, yes, but not in a casual, quirky way. It’s funny in the way real people are when they’ve learned to use self-deprecation as a shield. Martha weaponizes humor with surgical precision. She cuts herself with it — and the reader, too.
Among her quips: “I have never understood why people think of champagne as celebratory rants rather than medicinal.”
Moreover, the novel’s family dynamics are masterful — Mason writes the kind of emotionally constipated British family that communicates love through cruelty and neglect through politeness. Martha’s mother is a failed sculptor who swings between cruel sarcasm and quiet despair. Her father, a poet, is so gently absent he almost disappears from the page. The one constant in Martha’s life is her sister Ingrid, whose fierce loyalty and deadpan delivery is one of the book’s great pleasures.
“You can’t leave someone just because they’re difficult,” Ingrid says.
“You can,” Martha says. “They do.”
Unlike most books that chronicle mental illness, “Sorrow and Bliss” is not a redemption tale. It doesn’t offer neat lessons or inspirational monologues. It lets Martha be cruel and selfish and brutally honest; allows her pain to exist without being sanitized. But what it does offer — subtly, generously — is possibility.
“I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved,” Martha narrates. “I have felt alone but I have never been alone.”
And that’s what makes “Sorrow and Bliss” remarkable: not its depiction of breakdown, but the quiet, almost imperceptible suggestion that a life doesn’t have to be healed to be worth living. That sorrow can sit beside bliss. That Martha — sharp-tongued, self-defeating, unbearably human — deserves the dignity of continuing anyway. Not because she’s fixed, not because she’s better, but because she’s still here.
And sometimes, that’s the whole point.
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From the Community | SB 1047 and the enduring tech-policy divideAndrew Bempong '25 explores the extensive divide between the technology industry and policymakers, arguing why the two must work together.
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“Senator, we run ads,” Mark Zuckerberg responded with a hint of incredulity. In 2018, the Senate summoned the chief executive for a hearing concerning Facebook’s data privacy concerns. Despite chairing the Republican High-Tech Task Force, Senator Orrin Hatch needed Zuckerberg to explain the basics of Facebook’s ad revenue business model during questioning.
Senator Hatch’s ignorance may seem like an isolated incident, but it highlights an ongoing disconnect between the rapidly accelerating tech industry and the slow-moving policymakers that govern it. The government’s inability to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) is a clear example of this growing divide, where proposed state bills like California’s Senate Bill (SB) 1047 ignite controversy surrounding AI regulation — a symptom of a State Capitol issue that has continued to involve and impact Stanford through a growing disconnect between those who create technologies and those who regulate them.
Public debates over the bill’s vague language and convoluted protocols fuel this controversy, yet these are just symptoms of an overarching issue — policymakers don’t understand tech. The lack of technical expertise among legislators has steered SB 1047 away from addressing demonstrable AI risks such as algorithmic bias, data privacy breaches or artificially generated disinformation. Instead, the proposal leans toward the restriction of AI technology itself in fear of imagined future catastrophes — a point countered time and time again by prominent Stanford AI researchers who further cement the university’s critical role in advancing and shaping policy discourse around AI. If we fail to promote AI literacy and education within governing bodies, we risk enacting misguided policies like SB 1047 that needlessly stifle Stanford’s technological innovation, ultimately impeding student learning opportunities and narrowing faculty research.
The California bill’s inception, however, stemmed from good intentions of state legislators and AI safety advocates. State Senator Scott Wiener, a previous proponent of state AI safety legislation, proposed SB 1047 in February 2024. The bill was heavily inspired by a draft from Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety (CAIS). SB 1047 establishes strict protocols on large “covered model(s)” during pre-training and post-training, focusing on the threat of catastrophic risks rather than immediate issues. Covered models include those whose training costs more than $100 million or uses an inordinate amount of computing power, along with their fine-tuned derivatives.
Before training, developers are required to take “reasonable” precautions to assess if their covered model could enact mass casualties or more than $500,000,000 in damages, defined as “critical harm” via safeguards and kill switches. After training, risk assessments and annual third-party auditing assess the model’s compliance. Reports are sent to the Attorney General and penalty fines range from $50,000 to $10 million, potentially swallowing up large portions of funding for research-based universities like Stanford for infractions, incidental or not. The proposal also introduces the California Government Operations Agency’s “Board of Frontier Models” (BFM), which would oversee and define state regulatory standards.
Despite the California Senate bill’s ambitious goals, SB 1047 establishes vague compliance measures and overregulation. The cumbersome provisions are born out of fear of an existential threat by policymakers who lack AI literacy. The bill’s language is filled with ambiguities as it naively plans for future catastrophes involving biological, chemical, and even nuclear warfare. Researchers and developers at Stanford’s cutting-edge computational research labs would be given considerable discretion regarding what reasonable safeguards may indicate for compliance. However, they would face harsh penalties if their definition doesn’t comply with third-party auditors such as the bill’s proposed Frontier Model Division.
The bill’s imprecise language will create apprehension around the deployment of cutting-edge models, as evaluating any risks before training is notoriously difficult, let alone the risks posed by “derivative” models, which others may fine-tune or jailbreak beyond the original developer’s control. In the face of convoluted regulation and harsh penalties, the most rational course for Stanford researchers who wish to release potentially groundbreaking findings may be to release nothing at all. Despite its goal to increase AI safety, the bill instead impairs AI progress and the technology that empowers Silicon Valley’s key players, like Stanford, on the global stage.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and CS professor, says it is impossible to train new AI leaders without access to proper models and data. Li has been instrumental in the last decade of AI advancements in academia and industry and is actively engaged with national policymakers to promote ethical progress in the field. She believes a kill switch would “further dampen the efforts of these students and researchers, already at such a data and computation disadvantage compared to Big Tech.”
Although it would remedy the bill’s failures, it’s not necessarily a policymaker’s responsibility to be tech-literate. Measures like mandatory AI training sessions may distract lawmakers from immediate legislative concerns, especially when they can consult with AI experts independently. However, policymakers commit themselves to representing the public’s concerns. These matters span across a vast array of domains, including the widespread adoption of AI technology. Thus, addressing AI regulation is a legislator’s duty as it continues to embed itself into our everyday lives. Policymakers must stay educated on AI matters to efficiently govern its risks through engagement with tech literacy coursework and experts. Such education could better address AI’s immediate threats to society, like algorithmic bias or misinformation.
The failures of SB 1047 exemplify an urgent need for AI literacy among government officials. Legislation mandating AI educational programs, assessments and technical consultations for lawmakers would boost government AI literacy and contribute to more effective AI policymaking.
I believe our campus, holding a unique position as a leader in AI innovation and policy, is where meaningful change starts. It is not enough for CS students to neglect the societal impact of their technical work, just as students in policy and governance must not disregard the technical complexity of legislation they study (or later enact). Bridging this gap requires mutual interdisciplinary engagement — immersing technical students in ethics, governance, and advocacy while making policy-focused students comfortable with tech literacy. It is imperative that we deeply understand the systems we seek to shape and advance in the future through interdisciplinary methods.
Stanford — I urge you to engage with our local representatives on AI matters that affect you. Speak up about AI policy by any means — through academics, advocacy or even direct civic action. Keep your officials accountable for learning about the role AI plays in your lives and theirs. AI is moving at breakneck speed; we must ensure those in power keep up.
Andrew Bempong ’25 is a co-terminal Master’s student at Stanford University studying Computer Science.
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Former Donner dormmates win Gaither fellowshipsAdrian Feinberg ’25 and Noah Tan ’25 will both join the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as Gaither fellows this fall, contributing to research on topics like democracy, global security and economic policy.
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When Adrian Feinberg ’25 and Noah Tan ’25 first moved into Donner in their freshman year, they had no idea their lives would intersect even post-graduation. However, after both they both received the prestigious James C. Gaither Junior Fellowship, the former dormmates will be living in Washington next year and completing research internships.
The year-long opportunity brings fellows to the nation’s capital as research assistants to contribute reports, books, op-eds and other projects for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s senior scholars. The fellowship is awarded to approximately 15 students each year.
This year’s cohort is composed of 16 students, including Feinberg and Tan, from universities across the country, including Dartmouth, Cornell and Amherst. Past fellows include Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
As an alum of a military high school, Tan has placed public service at the forefront of his academic and professional journey. From talking to military mentors at his high school, Tan developed his interests in international security “from the ground up.”
“Getting a boots on the ground perspective was really impactful to me,” Tan said. Tan is majoring in international relations with a minor in music composition.
At Stanford, Tan’s conversations with his mentor Herb Lin, a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), introduced scholarship as an alternative way to contribute to security. Tan hopes the fellowship will allow him to explore his interest in international trade and economic security.
For Feinberg, who is majoring in international relations, U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory was the “moment [he] gained real political consciousness” and sparked his interest in democracy. “I’ve had this lingering sense of dread that has propelled my interest in democratic decline and in the aftermath of democratic decline since [the election],” he said.
