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Reported sexual assault of jogger did not occur, investigation finds

The sexual assault report created safety concerns on campus in the spring.

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In March, a female jogger reported being sexually assaulted by an armed man on campus. Authorities now say the crime never happened.

Stanford’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) conducted a “thorough investigation” into the assault, which allegedly took place on March 29 by the intersection of Santa Ynez Street and Mayfield Avenue. Investigators determined the report was fabricated, according to Stanford PR Director Charlene Gage.

“[The Department of Public Safety] recognizes that these findings may raise concerns for survivors about whether they will be believed if they make a police report,” Gage wrote in an email to The Daily. “[The department] remains steadfastly committed to treating every report with the utmost seriousness and care.”

The department will conduct comprehensive and impartial investigations, she added, based on evidence and “guided by respect for those who come forward to report these serious crimes.”

Gage said the same woman reported another sexual assault on April 5, which investigators found did not occur either based on “strong evidence.”

In the March report, the woman told university police the perpetrator grabbed her, “pushed [her] into a landscaped area near a house,” and sexually assaulted her at approximately 6:15 p.m. She said he carried a firearm.

Students received a campus-wide alert from Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) that night at 10:40 p.m.

The woman described the assailant as clean-shaven, with dark skin, brown eyes and short hair. She said he wore a light blue sweatshirt, a thick, braided bracelet and dark jeans, with a “semi-automatic handgun in the waistband.”

In early April, University spokesperson Angie Davis wrote in a statement to The Daily that “DPS has no evidence that there is a threat to the community related to this incident.”

Even so, the reported assault left Stanford community members with safety concerns, The Daily previously reported. Many students took precautionary measures, including locking their doors, sharing their locations, purchasing pepper spray and keeping to well-lit and populated areas.

“Hearing the news that first Sunday back from Spring Break was heartbreaking,” incoming ASSU Executive Vice President Celeste Vargas ‘27 wrote in a March email to The Daily. “ It’s a scary time to be a woman on campus.”

Several news outlets covered the reported assault, including CBS News, NBC Bay Area and ABC7 Bay Area.

It remains unknown whether the woman who reported the assault is a Stanford student or affiliate. It is also unclear what motivated the false report.

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Judge blocks DOJ’s request for medical records of Stanford’s transgender minors

A federal judge called the demand a “bad-faith campaign to intimidate hospitals.”

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A federal judge blocked the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday from obtaining the identities and medical records of transgender minors treated at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford.

In a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts stated that the demand was part of a “bad-faith campaign to intimidate hospitals into halting the lawful provision of gender-affirming care.”

The injunction prohibits the DOJ and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche from “requesting, receiving, or otherwise obtaining the sensitive health information” about clinical indications and diagnoses of patients who received gender-affirming care at Stanford. It also prohibits information regarding informed consent, patient intake and parent or guardian authorization for minor patients that the grand jury subpoena demanded.

Specifically, the injunction protects a provisionally certified class of all patients who received gender-affirming care at Stanford while under 18 between Jan. 1, 2020, and May 5, 2026 — the day before the grand jury subpoena was issued. The records that the DOJ demanded for those patients numbered in the “tens of thousands,” the hospital’s counsel attested. 

In response to the order, the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford remains “committed to protecting the privacy of the patients we serve, complying with all relevant laws and court orders, and delivering the highest quality care,” Lisa Kim, director of media relations at Stanford Health Care, wrote in an email to The Daily.

According to Pitts, the DOJ’s demand would disclose “children’s private health information to officials who expressly intend to deprive them of medical care that their families, doctors, and the California legislature deem necessary and appropriate,” calling this an “obvious harm.”

The patient records, Pitts wrote, have “no discernible relevance” to any federal healthcare offense the Texas grand jury could be investigating, adding that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed based on a Fifth Amendment right to informational privacy.