Feinberg took political science professor Kathryn Stoner’s “Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law” course, which deepened his academic interest in the topic. Stoner is also the director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), which Feinberg was an honors student in. His first visit to the Carnegie Endowment was part of a CDDRL honors college trip to Washington.
Thomas Carothers, the director of Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program, also influenced Feinberg’s decision to conduct research for the program as a Gaither fellow. After the fellowship, Feinberg hopes to pursue a graduate degree in history and is considering attending law school.
Both Feinberg and Tan are looking forward to being a part of the cohort.
“I really hope that socially, we get along as a cohort,” said Tan, who hopes that the fellowship will provide a “nice and easy transition into still having people to connect with while also in the workforce.”
On leaving the university setting, Feinberg thinks “it’s good to live in the real world,” but added that he hopes the fellowship and cohort maintain “the spirit of critical thinking and of intellectual pursuit” found on campus.
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Physics faculty call out Levin for refusal to sign anti-Trump letterAn open letter penned by eight faculty members in the physics department expressed support for a AAC&U statement criticizing "government overreach." The letter has amassed over 200 signatures from other faculty.
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Eight faculty members in the physics department wrote an open letter on April 22 supporting a national statement by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) criticizing “unprecedented government overreach.” The faculty members’ letter stated their opposition to University president Jonathan Levin ’94’s decision to not sign the AAC&U’s statement.
The open letter from the faculty members, which has amassed over 200 signatures from fellow faculty, asserts that the Trump administration has taken a “fundamentally hostile” approach to universities. The letter states that the administration made funding decisions “on the basis of a political litmus test” and that its attempts to “stem the inflow of talented foreign students” present violations to due process and intellectual freedom.
“Actions underway, if they succeed, will be devastating to U.S. universities and our core mission of conducting research to advance human knowledge and to educate students who are the next generation of scholars and leaders,” wrote physics professor and co-author of the letter Peter Michelson in an email to The Daily.
Michelson was joined by physics professors Aharon Kapitulnik, Steven Kivelson, Andrei Linde, Xiaoliang Qi, Stephen Shenker, Eva Silverstein and Leonard Susskind.
The letter expressed solidarity with the AAC&U’s statement from April 21 opposing “overreach and political interference” in higher education and the “coercive use of public research funding.” The statement expressed support for an “exchange of ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.”
The open letter also called out Levin’s decision to not sign “despite expressing informal agreement with its goals.”
“I don’t really understand the University’s reluctance to explicitly express solidarity with other universities,” said history professor Jessica Riskin. “The reality is that we are working with other universities through the AAC&U and other ways, which is wonderful, but I don’t really understand why President Levin is so reluctant to do it explicitly, to make common cause, to show solidarity.”
According to a statement to The Daily from Levin, he and Provost Jenny Martinez adequately expressed their perspective on the matters discussed in the AAC&U letter in an April 15 statement supporting Harvard amid threats of cuts to over $8 billion in funding from the Trump administration.
“I remain very disappointed that President Levin did not sign the AAC&U letter and still do not understand this decision, given his and Provost Martinez’s April 15 statement of support,” wrote Michelson. “Going forward, U.S. Universities must stand together against actions that threaten our very mission.”
The physics department’s letter called for the invocation of an exception to the institutional neutrality policy detailed in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which acknowledges that “from time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.” In these instances, the report states, “it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures.”
“When [something] has to do with the character and existence of the university, with the health of the university, I think we’re responsible to speak out as clearly as we can,” said physics professor Steven Kivelson, one of the letter’s co-writers.
Riskin said she would like the University to also make an explicit statement committing itself to take action to “protect international students and scholars from harassment, illegal revocation of visas and harassment of them [and] threats to their ability to remain studying and working at Stanford.”
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Research Roundup: Visualizing ‘zombie’ cells, new strategy to treat cardiovascular fibrosisAn MRI-agent “cage” that allows for the visualization of "zombie cells" and a new strategy to treat cardiovascular fibrosis feature in this week's Research Roundup.
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The Science & Technology desk gathers a weekly digest with impactful and interesting research publications and developments at Stanford. Read the latest in this week’s Research Roundup.
In a paper published in npj Imaging, a team of Stanford and Northwestern researchers found an MRI agent that helps visualize dormant “zombie” cells that contribute to osteoarthritis.
Over 30 million adults in the U.S. have osteoarthritis, a condition that weakens the cartilage between joints. While different factors can contribute to osteoarthritis, senescent cells — “zombie” cells that are still alive but non-functioning — are particularly significant. Although dormant, these deceiving cells secrete molecules that can negatively impact surrounding tissue. As the number of senescent cells generally increases with age, osteoarthritis can consequently develop or worsen.
While senolytic therapies — therapies that target these senescent cells — currently exist, there was previously no way to properly visualize the cells. Now that researchers have developed a system to do so, they are not only able to light up these cells to visualize them but also track the progress and efficacy of therapies.
The scientists selected gadolinium, an MRI agent that illuminates all tissues. However, to selectively target senescent cells, they added a “cage” around the agent which would only open when encountering a specific protein.
After this study, the scientists are even more hopeful; Heike Daldrup-Link, professor of radiology, highlighted that the MRI can provide information about a patient’s potential state of arthritis much faster than current methods.
“We envision that our contrast agent could fill this gap,” Daldrup-Link told Stanford Medicine, referring to the fact that current clinical trials tracking patients’ symptoms require significant time.
In a Stanford-led study published in Nature, researchers detailed a new strategy to beat cardiac fibrosis, a condition with no current treatment that is characterized by scarring of the heart tissue. Cardiac fibrosis impairs contractility of the heart muscle cells, increasing the risk of a heart attack.
Through multiple rounds of sequencing, the researchers first identified SRC, a protein that is significantly activated in diseased hearts. They then screened for compounds that could inhibit this protein, deciding saracatinib, a compound that was previously used in cancer research.
A series of experiments with saracatinib revealed that it lowers the impact of fibrosis, especially when combined with the suppression of another pathway that is responsible for fibroblast activation. Contractile function – movement through the use of proteins – of the heart muscle cells was also restored.
Joseph Wu, senior author of the study and director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, explained that this new strategy will not come at the expense of other cells with fundamentally important functions.
“We want to break this vicious cycle – but until now, there’s been no reliable way to do so selectively in fibroblasts without affecting other essential heart cell types, such as cardiomyocytes,” Wang told Stanford Medicine.
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Splashing into spring: Startup makes waves as ‘mimosa in a can’Former Stanford students Wyatt and Spencer Hanson and their sister, Lyda Hanson, burst into the alcohol industry with their new product, Suntide Mimosas.
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As a child, Lyda Hanson had always been obsessed with starting her own company. In her senior year at UC Berkeley, she started thinking about canned drinks and began to look into the idea of canned cocktails when she noticed canned mimosas had no presence in the market.
During COVID-19, Lyda spent time mocking up the branding and concept. Soon after, Hanson brought on her twin brothers, Wyatt Hanson ’22 and Spencer Hanson ’22, to join her. Together, the Hanson family became the driving force behind their mimosa brand Suntide.
The Suntide brand is built around the California lifestyle, said Lyda, who added that the team wanted to capture the “surf-oriented coastal living” California is particularly known for.
After Lyda finished mocking up the brand’s packaging, the Hansons reached out to flavor houses, companies that make formulas for the drinks. The Hansons would create a sample for the flavor houses to match, then receive experimental samples to test and refine. This process continued until they found the right combination of juice and sparkling wine.
“I think the peach [flavor] went through like 35 different revisions until we finally nailed it,” Wyatt said.
Creating the company had its ups and downs, Lyda shared. When she first began the process, there was an aluminum shortage. She also struggled to find a co-packer, a company that packages the products of a client.
Additionally, while Lyda found working with her family extremely rewarding, it was also sometimes difficult finding “that line separating business and family.”
“Family is important, right? You want to preserve those relationships as well,” Lyda said. “At the end of the day, it’s super rewarding, of course. Like how cool is it to start a company with your brothers? It’s fun.”
Wyatt, who majored in management science & engineering (MS&E), felt that his classes didn’t specifically prepare him for the alcohol industry but did teach him a lot of the frameworks and problem-solving methods he applies in his work now. Spencer majored in political science and most of his classes did not directly relate to his work at Suntide, but he had wanted to major in something that would challenge him and allow him to read and write a lot.
“College in general prepares you for critical thinking and communicating, but [the] specific industry stuff, you can’t learn that unless you work in the industry,” Spencer said. Being able to communicate, email and meet deadlines were the biggest skills he took from college that has helped him in his work, he said.
At Stanford, Spencer said that there’s so many people to learn from, not just from professors or classes but from other students.
“We really identify with our time at Stanford, and it really affected us as entrepreneurs. I think that being around people who are so motivated, so hungry, and I always wanted to start a company. It was just a matter of when,” Spencer said.
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Faculty Senate addresses alleged academic espionage, co-ops and gen ed requirementsThe Faculty Senate addressed alleged academic espionage, the potential expansion of COLLEGE to three quarters and Terra and Synergy’s conversion to self-ops in a Thursday meeting.
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University president Jonathan Levin ’94 addressed a recent Stanford Review article that alleged the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “academic espionage” from Stanford research at the Faculty Senate meeting May 8.
Levin said that the University takes both “national and research security…with utmost seriousness” and that Stanford is a leader “in researching and advancing best practices to address foreign influence in research.” He also said that “it is important to distinguish” between the CCP and “valued members of our community,” referring to Chinese or Chinese-American faculty and students.
Steven Goodman, the associate dean of clinical research and professor of medicine, asked Levin about the “express concern” that international students might use the education they receive at Stanford to advance interests outside the United States.
Levin responded that a “very large fraction” of international graduate students remain in the U.S. after completing their degree.
Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) Jay Hamilton and Vice Provost for Student Affairs (VPSA) Michele Rasmussen provided updates on the state of undergraduate education.
Hamilton said that next year, the Faculty Senate will consider expanding the mandatory first-year COLLEGE requirement from two to three quarters. He also said that he plans to implement a “writing study” to assess the quality of instruction in the University’s required writing courses, Program in Writing in Rhetoric (PWR) and Writing in the Major (WIM).
ASSU senator David Sengthay ’26 M.A. ’26 asked Rasmussen why Synergy and Terra would be converted to self-ops, citing a letter of support from students, faculty and alumni urging the University to reinstate their co-op statuses. Sengthay said that the pre-assignment system, which only allows students to apply to one theme house, prevented students who were willing to live in Synergy or Terra from indicating that preference.
Rasmussen said that the decision was “by no means an indictment” of co-ops but the result of “very low preassignment numbers.” Given the cooking and cleaning responsibilities required of residents, maintaining co-op status would not have been “viable for next year,” Rasmussen said.
Provost Jenny Martinez said that 185 students applied for pre-assignment to 266 co-op spots. Martinez added that self-ops exhibit higher demand.
Associate professor of history Jennifer Burns said that students may interpret the co-op conversions as another example of the University’s supposed “war on fun.”
“Students know better than faculty how to generate and sustain their own communities,” Burns said.
Correction: A previous version of this article omitted part of Levin’s quote. The Daily regrets this error.
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Stanford men’s tennis sweeps South Carolina in super regionalsThe Cardinal advanced to the Elite Eight after handing a dominant defeat to the Gamecocks, remaining undefeated at home this season.
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No. 5 Stanford men’s tennis (25-5, 10-3 ACC) advanced to the NCAA quarterfinals with a shutout victory over No. 13 South Carolina (21-8, 11-3 SEC) at Taube Pavilion Friday afternoon. The 4-0 win marks an undefeated 12-0 home season for the Cardinal and Stanford’s winningest season overall since 2003.
The Cardinal are continuing their 12-game winning streak after earlier 4-0 victories over New Mexico (16-9, 4-3 MW) and Pepperdine (17-11, 5-2 WCC) earlier in the tournament.
Stanford came out of warm-ups strong and never looked back. No. 47 ranked pair graduate student Henry Von der Schulenburg and sophomore Kyle Kang defeated their No. 56 ranked opponents 6-4 at the second doubles spot. No. 70 ranked sophomores Nico Godsick and Hudson Rivera clinched the doubles point soon after defeating the No. 3 ranked doubles team in the country at the top doubles spot with a score of 6-4.
In the first hour of play, South Carolina won only 12 total games across singles matches, with the Cardinal taking the first sets in all six singles matches.
Freshman Alex Razeghi swiftly finished his opponent 6-1, 6-1 at the sixth singles spot. No. 71 ranked Von der Schulenburg followed with a 6-1, 6-4 win on court four.
“I have a lot of confidence right now,” Von der Schulenburg said in an interview with The Daily after the match. “We practiced everyday for three hours this week, and it really showed in our performance today, taking all first sets.”
No. 101 ranked senior Max Basing closed out the under-two hour match with a 6-1, 6-4 clinching victory on court three. The Cardinal led on all three remaining matches as well.
For Basing and Von der Schulenburg, Friday’s victory marked their last match at home.
“I’ve enjoyed this year more than anything,” Basing said in an interview with The Daily. “Having a bunch of people out in this stadium is really special. I’m going to play tennis after college, but I think that the memories I’ve made here will be the best kind of memories I’ll ever make.”
The Cardinal will next play against No. 12 Mississippi State (25-5, 11-3 SEC) in the quarterfinals in Waco, Texas on Friday, May 16.
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Reflections on the Cantor’s ‘Penitent Magdalene’On her recent trip to the Cantor Arts Center, Seyahi found herself struck by a painting that invited questions as much as it did awe.
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In the European art section of the Cantor, I discovered a painting that felt almost personal. In the “Penitent Magdalene” by Jean-Jacques Henner, a young girl sits on the floor, her back against the brown wall. She looks young, likely around my age, which makes me feel a connection towards her. She sits topless, with her chest bare. Her skin is very pale and bright, which juxtaposes with the dark background, creating a sense of chiaroscuro. Her light brown hair falls below her back. She wears what seems to be a bright blue long skirt that covers her hips and legs. The blue of the skirt is the only colorful aspect of the painting. It makes me question why she is bare-chested while wearing what feels like the bottom part of a dress. What happened to her? Did someone rip the top part of her dress? Did she do it to herself?
What’s striking about her is that she is not facing us; she looks away, towards the darkness of the inner parts of the room she is in. We can’t see her face, except for the left side of it. Her neck stands elongated below the face she is hiding. Why is she looking away from us? Is she embarrassed? Did she do something she hates and she can’t face us anymore? Is she about to cry and doesn’t want us to see? What is she hiding?
Her gaze must be searching for something, something that can pull her out of what feels to me like misery. Perhaps she is looking for an escape from her life. Maybe she wants a new one. Maybe she wants to leave her reality. Something about this pose makes her appear like a normal young girl: a girl who feels ashamed, a girl who feels hopeless, a girl who wants to change things, a girl who wants to escape from her mind. She is pushing herself so close to the wall, as if she wants to become one with it and disappear. In a sense, despite being painted in 1881, she feels eternal. Modern. Looking at her reminds me of myself and the angst that comes with being a girl. I find myself asking, who is she?
With these questions in my mind, I read the description. The woman depicted in the painting, Mary Magdalene, was wrongly identified as a sinner who regretted her past, becoming “a symbol of penance” in Christianity. The painting captures her in this state of regret and contemplation: she regrets that she sold her body. The way she made mistakes in the past yet grew from them through salvation makes her a relatable figure, as she is an embodiment of the idea that we are not perfect. Perhaps that’s why, looking at her painting, she feels so real — she is just a girl who is ashamed of who she used to be, who wants to move on, a girl who doesn’t like what she did. Isn’t this universal? Becoming a saint after penance, Mary Magdalene serves as a reminder that there is always a tomorrow, and there is always a way to change things in life.
Mary Magdalene is usually depicted as looking up to heaven. In George de la Tour’s depiction of Mary Magdalene, she looks at the candlelight, a symbol of illumination and divine light. However, in Henner’s depiction, she stares into darkness; her gaze is lost amongst the dark shadows. Here, she is “turned away from us.” In de la Tour’s Baroque depiction, Mary’s spiritual purification is emphasized through her stare to a source of light, but Henner’s depiction is almost more real – in the real world, we can’t easily find such pure divinity, and we might need to search for salvation through more earthly and darker means.
What I hadn’t noticed in my initial look was her isolation. She is secretive in a sense. We don’t know what’s on her mind. She is almost left alone with her problems, expected to solve the confusions of her mind by herself. Perhaps this loneliness is also common: Henner is able to bring the viewers to relate to her, understand her and find a source of empathy for ourselves.
As I leave the gallery, I take one last look at her, and I smile. Here in this gallery, Henner’s “Penitent Magdalene” will forever stand as a reminder that we can move through our past and find a new self, however difficult the journey might feel.
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Full Moon on the Quad BingoPucker up, buttercup: Full Moon on the Quad is back. Here are some bingo cards sure to take your night to the next level.
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Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.
Pucker up, buttercup. Full Moon on the Quad (FMOTQ) is back! Whether you’re a senior ready to move on from your ex or a freshman itching to make bad decisions, The Daily Humor Section wanted to put together a little something-something to make sure your FMOTQ is fun, exciting and something to remember. We hope you enjoy these Full Moon on the Quad Bingo Cards, authorized (but not necessarily endorsed) by The Stanford Daily.