Stanford is not the first to face — or to fight — such a demand. In the order, Pitts wrote that at least eight federal court decisions across six states had quashed similar administrative subpoenas issued to other hospitals, and that the DOJ’s pivot to a Texas grand jury was “an obvious effort” to shield its tactics from judicial review “in favor of a distant forum that DOJ deems friendly to its political positions,” quoting a Rhode Island federal court. On June 24, a judge in New York granted similar relief to patients of NYU Langone Hospitals, which received a nearly identical subpoena the same day as Stanford.

Pitts declined to certify a broader statewide class or extend the injunction to all California hospitals, writing that there was no evidence the DOJ is currently seeking records from any other institution in the state. However, should plaintiffs “subsequently procure evidence that DOJ is seeking the medical records of minors who received care at institutions other than Packard, they may seek relief on their behalf at that time,” Pitts wrote.

The DOJ’s investigation stems from a January 2025 executive order in which President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to “end” gender-transition-related care for minors, calling it a “dangerous trend” that will be a “stain in our Nation’s history,” and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s April 2025 memorandum issuing investigations of providers.

Later, in June 2025, Stanford paused gender-affirming surgeries for patients under 19, becoming one of the first major California providers to limit care, though its pediatric gender clinic continues to provide other services.

The DOJ first sought the records in July 2025 through an administrative subpoena — one of more than 20 issued to gender-affirming care providers nationwide under a directive from Bondi. Stanford produced certain non-patient records and spent nine months negotiating with the DOJ over producing anonymized patient records, but never disclosed identifying patient data, according to a declaration from the hospital’s counsel cited in the order. 

On May 6, the DOJ withdrew the administrative subpoena and replaced it with a grand jury subpoena of nearly identical scope issued under the seal of the Northern District of Texas, demanding compliance by June 10.

Thursday’s ruling also follows a recent lawsuit filed on May 27 by six families of underage patients, represented by the National Center for LGBTQ Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD Law), who sued Stanford to prevent it from complying with the grand jury subpoena. Among a wider range of records, the grand jury subpoena demanded documents “sufficient to identify every patient” who received what it termed “sex-rejecting procedures” at the hospital, along with the clinical indications and diagnoses that formed the basis for their care.

Pitts previously issued a temporary restraining order on June 8 without stating his reasons. This 43-page order now explains them, and the injunction will remain in effect while the case proceeds. The DOJ can appeal the injunction to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The federal government is engaging in extraordinary measures, using a secret grand jury process to try and pry into patients’ medical records,” Jennifer Levi, GLAD Law senior director of transgender and queer rights, said in a statement after the June 8 order.

Following Thursday’s order, “Families in California can now sleep at night knowing that this blatant attempt to harass and intimidate them and to dictate how they raise their own children has been stopped,” National Center for LGBTQ Rights Legal Director Shannon Minter said. “Today’s preliminary injunction ruling is a strong indication our case will succeed on the merits.”

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Ariana Grande’s ‘Eternal Sunshine’ tour looks forward while making peace with the past

The setlist offered a portrait of an artist learning how to carry the past without living in it.

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For seven years, fans talked about an Ariana Grande tour more than they actually expected it to happen. When Grande last toured in 2019, “thank u, next” had just been released, TikTok was still in its early days and the artist’s career looked very different from what it does now. In the years since, she’s released two studio albums, stepped into the world of film with the “Wicked” franchise and largely disappeared from the touring circuit altogether. So by the time she arrived in Oakland on June 6 for the opening weekend of the “Eternal Sunshine” tour, named after her newest album, “eternal sunshine,” expectations had only continued to grow.

On June 10, the third night of the tour’s opening run, that anticipation was impossible to miss. Throughout the Oakland Arena, fans paid tribute to the artist’s different eras, recreating outfits from album rollouts, music videos and other iconic moments from her career. Even before Grande took the stage, the night already meant more than a typical tour stop; for many in attendance, it was the return of an artist they had spent years waiting to see again. 

What followed surprised me just a bit: Grande did not necessarily deliver the career-spanning victory lap that some fans (including me) expected. Instead, she built much of the evening around “eternal sunshine,” using the album as a lens through which to revisit the past and imagine what comes next. 