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‘My Life At the Movies’: Rachel Kushner explores cultural authority and the influence of filmKushner invited audience members into her world of cinematic influences, diving into a series of stills and shots from various film and photo projects that have inspired her bibliography.
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Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
Stein Visiting Writer and acclaimed novelist Rachel Kushner — author of “Creation Lake,” “The Mars Room” and more — spoke to a packed room at Margaret Jacks Hall on April 30 for an extraordinary colloquium on cinema’s influence on her fiction.
“This is like the moment when a new episode drops. We’re going to have a new, fantastic moment,” said Nicholas Jenkins, the director of the creative writing program, as he introduced Kushner to an eager audience.
And fantastic it was.
Kushner began her lecture, “My Life at the Movies,” by expressing a desire to share her approach to culture. Over the next hour, Kushner invited audience members into a world of cinematic influences, diving into a series of stills and shots from various film and photo projects that have inspired her oeuvre.
The idea of authority rested at the heart of Kushner’s talk. According to Kushner, people can demonstrate their authority over a subject in different ways.
“You never want to be rigid or claim an authority that isn’t yours to share,” Kushner said. “When you look at a movie, you have authority over what it is you are seeing and your own takeaway.”
The authority in writing, Kushner said, is the capacity to witness what one sees and appreciate the beauty in it. The beauty and emotion she finds in interpreting cultural objects, particularly movies, is what she uses to weave the emotional and structural fabric of her novels.
Kushner discussed novelist Myriam Gurba’s “Creep” — in which the narrator likens her family to that of “The Munsters” (a popular sitcom) — and Brett Easton Ellis’s “The Shards,” which features a rendering of a Kim Wilde video in prose. According to Kushner, both are instances where pop culture becomes more than a backdrop, serving instead as a character’s lens and a scaffolding for their identity and voice.
Kushner herself often emphasizes film in her fiction. By placing her characters in scenes where they watch movies, she allows cinema to filter into the story and offer broader commentary on society. Sometimes, the characters’ reactions to the films are her own — sometimes not. The point is always to find beauty in cinema and offer a take no one else can.
Kushner also spoke of the impact that Don DeLillo’s book “Underworld” had on her. Specifically, his usage of Robert Frank’s notorious documentary on The Rolling Stones, “Cocksucker Blues,” (1972) inspired her to consider incorporating film into her stories.
“I didn’t know you could write something like that in a novel,” Kushner said, referring to a passage where a character reflects on gender, voyeurism and the acoustics of sound in Frank’s film. “After that, I wanted to try.”
Playing the audience a clip of Frank’s documentary, Kushner wove in one of her favorite lines from DeLillo’s novel, where protagonist Klara Sax comments on the patronizing nature of The Rolling Stones.
“‘It was interesting how all the women in the film were girls or became girls,” Kushner said. “The men and women did all the same things — dope, sex, picture taking — but the men stayed men, and the women became girls.’”
This line was met with silence from the audience, as the room was enchanted simultaneously by the black and white footage and its scathing critique. According to Kushner, meditations like these inspired her to explore the personal subjectivity with which characters interpret film.
Later, Kushner shared an example of when she wrote a little-seen Italian documentary by filmmaker Silvano Agosti into her novel “The Flamethrowers.” The documentary, called “D’Amore Si Vive” (1984), features a nine-year-old boy named Frank who speaks with a strange eloquence about sexuality and adulthood.
In Kushner’s novel, her character recounts viewing the documentary and being struck by this child’s machismo. The boy is reimagined, his story altered and stylized — but the discomfort and allure remain. Kushner reminded the audience that this is fiction: he film is shaped, manipulated and divorced from its original version.
Agosti’s film was but one of many flicks Kushner folds into the architecture of her fiction. She spent the remainder of the hour flipping through more influential scenes from obscure pictures, including Erol Flynn’s revolutionary epic “Cuban Rebel Girls” (1959), James Benning’s “California Trilogy” (1999) and Barbara Loden’s “Wanda” (1970).
Kushner’s characters encounter these artifacts from the cluttered debris of American life, with factors such as class and gender informing their perception of them. It’s all part of the continuous partnership between life and art, image and prose and reality and performance, said Kushner.
If there was a thesis to Kushner’s talk, it was that writers must assemble a private toolbox of influences and use them unapologetically.
“There’s a gap between the source material and the thing I make of it, which is where fiction happens,” Kushner said.
The bold writer must wield the courage to shape and manipulate art into their narratives. The power of authority in literature is that it is wholly subjective. It is a tool for interpretation and an invitation to bend unspoken rules. Kushner’s worlds, haunted by the grainy textures of unsanctioned VHS tapes and half-remembered films, are evidence of this.
For those in the room, Kushner’s lecture left a clear invitation to look harder, borrow well and write what only you know.
A previous version of this article misspelled Don DeLillo as Don DeLilo. The Daily regrets this error.
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Daily Diminutive #061 (May 12, 2025)Click to play today's 5x5 mini crossword. The Daily produces mini crosswords three times a week and a full-size crossword biweekly.
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From the Community | My mother raised me with her bare hands. One day isn’t enough.Melisa Guleryuz argues why Mother's Day should extend beyond a singular day, sharing her experience as a daughter to a profoundly loving and influential mother.
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How do you thank someone for everything? You don’t. Not in one day. Not ever fully.
This is why I want to argue that Mother’s Day — sweet as it may be — is painfully insufficient. It collapses an epic, lifelong labor of love into 24 hours of sentimentality and consumerism. It gestures toward something sacred but leaves it stranded in the shallow end of appreciation.
Some women love so deeply that they leave fingerprints on your soul. My mother is one of them.
She mothered me not as a duty but as a devotion. Her love was not performative, not occasional, not seasonal. It was — and still is — a constant, like gravity. Invisible, essential and always there to catch me if I fall.
She raised me with a tenderness that had teeth, the kind of love that didn’t just cradle but carved, that protected me not just by shielding me from the world entirely but by taking the first blows herself. When I was small and frightened, she made herself smaller too, curling around me like a cocoon. Her strength was quiet and astonishing, a kind of strength that didn’t announce itself but showed up every morning in the form of patience, softness and sacrifice. She held up the sky when it threatened to collapse, then taught me how to hold it, too.
There were no medals. No standing ovations. Just a daughter who made it through because her mother kept holding the line.
And yet — each year — the world asks me to reduce this story to a single day.
A pink-tinted holiday. A bouquet delivered by someone else’s hands. A brunch menu with a prix fixe. Maybe a card that says “thank you for everything” in curly font followed by my signature that I scribbled between classes.
And for many students, this isn’t just about sentiment. It’s about justice. It’s about recognizing that we are often standing on the shoulders of women who held more than we’ll ever know, women who raised us with invisible strength, often while quietly breaking under the weight without letting us bear witness to their pain. My mother gave me her whole self so that I could learn how to be mine. And I’m not the only student here who can say that.
So, why do we confine this love to one Sunday in May?
At universities like ours, we speak fluently about achievement. We publish research, award fellowships and etch names into plaques. But we rarely carve space to honor the origin stories — the ones that begin not in lecture halls or boardrooms, but in kitchens, hospital rooms, late-night phone calls and folded laundry. We don’t talk enough about how many of us were raised not just by mothers but because of mothers. They did not just bring us into the world — they made us ready for it.
There are students here who carry their mother’s wisdom like a second spine. Who still hear her voice in moments of doubt. Who pack her love in their backpacks, between laptops and deadlines, as their most reliable form of survival.
And yet, we’re expected to express that ocean of gratitude with a single call, maybe flowers and maybe a five-minute slideshow on Instagram.
It’s not enough.
If Mother’s Day is the only time we pause to say thank you, we are failing to reflect the depth of what motherhood really is.
Here’s what I propose:
Let’s loosen the grip of tradition and imagine something richer. Let’s extend the spirit of Mother’s Day into a culture of daily, living appreciation. Let’s make room — in our institutions, in our conversations and in ourselves — for continuous honoring.
What if we let our mothers know what they mean to us on a random Tuesday, in a voice message sent after class, in the way we start to mother ourselves with the same tenderness they once gave us?
Mother’s Day can remain on the calendar, but it should never be the limit of our love. Some women deserve to be thanked every day.
My mother is one of them.
She made me who I am — not just by giving me life, but by reminding me every day that I was worthy of living well. She didn’t just raise me. She loved me into being.
And no day — no holiday, no card — could ever be enough for that.
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Martinez talks co-ops, student protests during office hours at On Call CafeDuring her office hours at On Call Cafe, Provost Jenny Martinez heard testimonies from members of threatened co-ops and engaged with student activists on immigration and the felony charges against the Building 10 protestors.
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On Thursday, dozens of students crowded around a table at On Call Cafe in Old Union to speak with Provost Jenny Martinez, raising concerns about the status of co-ops and making arguments against free speech restrictions on campus.
The Provost’s office hours followed an announcement from Residential Education (ResEd) that longtime co-ops Synergy and Terra would be converted into self-ops and lose their designated theme housing after failing to fill 50% of their rosters by the initial pre-assignment deadline.
Students from Synergy began the conversation by presenting Martinez with a letter and a series of testimonies from members of the co-op community, encouraging her to work with student leadership to allow the co-ops to keep their designated status.
“Why do you think the sign-up [numbers] were so low?” Martinez wondered, before asking the students how they would set up the residential system in order to “balance who gets a house when it seems like there’s more students who want to live in a house as a self-op then as a co-op.”
In response, students volunteered solutions such as instituting an alumni advisory board and changing the pre-assignment process from a single application to a ranked choice system.
“Synergy and Terra are desperately scrambling to find solutions,” said Hammerskjold Resident Assistant (RA) and co-op council member Mandla Msipa ’26. “I appreciated Provost Martinez looking for solutions and I’m hoping to see that attitude carry so that we can work on actually implementing solutions that preserve Synergy and Terra and the entire co-op community,” he said.
Martinez mentioned that according to ResEd, there are more beds available than students who pre-assigned co-ops. “Every student who wanted to live in a coop could. Why is that a bad idea?” she asked. “What’s the character of each of the co-ops now and how have they changed over time?”
Martinez was invited to dinner at both Synergy and Terra, though she acknowledged that “I don’t think we’re going to solve [ResEd] tonight.”
Following the co-op discussion, other students voiced their concerns about the campus environment under President Trump’s second term. Students asked Martinez how the university was responding to challenges for international students and criticized the University’s silence in the face of federal funding cuts.
Martinez shared that the University was working with immigration experts to support students. “The students whose visas were revoked and then reinstated — those students were connected with lawyers that the University provided,” said Martinez.
The conversation quickly escalated when students brought up the topic of free speech and the recently announced felony charges for the 12 students arrested last spring for breaking and entering the Office of the President.
“The question of the charges is for the [District Attorney (DA)],” said Martinez, as students demanded to know the extent of Stanford’s involvement with the DA’s office and what contributed to the hundreds of thousands of dollars reported in damages.
One student passionately accused Martinez of “playing a part” in the way the charges were filed, and another asked if she was collaborating with President Donald Trump to “push felony charges as hard as possible.”
“All the students involved in that protest are actually a great example of what Stanford students should look to,” said Poojit Hegde ’24 MS ’25, who compared the incident last spring to historic student protests.
Dohyun Kim ’25 was “deeply frustrated” and called the University’s cooperation with the DA a “deliberate choice to try and punish students.”
Martinez drew on her background as a constitutional historian, defending the time, place and manner restrictions on student speech on campus. “I think people should be able to say whatever content they want to say even if it offends other people, as long as it’s protected by the first amendment,” she said. “The first amendment protects a wide variety of viewpoints, but it does not protect conduct.”
Martinez left at 9 p.m., thirty minutes after the event was originally planned to conclude.
“I think that her adherence to whatever law is convenient for her is completely unfit for the rising fascist regime we’re seeing in the United States,” said Amanda Campos ’26. “If I were in a position of power like her and I called the police on peaceful student protesters…if I refused to stand up for them, if I hid behind her interpretation of the First Amendment, I would resign.”
Some students felt disappointed by their conversation with Martinez. “It does not feel like she wants to be in a genuine dialogue or discourse with us as students,” said Hegde who felt that “the way that [Martinez] was responding to us was disrespectful because she was really calculating in her way of avoiding addressing her job.”
Also hoping for a more productive dialogue, Martinez held office hours at On Call to make them more accessible. “I hold [office hours] so students can drop in and talk to me about what’s on their mind,” she wrote in an email to the Daily.
“I felt like a few students really dominated the conversation,” especially when discussing student protests, wrote Martinez, who felt “disappointed that other students who might have disagreed with the most vocal students or wanted to talk to me about other things never got the chance.”
“When I was leaving a student pulled me aside and expressed that feeling,” she wrote.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated a source’s quote. The Daily regrets this error.
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Meet Isaac Nehring: Truman Scholar and ‘man of action’2025 Truman Scholar Isaac Nehring ’26 hopes to conduct research in rural communities in his home state of Montana.
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Described by his sister as “a man of action,” Isaac Nehring ’26 has been a champion for rural issues at Stanford, from organizing a panel of rural speakers to working in rodent patrol for the O’Donohue Family Education Farm. On April 18, Nehring received the 2025 Truman Scholarship.
The Truman Scholarship is a $30,000 graduate fellowship awarded by the Harry S. Truman Foundation to undergraduate students demonstrating leadership, academic excellence and a commitment to public service.
Nehring, majoring in American Studies, is driven to answer questions regarding public lands, legislature policy and its intersections with his home state Montana. Nehring plans to study civil and environmental engineering for his coterminal degree and attend graduate school elsewhere with the Truman Scholarship, before pursuing a career in conservation advocacy.
Nehring’s passion for rural issues is exhibited in the discourse he fosters. Luke Terra, resident fellow of Nehring’s freshman dorm Otero — the university’s public service theme house — described Nehring as “wired from the beginning to want to create ways for students to connect and engage on topics that really didn’t get a lot of attention.”
Within Nehring’s first two months at Stanford, he drafted and submitted a grant proposal to the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) to launch the first annual rural panel with the Stanford Rural Engagement Network, also known as Rural Club, which he has helped organize every year since then, according to Terra.
The latest panel was held this Thursday, featuring economic revitalization and cultural preservation in small-town America.
“I’ve worked with a lot of students, but never someone who, very immediately upon arriving at Stanford, has a clear sense of what’s missing in our community conversations. And more than that, [who] has the kind of wherewithal to generate resources and organize an event and bring students together,” Terra said.
Nehring will conduct research with the Bill Lane Center to investigate how Montana is conceptualizing change, a research question that he hopes to refine through interviews in rural communities in Montana and develop as his senior thesis topic, he told The Daily.
“There [are] a lot of communities and demographics in Montana that are isolated, specifically rural communities. And there’s actually quite a bit of data that I want to use, but I also want to hear people’s stories,” Nehring said.
Nehring traces his interests in conservation and policy back to his roots in Montana.
Growing up in Helena with his two younger siblings, Annika Nehring ’28 and Eli Nehring, a big part of Nehring’s childhood was hiking the trail by his mother’s front doorstep, camping, floating on river in a raft and skiing at a local hill.
His foray into politics began in eighth grade. “Our state really loves guns, and I grew up in a household that owns a lot of guns,” he said. “I learned early on how critical compromise is [and] what the particular challenges are in a red state, in a small state and just any Rocky Mountain libertarian-minded state.
Nehring enjoys learning in a “hands-on” capacity and has been involved in many immersive programs at Stanford that have deepened his learning. One of them is his Sophomore College (SoCo) class CEE 17SC: River and Region: The Columbia River and the Shaping of the Pacific Northwest, which included a trip around the Pacific Northwest, with Donald J. McLachlan professor emeritus of history David Kennedy and associate professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering David Freyberg.
After his own SoCo experience, Nehring continued to lead a SoCo as a course assistant the summer before his junior year with the Bill Lane Center: POLISCI 29SC: Coastal Resilience: Problems and Solutions to Extreme Weather Challenges on the West Coast.
Nehring also spent sophomore winter in Washington D.C. through Stanford in Washington and junior fall abroad in Australia through the Bing Overseas Studies Program (BOSP).
“D.C. opened my eyes a lot and weirdly made me more confident,” Nehring said, especially in getting to know policymakers “as real people.” In Washington D.C., Nehring worked under Jon Tester, former U.S. senator from Montana and former president of the Montana Senate. Nehring also met U.S. Senator from New Jersey Cory Booker ’91 MA ’92, who gave him a hug on the Senate subway upon sharing he was from Stanford, Nehring said.
Erik Bradley ’25 MS ’25, Nehring’s roommate from Stanford in Washington, described him as “laser-focused on world issues” and “really lov[ing] his state.”
“He loves his state’s public lands and will spend a good amount of time talking about repairing laws, just because he feels deeply in his bones it’s super important,” he said.
When Nehring is on campus, he enjoys volunteering at the O’Donohue farm.
“It’s so beautiful,” Nehring said. “I’m trying to find more hours to work there and or just hang out.” He shared his enjoyment putting in T-posts and listening to his go-to podcast, “The Session.”
Jessie Bough ‘27, also a Montana resident and involved in rural club, said that Isaac was one of the only students from Montana who “really welcomed me.”
“He is also a super passionate and strong leader. He’s been really huge in transforming the club into something that now a ton of people know about and really love,” Bough said.
Anna Rose Robinson ’26, another close friend of Nehring’s, said “[Isaac] loves to take conversations outside of the classroom, bringing them home with the people he cares about, then bringing other people in as well.”