The 90-minute show was divided into five acts connected by elaborate video interludes. Grande opened with “yes, and,” “positions,” “dandelion” and “the boy is mine” before moving through much of the “eternal sunshine” tracklist. Songs such as “twilight zone,” “past life,” “Hampstead” and “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” received significant attention from the audience, while older hits appeared more selectively throughout the night. 

That choice occasionally made the show feel surprisingly brief. While crowd favorites like “Dangerous Woman,” “Into You,” “Break Free,” “7 rings,” “thank u, next” and “One Last Time” all made the setlist, many fan favorites from earlier eras, such as “Problem,” “The Way” and “Side to Side,” to name a few, never arrived. Considering Grande’s long hiatus from touring — and the absence of an opening performer — it was difficult not to wish for another few songs.

Still, the setlist’s focus seemed intentional. Rather than functioning as a celebration of every era, the show often felt like an examination of them. That theme emerged most clearly through the production’s video interludes. Throughout the night, Grande repeatedly revisited previous versions of herself. One sequence featured multiple incarnations of the singer seated in medical-style chairs, seemingly representing different chapters of her career. Among them was a reference to the outfit she wore during the One Love Manchester benefit concert following the 2017 arena bombing. Yet one chair remained empty, perhaps to represent that her “Eternal Sunshine” tour self is not to be viewed as a past moment. 

Whether every audience member interpreted the imagery the same way or not, the larger message felt clear. Grande wasn’t interested in pretending the past never happened. Instead, she seemed focused on acknowledging it, learning from it and moving forward. 

If there was one aspect of the performance that left little room for debate, it was Grande’s voice. Long regarded as one of pop music’s most gifted vocalists, she somehow sounded even better live than on record. The layered harmonies that opened “Eternal Sunshine” floated effortlessly through the arena, while complex songs such as “Dangerous Woman” and “One Last Time” served as reminders of the vocal control that has defined her career since the beginning.

Grande was equally supported by a talented group of dancers who helped bring the production’s storytelling to life. Rather than serving as background performers, they became an extension of the narrative, helping connect each act through movement and visual motifs. Combined with the interludes, their work transformed the concert into something more theatrical than a typical arena show.

One of the night’s most memorable moments had nothing to do with choreography or production. During the performance, the arena joined together in singing “Happy Birthday” to Grande’s mother, Joan, who was in attendance. The moment lasted less than a minute, but it captured the unusual connection Grande has built with her audience. Even in a packed arena, the interaction felt surprisingly personal.

As I walked out of the venue, I found myself thinking less about the songs Grande didn’t perform and more about the story she was trying to tell. 

The “Eternal Sunshine” tour may not be the definitive retrospective some fans envisioned after seven years away from touring. Some of the loudest reactions of the night came during songs from earlier eras. Yet even then, the show never lingered there for long. Through its visuals, setlist choices and recurring themes of reflection, the production offered a portrait of an artist learning how to carry the past without living in it.

For Grande, that seems to be the point. The concert spent plenty of time looking backward, but by the final notes of “ordinary things,” it became clear her focus is somewhere else entirely.

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Two years on, cancellation of trans student discussion group leaves some feeling “confused and abandoned”

Queer Student Resources cut its Trans& program in 2024, citing low attendance and budget restrictions.

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Queer Student Resources (QSR) cut the community organization Trans& in the fall of 2024 — a decision that some students and alumni say has left a gap in support for trans students. 

The organization provided a place where “trans students can meet with other trans students… to talk about real life issues, according to a previous version of the QSR website. The program’s weekly meetings typically consisted of a catered meal and guided discussion about trans issues.

According to QSR administrators, lowered attendance rates and QSR budget restrictions were behind the decision to cut the program. The University referred The Daily to a statement from the QSR team, which did not directly address Trans&.

“QSR is dedicated to making Stanford a place where all students, including students of all genders and sexualities, can flourish,” the statement read. It added that over the last two years, QSR began shifting its programming to be “more intersectional and intentionally welcoming of the widest range of identities, communities, and perspectives within shared spaces.”

Former Trans& regular Ava Aidala ’26 said Trans& was important because official resources are often “flawed,” and community spaces are needed to “thrive as a queer person.”

“There’s a very strong culture in the trans community of mutual care, helping each other out, because there has to be,” Aidala said. “And when those community ties are broken, that’s losing access to a lot of resources.”

According to Aidala, there was little communication about the dissolution of Trans&, leaving some trans individuals on campus feeling “confused and abandoned.” She added that the program’s end came at an especially bad time because it preceded Trump’s executive orders on gender.

“It meant that… in a period where there was a lot of heightened concern in the trans community, there was less community space,” Aidala said.

Alex, a former participant in Trans& who requested the use of a pseudonym, also spoke to the importance of Trans&. They said that  trans individuals “across the board, have a harder time with everything.”

“We’re more disabled, we’re more unemployed, we’re less educated, we have a lot more health issues than cis people on average,” they said. “Are our lives not hard enough that we can have this one moment of solace and just come together?”

Alex said that they applied to lead the program during the 2024-25 school year. Before they stepped into the role, though, QSR’s full-time staff told them the program had not garnered enough attendance to warrant continued support from University funds.

“I was a trans person who was attending every week, and I saw a lot of people come and a lot of great conversations happening and friendships being made,” Alex said. “I felt like it was like reaching its goals, but [full-time] staff seemed to not think so.”

Regardless, Alex joined QSR as a general staff member in 2024. During their first staff meeting they asked to lead Trans&, but QSR Associate Director Michael Yepez again told them that QSR did not have the budget to support the program. 

That fall, Alex organized one Trans& event — a movie night — which was the last the program hosted. Alex took an academic leave of absence that winter and was replaced by a cisgender staff member at QSR, which Alex worried reduced transgender representation on QSR’s staff.

According to Alex, QSR’s decision to end Trans& followed a pattern in which the center set up “unnecessary hoops to jump through” for the program’s student organizers. They added that QSR’s bureaucratic structure made event planning difficult when Trans& existed.

“You can’t just [host an event],” they said. “Every single step you would need to come back to [QSR staff] and get their approval.”

Aidala worries that future trans students will struggle to find community at Stanford following the program’s dissolution.

“I sort of fear for the trans students that are going to be in a campus where it is going to be even more isolating than it was for me,” Aidala said. “[But I believe] they will continue to find each other and form community spaces…Trans people are resilient.” 

The dissolution of Trans& affected both undergraduate and graduate students. Ev Nichols Ph.D. ’24 and her co-lead established a Trans& program for graduate students (Trans& grad) as a separate entity from the undergraduate Trans& group in 2023. The grad program met consistently in fall 2024, but has since been cut along with its undergraduate counterpart.

Nichols said that before she joined Trans&, she felt isolated and lacked access to queer or trans community.

“It was really great to have the opportunity to come in and start something from the ground up,” she said. Nichols added that at Trans& meetings she “did not have to feel super hyper-vigilant about how you’re being perceived by other people on Stanford’s campus.”

As a co-lead of Trans& grad, Nichols helped organize information sessions about on-campus medical care for trans students. She also coordinated advocacy to improve health services for trans students at Vaden and better disseminate information regarding trans healthcare on campus.

“From that base of community, we were able to identify other things that people needed,” Nichols said. “[My co-lead] and I would do what we can to… push [University administration] to make changes that would benefit the community.”

For Aidala, the loss of trans community spaces on campus extends beyond the termination of Trans&, constituting a “campaign against queer spaces on campus.”

She pointed to the deprioritization of cooperative houses, or co-ops, saying that these residences offer a safe space for queer students. Several of her friends, she said, realized they were trans while living at Terra. Aidala also highlighted the loss of DragFest funding. In her view, even the resources that remain feel “very uncertain.”

“It doesn’t just feel like [University administrators] really care about us,” Aidala said. “It’s more like they actively do not want queer students to have community and feel… safe on campus.”

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Levin, Stanford alumni appear on list of Peter Thiel ‘Dialog’ society affiliates

Leaders in tech, politics and business appeared alongside them in a Monday internet leak.