Outside of rural issues, Nehring has also weaved his love for the Educational Farm into Otero community events. For the last two occasions of the dorm’s end-of-year celebrations, Nehring was the pizza chef, operating the farm’s outdoor pizza kitchen “pumping out 50 pizzas for us at the event, which was just a really kind service that he gave to all of us,” Terra said.
Reflecting on his Stanford career, Nehring said he has become more open-minded to solutions to issues from electoral politics to conservation as well as growing in empathy and ability to accept failure.
“One of the things I’ve gotten a lot better at is also just being totally okay with receiving a no,” Nehring said. “I’ve been pretty happy and personally successful at Stanford in just putting my name out there and genuinely failing so many times, from my acapella audition to rejections from serious applications.”
“The Truman is one thing I have gotten, but it takes a million things to get to that and not win all of them,” he said. “I think people should always put themselves out more and use the resources more.”
Annika Nehring similarly noted her brother’s guidance, encouragement and ambition.
“Growing up, he was always the one coming up with crazy ideas, his mind was always running on a higher gear than the rest of us. I was always the pessimist, but somehow his projects always would work,” she said. “He just proved me and the world wrong every time, and he’s always hustling.”
A previous version of this article had an incorrect caption and also claimed that the Truman Scholarship would fund Nehring’s summer research project with the Bill Lane Center. The Daily regrets these errors.
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Stanford softball suffers loss to Duke in ACC quarterfinalsStanford softball notched its third straight 40-win season but was blanked 7-0 by Duke in ACC quarterfinals. Their NCAA Championship fate will be revealed May 11.
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Coming off a win against Pittsburgh (20-32, 7-17 ACC) the day before, No. 16 Stanford (40-11, 16-8 ACC) fell to No. 21 Duke (38-15, 16-8 ACC) in the quarterfinals of the ACC Championship.
Duke came out strong with two runs in the first three innings of the game, and Stanford never recovered despite having runners in scoring position in the fourth inning. Ultimately, the Blue Devils’ balanced performance, including a three-run home run, shut out the Cardinal. The game ended 7-0 and was the first time all season that the Stanford offense failed to score a run.
The day before, the Cardinal put up a strong performance against the Panthers, dominating en route to a 9-2 victory. The team’s pitching staff surrendered two runs in the first two innings, but they pitched a shutout in the remaining frames as senior Kylie Ching earned the win with her four-inning outing. The win put the Cardinal’s overall record at 40-10, which marked their third season in a row with 40+ wins. Senior Allie Clements hit a home run early in the game, her sixth of the season this year and ninth overall in her career.
The quarterfinal exit is a disappointing ending for a squad loaded with talent. Seven members of the team made their way to ACC all-star teams. Junior River Mahler was on the first team for the second time in her career, the first being as a player in the Pac-12. Junior Kyra Chan, sophomore Alyssa Houston and junior Emily Jones made the second team. Sophomore Jade Berry, junior Taryn Kern and freshman Joie Economides were on the third team.This is Kern’s third time being selected to an all-star team. Economides also secured a spot on the All-Freshman team.
Despite the loss, Stanford’s season may not be over yet. The team will now wait for the NCAA Championship selection show on May 11 to see if their season continues.
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On Mother’s Day: Stop blaming moms and start taking responsibility for your lifeOn this upcoming Mother’s Day, we need to take responsibility for our lives instead of placing all blame on our mothers, writes Gottlieb.
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There’s a clip about motherhood that went viral on social media recently. It’s from Apple TV’s “The Morning Show” and in it, the TV news anchor Alex Levy, played by Jennifer Aniston, loses it when her teenage daughter Lizzy, played by Oona Roche, blames her for all the ways in which her mom has disappointed her.
This scene spoke to me at a time when I felt a lot like Lizzy did. Strangely, though, I found myself rooting for her mom.
The sequence starts with “I’m sorry I broke your heart” and ends with Alex unapologetically launching an F-bomb at her daughter.
Mothers everywhere from TikTok to Instagram to Reddit discussions shared confessions of how they cheered this tour de force monologue, saying that Alex had the courage to give voice to what they felt they couldn’t: the unspoken frustration and emotional toll of motherhood, especially the feeling of being both unappreciated and criticized by their children after sacrificing so much.
As Alex put, “I’m a human being, Lizzy!”
Last Mother’s Day, my relationship with my mother seemed broken. She had done something that felt to me like a colossal betrayal of trust that greatly affected my future. And like Lizzy, I was brimming with blame.
The details aren’t what matters, but let’s just say that the summer that was supposed to be a bittersweet post-high school farewell was anything but. I carried resentment. She carried guilt. We both acknowledged that she’d messed up, but when I arrived at Stanford in September, I was still furious with her for what had happened.
Then one night, the “Morning Show” video popped up on my phone. Among the GenZ influencers talking about why they cut their “toxic” and “narcissistic” moms out of their lives, the algorithm fed me its counterpoint. And while Alex might have seemed unhinged in her outburst, what she said about the weight of her daughter’s expectations rang true. Mesmerized, I watched it several times in a row, and then I had a realization: maybe we kids were guilty of a kind of narcissism too?
One of the hardest realities to acknowledge is that a parent might be misguided, not see things clearly, or have their own emotional needs that get in the way of their children’s wellbeing, despite their best intentions. There’s a disillusionment in recognizing the fallibility of a parent, especially when that parent profoundly disappoints you.
However, our culture levies this disappointment disproportionately onto mothers.
Mothers are often expected to embody an ideal of perfection that is both relentless and unrealistic. They’re supposed to be endlessly nurturing, patient, uber-competent and self-sacrificing — and there’s no room for error. Maybe because I was raised by a single mom, I noticed a difference in how the fathers around me were viewed. A mom was given tacit demerits if she missed a school function because, say, she was at work; the fathers around me were constantly praised, almost heroically, for making a single appearance in our classrooms. The double standards abounded: If a father made a mistake, he was understandably stressed. If a mother messed up, she was neglectful or uncaring.
Sure, some fathers disappoint in all kinds of ways, leaving their children angry. But the bar is uneven: it doesn’t take much for a mother to disappoint — not just in culture’s eyes, but also in her children’s. When she stumbles, we call it failure instead of what it actually is: being human.
My mom and I have talked a lot about why and how things went south last year, and through these conversations, I’ve come to see her as a whole person with her own history and emotional deficits, which are hers alone to deal with. But what’s interesting is that as she navigates her way through the empty nesting stage of life, my task is to grapple with “adulting” — and a big part of adulting is taking responsibility for the course of my own life.
“Go make the life that you want!” Alex urges her angry daughter in her monologue — maybe that’s what all of us emerging adults need to focus on more. I wish I’d learned this lesson under different circumstances, but I’m also grateful that because of this perspective, my mom and I are close again in a way I couldn’t imagine last year.
As we move into adulthood, we need to rethink Mother’s Day not just as a time to celebrate moms, but to liberate them from the mythology we’ve built around them. Maybe we can honor them better by giving them permission to be full people — mistakes and all. We should thank them for all they do for us, but let’s also remember to thank them for surviving the weight of all we’ve expected them to be.
That, to me, is how we start growing up.
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Daily Diminutive #060 (May 9, 2025)Click to play today's 5x5 mini crossword. The Daily produces mini crosswords three times a week and a full-size crossword biweekly.
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The Stanford Scene: West Mulholland ’27 balances stardom and StanfordWest Mulholland ’27 discusses his recent film “Presence” and his experience as a student-actor.
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In his column “The Stanford Scene,” Paolo Reitz ’27 interviews Stanford filmmakers, actors and organizations on their recent projects and big events within the film scene on campus.
West Mulholland ’27 stars in “Presence,” the latest psychological horror film from director Steven Soderbergh, distributed by Neon and released in January of this year. During his time at Stanford, Mulholland has already worked on various other movies, including a role in David Slade’s “Dark Harvest” (2023).
Starring impressive names like Lucy Liu, “Presence” follows a family that slowly realizes they are not alone in their new house — and must grapple with the terrifying consequences. Mulholland plays Ryan, a popular high school athlete and the boyfriend of lead character Chloe.
As he continues pursuing a film and media studies degree, Mulholland hopes to utilize his acting experience as a foundation to work with directors and eventually direct his own projects.
The Daily spoke to Mulholland about his experience as a student-actor and his future plans.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
The Stanford Daily (TSD): [“Presence”] released this January, but presumably you were working on it long before then?
West Mulholland (WM): It was actually one of the quickest shoots I’ve done. I filmed this in the three weeks leading up to my frosh year at Stanford, and actually missed the first three days of New Student Orientation. It turned into a big thing with Stanford because they [initially] wanted me to take a gap year while classes hadn’t even started yet. Thankfully, they were very gracious and allowed me to make up the days via Canvas.
It was a great experience meeting all the cast and crew and working with Steven Sodorbergh over the three weeks, and then flying straight back to school for my first day of classes. It was, in total, an 11-day shoot that we shot chronologically, which was a huge help because it allowed me to develop my character as we worked.