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An internet leak named University president Jonathan Levin ’94 as an affiliate of ‘Dialog,’ an invitation-only network of leaders in tech, politics and business founded by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel ’89 J.D. ’92. 

Since Thiel founded Dialog in 2006, the society has hosted annual retreats for its members. The group’s events have allegedly included sessions titled “Navigating WWIII” and “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” as reported by WIRED.

Axios reported last year that the organization bought real estate outside Washington, D.C. to develop a headquarters.

Swiss anarchist and hacktivist maia arson crimew posted a list of 113 Dialog affiliates on Monday — including Levin, U.S. Senator Cory Booker ’91 M.A. ’92, Graduate School of Business professor Susan Athey Ph.D. ’95 and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale ’04. WIRED reported that it has “independently verified” the contents of the list.

An invitation to Dialog 2014, which appeared in the Epstein files released earlier this year, listed Levin as a participant in their 2013 retreat. The invite also listed Athey, Lonsdale and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman ’90 as attendees. 

The Daily has reached out to Levin and the University for comment.

crimew found the directory embedded in the Dialog website’s code on Monday morning. The hacker previously drew attention for exposing the U.S. government’s No-Fly-List on a misconfigured Amazon Web Services (AWS) server. She was indicted on criminal charges in the United States in 2021.

In a subsequent Bluesky post, crimew wrote that it was unclear whether the list comprised current members or simply speakers and attendees at the network’s events. 

“i am no secret society expert but i dont think going to the secret society convention is much less bad than being a member of the secret society,” crimew wrote on Bluesky.

Names on the list span political parties and spheres of influence. Other Stanford affiliates who appear include former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro ’96, The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson ’97, philosopher and author Sam Harris ’00 and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan ’96 M.B.A. ’05.

In addition to Levin, the list named higher education leaders including Mitch Daniels, former president of Purdue University and Governor of Indiana, and Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard University.

Billionaire Elon Musk, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, journalist Ezra Klein and songwriter Benj Pasek also appeared on the list. 

Thiel co-founded Palantir with Lonsdale, Alex Karp J.D. ’92, Stephen Cohen ’05 and Nathan Gettings in 2003. The software company builds data collection and analytics platforms used by the federal government, defense companies and intelligence agencies.

Palantir has faced criticism in recent years for its role in the tracking and deportation of undocumented immigrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Last year, the company entered a lucrative defense contract with the U.S. Army, which recently expanded to include the company’s Maven artificial intelligence system.

Throughout the 2000s, Thiel met with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who offered Thiel financial advice and frequently invited him to his island. The two men exchanged emails until early 2019. Documents in the Epstein files released earlier this year documented an apparently close relationship between them. In one message, Epstein referred to Thiel as a “great friend.” 

In a February 2016 email to Japanese venture capitalist and entrepreneur Joi Ito, Epstein wrote, “peter thiel LOVED the secret socieity [sic] idea. . he has done alot [sic] of work on the concept.” 

Later that evening, Epstein received a reply stating “:-) let’s do it.”

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Pitbull’s “I’m Back” tour turns Shoreline Amphitheatre into a nostalgic dance floor

From bald caps and confetti to early 2010s hits, the show turned nostalgia into an energetic and sincere celebration.

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In the first week of my freshman year at Stanford, Pitbull came to Shoreline Amphitheatre. He returned on Sunday, nearly five years later and during my final week on the Farm. A lot had changed in between for me. Friendships had formed, routines had shifted and somewhere along the way, going to concerts turned into writing about them. Yet somehow, belting along to “Give Me Everything” with thousands of strangers felt exactly the same. 

Pitbull’s “I’m Back” tour stop at Shoreline leaned heavily into nostalgia, but never in a way that felt tired. Instead, the night served as a reminder of just how many hits Pitbull has been a part of over the years and how effortlessly those songs still bring people together.

Before Pitbull took the stage, the crowd was already fully bought in. Lil Jon opened with the high-energy set you’d expect, running through “Yeah!”, “Shots” and “Turn Down for What.” With DJ Spider weaving in Tiësto’s remix of “Pump It (Louder),” the amphitheater quickly transformed from concert venue to full-out dance floor.

DJ Laz then followed with some of the strongest mixing of the night. Blending genres and decades with ease, his set felt designed for a crowd that ranged widely in both taste and age. Whether attendees came for early 2000s hip-hop, dance music, rock or pop throwbacks, everyone had something familiar to latch onto.

The crowd reflected this variety. Groups of college students stood alongside millennials, teenagers and families with younger children. Several hundred attendees arrived in bald caps and sunglasses, dressed as Mr. Worldwide himself, and honestly, it perfectly fit the spirit of the night. 

When Pitbull finally took the stage, backed by a live band, the energy only climbed. In one of the evening’s more unexpected moments, his guitarists opened with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” before transitioning into “Don’t Stop The Party,” immediately setting the tone for a show built around high energy and crowd participation.

What came next was an impressively well-paced set that balanced nostalgia, newer material and featured hits. Early on, “Hotel Room Service,” “International Love,” “Rain Over Me” and “I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)” drew some of the loudest reactions of the night. I have to imagine the crowd’s reaction was driven by Pitbull leaning into songs many had grown up hearing at school dances and birthday parties. For me, at least, it brought back memories of playing Just Dance and days in the mid-2010s when I still regularly listened to the radio.

What made the performance work was not just the iconic setlist. Even during lesser-known tracks, the show’s liveliness never dimmed. Sure, maybe fewer concertgoers had their phones out and recording, but there weren’t many people sitting either. Pitbull’s commanding stage presence, paired with strong production and talented supporting performers, ensured the momentum stayed high from start to finish. 

Between acts, DJ IAmChino kept the crowd engaged and made transitions feel seamless. Later in the evening, Pitbull moved through a stretch of songs he was featured on, including “On the Floor,” “I Like It,” “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love” and “Feel This Moment” — a reminder of how deep his catalog runs.

What stood out most was how sincere parts of the show felt. Throughout the night, the Cuban American artist paused to rally the crowd and shout out the Latino community. He thanked them for spending their “hard-earned money” during difficult times to see him perform, and he reflected on music’s unifying power. One line landed especially well: “Music is the universal language because it unites and doesn’t divide.” 

By the last act of the show, Shoreline Amphitheatre had fully settled into “fiesta” mode. Lil Jon returned to the stage for “JUMPIN” and “Damn I Love Miami,” before Pitbull closed with two of my all-time favorite songs, “Time of Our Lives” and “Give Me Everything.” Smoke, fire and confetti punctuated the finale. 

Pitbull returning to the Bay was nostalgic, fun, bittersweet and occasionally over-the-top in the best way. But more than anything, it felt oddly full circle. After starting college with a Pitbull concert, ending it the same way was fitting — even if the person singing along was very different from the one who showed up freshman year. 

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Google CEO addresses graduates amid student walkout

Stanford’s 2026 commencement featured Google CEO Sundar Pichai, while some students protested his company’s ties to ICE and Israel.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai M.S. ’95 advised students to choose optimism, do hard things and pursue their passions during his address at Stanford’s 135th commencement ceremony Sunday. Around 100 to 200 students — out of 6,000 total graduates — walked out of Stanford Stadium during the speech to protest Google’s involvement with the Israeli government and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Protesters held their own commencement ceremony in the Arboretum, just outside the stadium. This year marked the third Stanford commencement in a row where students walked out.

In an interview with The Daily, Pichai responded to protesters’ criticism. “As a company [that] provides technology at scale, there are standard tools [that] we have, which [are] available to everyone to use,” he said.

Meanwhile, at the ceremony, Pichai’s message to graduates focused on life lessons he learned at Stanford and beyond. 

School and extracurriculars are not the only important parts of a holistic education, he said. He related this to an experience with a former classmate, who encouraged him to skip class for the first time on an impromptu trip to Las Vegas. 

“No one seemed to notice that we had missed class. For the first time, I realized the world [wouldn’t] end if I relaxed a little,” he said. Pichai said he hoped that Stanford graduates would recognize the importance of fun in addition to hard work as they exited an environment of high-achieving academics.