TSD: How has your experience been being a student while also being an actor?
WM: It’s a lot. When my agent sends me three self tapes during midterm season while I have a bunch of projects, it does suck. The way I see it though is it’s my work — like another seven unit class within itself. I always make sure to have time in the week to allocate towards reading a script or even watching movies to get [a sense] of characters. I’m not perfect at making sure it all happens every day, but I’m learning to find the balance between the two. At the end of the day, it’s still incredibly rewarding.
I have to take off a lot of time to work on films throughout the year. Recently, I took a leave of absence over fall quarter to work on two films. One was with director Angelo Pizzo and it’s a film about his childhood and the pressure he faced from his family to become a great concert pianist. I play the role of the best friend that gets him to break free from his family’s influence. A throughline with a lot of my characters is that they are hurt, damaged individuals that let the burdens of life make them almost villains.
TSD: Do you think that working on characters with trauma has helped you overcome challenges within yourself?
WM: Well, it makes me really reflect and be grateful for all the love and support I have in my own life. Tapping into the mindset of these characters and developing them shows that the world is a really hard place and a lot of people come from places of disadvantage. But, they also put themselves in those situations and that’s why they become these monsters. It’s very eye-opening because you feel bad for what they go through, but I don’t because of the choices they make.
TSD: How do you think acting will play a role in your future?
WM: I’ve had a running joke with my family that I’m hoping to graduate with my little sister — she’s three years younger than me. So if I can graduate by 2030 with all the projects I’m doing, it would be the most incredible thing. I hope acting puts me into the industry even further so that I can pursue film production and directing in the future. I want to do something more than just acting. Working on these projects now sets me up to work on bigger films in the future, and I meet super cool production teams that I can continue to work with in the future.
“Presence” is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, YouTube Premium, and Apple TV+.
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University aims to convert co-ops Synergy and Terra to self-opsSynergy and Terra were informed by ResEd on May 6 that both co-ops would lose their co-op status next academic year, due to low pre-assignment numbers.
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Assistant vice provost for Residential Education (ResEd) Cheryl Brown informed co-ops Synergy and Terra that both houses would be “sunsetted” and lose their co-op status in a staff meeting with ResEd on Tuesday.
Pre-assignment numbers for the upcoming academic year have been low across all co-ops. After pre-assignment, Synergy and Enchanted Broccoli Forest (EBF) resident assistants (RAs) for next year met with Rowan Neighborhood Program Director Andrew Gray to request a second round of pre-assignment, which was denied.
Gray allegedly alerted Synergy, a co-op founded in 1972 focused on alternative living, and Synergy and Terra, an unofficial queer and trans-themed co-op founded in 1970, that they may be turned into self-ops due to the low numbers. Synergy then shared this information with Terra.
“As part of Stanford’s co-op tradition, theme houses are expected to maintain a healthy pre-assignment roster filling between 50% and 100% of their assigned spaces with students committed to fulfilling the theme duties of cooking and cleaning without assistance. Falling below this range results in the loss of theme housing privileges,” vice provost for student affairs Michele Rasmussen wrote in the email to Synergy at 4 p.m. on May 6.
Co-ops are community based row houses where each resident has cooking and cleaning responsibilities. To live in a co-op, residents can pre-assign through an application. The remaining spots in the house are open for students to choose in the regular housing selection process. As future self-ops, Synergy and Terra would have those operations taken care of by the University and be part of the regular housing selection process.
“Co-ops at Stanford have always been, and will remain, a beloved and valued part of residential life. However, it is our responsibility to steward Stanford residential spaces as effectively and fairly as possible,” ResEd spokesperson Luisa Rapport wrote in a statement to The Daily. She said the University remains “committed” to supporting pre-assignees to these houses.
On April 25, ResEd presented Synergy and Terra staff with three options for the houses: turn both houses into self-ops, keep both houses as semi self-ops (which involves accepting dining or custodial staff and increasing costs to residents) or consolidate both houses into one. Synergy and Terra staff chose the second option and decided to try to negotiate for certain modifications. They then informed ResEd of this decision.
Synergy created a letter of support for students, faculty and alumni to sign, noting that co-ops serve an important space of historically marginalized communities and attributed low pre-assignment numbers to housing application barriers.
The letter currently has 809 signatures. Synergy also sent out a Google Form for students to indicate commitment to choosing the house during the regular housing draw. Synergy staff delivered the letter, which had over 600 signatures at the time, on April 29 to ResEd. The houses also communicated to ResEd that they were willing to keep discussing their options.
In the announcement on May 6, Synergy and Terra were told that no negotiation was to take place, leaving some residents feeling blindsided.
“Both houses know what’s going on, our RAs are letting us know. And then all of a sudden, our houses are getting shut down, which is not what we were led to believe this entire time until [May 6],” Sofia Gonzalez-Rodriguez ’25, a Synergy resident and former Synergy staff, said.
Now, both houses are deciding how to move forward and plan to appeal the decision with ResEd. Vardaan Shah ’25, a Terra resident and former Terra RA, has hope that ResEd can be negotiated with. “It’s not like these situations are permanent,” he said, referring to Columbae, which lost their co-op status and regained it last year.
Shah said the houses are unsure who is making the decisions and there has been a lack of transparency.
“It felt kind of hurtful, kind of disrespectful to our future staff, who had been putting in this time to meet with them,” Gonzalez-Rodriguez said.
Sydney Faux ’26, a Terra resident, was “devastated” when she heard the news, especially after all the negotiation and hope to salvage the houses. She says it is hard to hear that such a supportive community is being shut down for reasons that are unclear to her.
“Terra has been the first place that I can truly call home,” Faux said. “Terra really is the only place where I feel like I can truly express myself, whether it’s through queerness or any other sort of avenue.”
Shah said Terra is especially important for queer people, as it provides them with a safe space and an accepting family, something even more important now. For transitioning students, other Terra residents can provide advice and help them express themselves through giving them haircuts and free clothes that allow them to express their gender identity.
“I think it’s really devastating to me, honestly, that the University didn’t even take the time to understand what the ramifications of that decision was going to be before, before making it,” Shah said. “And it’s really devastating that the people who are going to be most impacted by this decision are people who are already marginalized.”
“Friends come in here and they do leave like family,” Terra resident Gio Jiang ’26 told The Daily.
Shah shared that Terra residents have told him that they would have dropped out, transferred or done harm to themselves had it not been for Terra.
Aarushi Patil ’24 M.S. ’25 finds the Terra community much more supportive than a standard dorm or self-op. “It’s hard to experience that loss of community … I think a lot of us didn’t find community outside of this,” Patil said.
Despite its theme, Terra is home to not only gender queer or LGBTQ+ people. Gonzalez-Rodriguez said the decision will also affect friends of the house, people who attend the houses’ events and alumni.
Faux said co-ops are so powerful and special — something the University does not understand. Metrics to determine the future of these houses are “arbitrarily set,” Faux said.
“There must be something that’s so, so special and so unique and so powerful about these places, such that people are begging the University, ‘I want to keep cleaning Aarushi’s toilets, I want to keep cooking for my friends,’” Jiang said.
This article has been updated to include comment from RedEd.
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To touch deathHsu shares what is feels like to hold death in one's hands.
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It’s winter of my freshman year the first time I touch a dead body.
The face is covered. The limbs are stiff. The air is stale.
I don’t think too deeply about it.
Death has always gone unspoken in my world. Yes, I realize that at some point everyone will die. And yes, I’ve lowered my friends into the ground, and seen what death was.
But I’ve never touched death.
There’s little to no warning on our first day of class. One moment, we’re looking over anatomy slides, and the next our, professor is leading us down the hallway and instructing us to put on gloves. The choking smell of formaldehyde is the only real warning.
Our TAs unzip the thick blue bags and pull back a sheet.
There she is.
I’m not scared, exactly. Still, it is shocking to see her in front of me and look across the room to the six other donors lying in blue bags. I half expect them to suddenly rise and crawl around like a scene from a horror movie.
But she remains lifeless, face covered in her bag.
I wonder how she ended up here; why she chose to give her body to us. For now, she doesn’t have a name or a backstory; she is just our donor. She has given one final gift in death. I can only imagine how selfless she was in life.
We are careful with her, making our way from the outside layers of skin deep into her abdomen and organs. I trace the arteries in her chest, the web of nerves that breaks out from her shoulder, and the muscles in her hand.
The heart is heavy the first time I hold it.
It’s the size of my fist, and I’m extra careful not to drop it. Cradled in the palm of my hands, it looks nothing like the cartoon-esque drawings in our textbook. Our TAs instruct us to trace the pathway of the blood flow, pushing their forceps through her superior vena cava and into her right atrium. I look down at my own chest, as if to see the same thing through my rib cage and muscles.