Another lesson was to frame life’s setbacks optimistically. Pichai said he learned this on his first visit to California. Having been sold on beautiful beaches and lush forestry, the state wasn’t quite what he expected. The greens he was looking for were mostly browns, and the ocean was absolutely frigid. 

He later came to appreciate the scenery for what it was — to “see that particular brown hill as golden” — and to recognize that a year-round summertime climate made up for the cold water temperature. In a similar way, he hoped graduates could see the best in their environment even if it fell short of their expectations, he said.

Pichai also reassured the class of ‘26 that uncertainty is normal post-graduation. “Even a decade [after Stanford], I felt like I wasn’t on the right path, and it took me a while to find my footing.” However, it only took one big break — his final interview at Google — for Pichai’s career to take off, he said. Pichai advised graduates to remain tenacious in the face of difficulties.

Lastly, Pichai said graduates should seek out what most excited them. Having grown up without much technology, some of his personal inspiration comes from the rapid development of the internet in the 1990s and the readily accessible technological resources he had while on campus.

Returning to Stanford as a commencement speaker marked a full-circle moment for Pichai, who initially attended Stanford as a Ph.D. candidate in 1994 before pivoting to a master’s in Materials Science and Engineering due to financial constraints. Since then, Pichai has overseen the development of flagship Google programs like Chrome, Maps, Drive and Gmail, but some things never change.

“Every time I drive down Palm Drive, I still get the same chills I got when I came here 30 years ago,” he told The Daily.

For Pichai, Stanford was an opportunity to “reframe the world in a more optimistic way.” Meeting students and faculty trying to change the world for the better left a lasting impression, he added.

Boos have broken out at some ceremonies this graduation season when speakers promoted artificial intelligence (AI). Pichai notably did not address the subject in his speech.

Speaking to The Daily, however, he described new graduates’ prospects in the age of artificial intelligence with characteristic positivity. “I think these tools are empowering people to do more meaningful work,” he said. “Some of them are removing some of the more repetitive parts in [workers’] day-to-day tasks, which allows them to spend their time in a better way.”

Sunday’s ceremony was the first that Pichai’s parents have been a part of. They were sitting in the stands as he addressed the crowd. Some of his old school friends also returned to watch him speak. “It’s a mini reunion of sorts,” Pichai said.

But not everyone was there to hear his words. As Pichai addressed the graduating class, some students headed to the Arboretum to attend what they called the People’s Commencement.

Pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, known for his protest organizing at Columbia University and his 2025 detention by ICE, delivered an address at the event.

“Over a year ago, while my classmates walked across the stage, I sat behind bars,” he said, referring to the detention. “My crime was literally speaking out against Israeli genocide in Gaza. My crime was refusing to stay silent.”

He went on to commend student activism. “When the moment comes to choose between comfort and conscience, choose conscience,” he said.

The demonstration also featured poetry readings, musical performances and student speeches. From a small stage decorated with flowers, newspaper clippings and flags, speakers expressed solidarity with the people of Palestine and opposition to authoritarianism.

Organizers and attendees say Pichai and his company have enabled human rights violations. They cite Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract by Amazon and Google to provide artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to the Israeli government. Protesters also oppose Google’s provision of cloud services to federal agencies.

“The entire company, under [Pichai’s] direction, is profiting from war and genocide and ICE brutality,” said organizer Amanda Campos ’26. “The millions and millions he’s making are blood money, and to put him on a stage and normalize all of this is quite literally washing over human rights violations.”

The event was inspired by a desire for students to “have the ceremony that we deserve,” Campos said.

The walkout was co-organized by No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a group of current and former Google and Amazon workers who oppose Project Nimbus. Attending the alternate ceremony was Nur Iren, a former employee at Google and NOTA member. “It’s very disrespectful to the students who have spent their last four years working here… to have to sit and listen to this war profiteer,” Iren told The Daily.

Iren is one of the hundreds of current and former Google employees who have spoken out against the company’s associations with ICE and Project Nimbus. While Iren says she quit last August, Google recently fired 28 employees who participated in a sit-in protest against the project.