Our donor had open heart surgery.
There’s staples sticking out of her sternum and the sutures in the valves of her heart. Feeling the scar, I wonder again how she ended up here. Was it the heart surgery that landed her here? Or was it the heart surgery that gave her extra time?
It’s strangely normal, this whole scene. I go to class, we unzip the bag, we learn and then we leave her. But the smell of the cadaver lab lingers. Sometimes, I believe that it penetrates the fibers of my shoes, the beds of my fingernails, and the roots of my hair. More than once, I catch the smell in my room, a stark reminder of where I’ve been and what I’ve seen.
More recently, I’ve been wondering if I could give a gift as immense as the one she’s given. Could I really offer my body up for strangers to cut open and study? To allow someone else to know my body more intimately than I will ever know it?
I never knew my donor in life, but I did get to learn about her in death.
I don’t know if I could ever do the same. But I do know that, because of her, I now understand a bit more about life after death.
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UGS postpones certifying election, hears from co-ops losing housesThe University plans to turn Synergy and Terra, two cooperative houses (co-ops) into self-ops for the next academic year.
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The Undergraduate Senate (UGS) postponed a bill to certify the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) election to next week, tabled a bill to expel former UGS co-chair Ivy Chen ’26 M.A. ’27 from the UGS and heard from representatives for Synergy and Terra, two cooperative houses (co-ops) the University plans to turn into self-ops for the next academic year, at their Wednesday meeting.
The UGS unanimously voted to approve a resolution affirming the UGS’s authority to certify specific portions of the 2025 ASSU election. On Monday, the Graduate Student Council’s (GSC) voted to call for a new election, citing a violation of election notice requirements, which require advertising in The Daily, mass flyers or sending out the elections handbook.
The resolution asserts the UGS’s authority to certify the UGS and undergraduate class presidential elections as well as all undergraduate-only annual grants and undergraduate portions of joint annual grants.
The resolution also defers certification of the ASSU Executive Slate until further joint deliberation with the GSC and directs the Elections Commision to not schedule a new election for any undergraduate-impacted ballot items until the election is invalidated by two-thirds of the UGS in addition to the GSC.
In the resolution, the UGS “acknowledges the concerns raised” by the GSC regarding election certification at their Monday meeting. During the meeting, UGS appropriations chair David Sengthay ’26 M.A. ’26 recognized the recent petition filed by Ava Brown ’26 and Will Berriman ’26, the winning ASSU Executive Slate, against the ASSU Constitutional Council regarding the GSC’s failure to certify the election results.
The petition alleges that the decision “violates the ASSU Constitution and ASSU Joint Bylaws, as it is not grounded in any constitutional provision or bylaw-defined criteria for invalidation” based on a failure to meet standards for voter fraud and voter disenfranchisement.
In a statement to The Daily, Brown and Berriman shared that, in a meeting with two UGS senators, they were told that “the GSC’s inaction to certify the election has ‘tied the hands” of UGS leadership.’”
“This represents a serious breach of the independence of the Undergraduate Senate,” Brown and Berriman wrote. “To date, no one — neither the Graduate Student Council (GSC) nor the Undergraduate Senate (UGS) — has disputed the integrity of our campaign and our actions during it.”
The UGS plans to vote on certifying the undergraduate portions of the election highlighted in the resolution next week.
The UGS also heard from representatives of co-ops Synergy and Terra on threats from the University to turn the two spaces into self-ops.
Co-ops are residences where house members spend two to six hours a week performing house jobs such as cooking, washing dishes and cleaning, according to the Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) website. Self-ops, by contrast, have a dedicated chef and custodial service on weekdays.
After failing to attract enough pre-assignees to fill the houses, Residential Assistants (RAs) in Terra and Synergy were informed that both houses would be converted into self-ops.
Jules Gittin ’26, a current Synergy resident and future Synergy RA argued at the meeting that the Terra and Synergy situation was different from the Delta Delta Delta (Tri Delta) sorority losing their house because co-ops have specific “relationships to their house.”
“[The] difference from the situation with Tri Delt is that the labor and the caretaking of the houses is what builds the co-op community, so it can’t really function the same,” Gittin said.
At the UGS meeting, representatives for Synergy and Terra urged the UGS to consider a resolution to support the co-op status of the two houses and press the University on the decision at the Faculty Senate meeting tomorrow.
“These communities are not just houses. They’re not just places that we put our bags down and we sleep at night. They are homes,” Gittin said.“The desire to live in a co-op comes from a desire [to take control] over your own life, over your own decision making.”
The UGS also tabled a bill attempting to expel former senator Chen from the governing body. Chen ultimately resigned shortly before the UGS meeting last week, prompting the UGS to discuss amending the bill to expel Chen into a censureship bill.
ASSU President Diego Kagurabadza ’25 shared he had not yet had the opportunity to amend the bill to a censureship. “I also have a little reservation about setting a precedent that the Senate can censure non-members,” Kagurabadza said.
The UGS unanimously voted to table the bill with one abstention.
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Berkeley philosopher challenges traditional views of love and consciousnessAlva Noë, chair of UC Berkeley’s philosophy department, delivered this year’s Presidential Lecture in the Arts and Humanities on the vital relationship between love and perception.
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“What if consciousness, like love, is the work of making relationships?” Alva Noë, chair of the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley, proposed at Stanford’s annual Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts on Wednesday.
“Love names the work of opening up the world, the very labor of consciousness,” Noë said.
His talk at the Stanford Humanities Center went on to challenge philosophy’s traditional distinction between value and fact where it delimits questions about love and human perception, respectively.
“If I’m right,” he said, “this way of organizing curriculum should be a source of embarrassment. Love and value are at the very heart of the problems of perception, consciousness and indeed, life.”
The Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts has brought prominent scholars, artists and writers to Stanford since the 1990s. Recent speakers have included historian Timothy Snyder, writer Zadie Smith and scholar Sadiya Hartman.
Noë received his Ph.D. from Harvard and has been a philosophy professor at Berkeley since 2003, where he also belongs to the Center for New Media, the Program in Critical Theory and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. A Guggenheim Fellow, much of his past scholarship has focused on problems of consciousness, aesthetics and the philosophy of mind.
He employed each of these problems throughout his lecture, at one point encouraging his audience to embrace the provocation that “all perceiving is somehow loving.” Love’s opposite, he said, is not contempt but indifference, which he called “the basic condition of blindness.”
Director of the Stanford Humanities Center Roland Greene, an English and comparative literature professor, told The Daily that love is a new philosophical frontier for Noë. “My goal is always to bring people who are in the process of working out a new idea,” he said. “So I wanted to get [Noë] at exactly this moment, before his ideas about love have hardened.”
The lecture drew on numerous thinkers and writers who have engaged themes of love and perception, including bell hooks ’73, Iris Murdoch, Sappho and Gillian Rose, whose 1995 memoir “Love’s Work” served as a touchstone for Noë’s ideas.
He argued against the conception that love is an unconditional good “because it is natural and normal.” According to this traditional view, Noë said, the “capacity for love belongs to normal human life,” akin to “strong teeth and healthy bones” or “having good genes.”
For Noë, however, love is not a passive emotion, but rather the effortful task of bringing another person “into focus and accomplishing their presence and our own.”
“We don’t love because the ones we love are so impressive or so charming or so beautiful or good,” he said. “There isn’t really any fully formed person there for you prior to the unfolding of your relationship with them…You enact them in the work of coming to know them. Love is the commitment to this work.”
To illuminate his claims, Noë turned to the theory of art. The aim of aesthetics, he observed, is not to “judge works of art with respect to whether they are, for example, beautiful or original.” Instead, aesthetic engagement is “the work of achieving the [art] object and oneself. It’s the work of making a relationship with it.”
Returning to love, Noë defined the word as “precisely a dedication to the aesthetic work of finding ways to see what is there, to engage a person or a situation honestly and with concern.”
Chloe Allen, a student at UC Santa Cruz who attended the lecture, told The Daily that Noë’s lecture left her thinking about the critical role of attention in relationships.
“I think it’s important to try and bring out what already exists in other people by paying enough attention to them,” she said. “The first step is just paying them enough respect to notice what is actually in front of you, and not take for granted the fact that they are there.”
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Police Blotter: Sexual battery, theft by use of access card information and second-degree burglaryBetween April 28 and May 4, incidents on campus included multiple thefts of bikes and scooters, vehicle break-ins, a reported sexual battery on Via Ortega, vandalism, and fraudulent use of access card information.
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This report covers incidents from April 28 to May 4 as recorded in the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) bulletin. Learn more about the Clery Act and how The Daily approaches reporting on crime and safety here.
The Daily has reached out to SUDPS for more information regarding the sexual battery at 400 Via Ortega.
The Daily has reached out to SUDPS for more information regarding the vandalism of $400 or more, the theft by use of access card information and second-degree burglary cases.
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