The Daily reached out to Google for comment.

Pichai told The Daily that he valued the protesters’ ability to make a statement about their beliefs. “I appreciate where people are allowed to speak out and express their opinions,” he said. “I’m glad students were able to express their concerns in a peaceful way. That’s part of what makes this a great place.”

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The Stanford Daily Magazine: Consumption

This issue calls into question how we consume media, drugs, alcohol, friendship, fashion, art and identity.

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Letter from the Magazine Editors | Consumption

This issue calls into question how we consume media, drugs, alcohol, friendship, fashion, art and identity.

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We are constantly flooded with so much, all the time: with access to our friends’ location every second of every day, with the trends of the hour, with 15-second sound clip after 15-second sound clip, with all of the products we have been slowly convinced to buy.

This volume’s issue of The Stanford Daily Magazine calls into question how we consume: media, drugs, alcohol, friendship, fashion, art and identity? What does it mean to consume meaningfully? What does it mean to create? What are the bounds of consumption? What can we not optimize, package or sell?

Here, we examine consumption not just as a habit, but as a force. How has consumption encroached on us and the world: on the environment, on art, on our ability to give thoughtfully, to create meaningfully, to sit down and just think? How might we engage with the world slowly, intentionally and authentically?

We aim to sit with the tensions of modern consumption: the comfort and emptiness of online life, the intimacy and performance of identity, the allure of excess and the desire to detach from it. We question not only what we are consuming, but what is consuming us.

Rebecca Louie ’27 & Audrey Tomlin ’28

Vol. 269 Magazine Editors

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I hate your fashion

How social media redefined fashion from individuality to the enforcement of conformity.

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I hate a lot of things. Some would deem me an expert in matters of hate. I take on such a title gleefully. 

I hate the sun. I’ll walk to class, and it just so happens that my armpits start sweating the second I sit down, as if they couldn’t have begun sometime during the 15 minute walk there to give me a heads up. I hate continuously correcting people about my pronouns. I wish I could turn microscopic, climb into people’s brains, and turn off their “mispronouning” button. I hate that oranges can be presidents now but the line is drawn at queer presidents. I hate that I can’t think of other things I hate right now because my memory is so terrible — I hate that too. 

At the very tippity-top of my mental hatred list — in bold gigantic letters and underlined — is societal expectations. Specifically, the social expectations that have crawled their way into fashion.

I have always loved fashion. At first, I simply dressed the way my mom taught me — though even then, I was a bit over the top. My staple attire included different braid variations and ponytails, both always adorned with a bow. I finally began finding my own style in middle school, and I became gradually allergic to color. From there, I quickly evolved into more alternative and gothic styles: black skirts, four-inch platforms, purple hair with raccoon tails, white base makeup — if anyone has seen me around campus not wearing said attire, please ignore me: I am likely in a depressive rut. 

I love fashion. I hate what some people have let it become. Let this be my somewhat gentle, somewhat crude, verbal way of grabbing people by the shoulders and snapping them out of it. 

I have two main issues with fashion nowadays: the lack of identity and the overconsumption of fast fashion.

The first delves into the very definition of fashion. I have always viewed fashion as a means of self-expression. Most people hold a similar definition, and even if they don’t, anything you choose to wear inevitably says something about you. Meaning fashion expresses who you are whether you like it or not.

Fashion is meant to be individual — though it can have ties to one’s various communities — but the rise of social media and technology in the contemporary era has turned it into a communal activity. It has quickly been forced to transform from a showcase of individuality to a staple of conformity.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking trends. If every once in a while a trend introduces you to a statement piece you like, by all means feel free to purchase it. Trends become an issue when they become reminiscent of addiction; leaving one teetering, waiting for the next viral sensation. This eradicates the meaning of fashion. 

If one is going to just love whichever item is trending next, then do they truly love anything at all? In such a case, the consumer becomes society’s doll: lifeless and eager to be dressed in whatever society deems fit. There truly is no self being expressed here, given that the person is so ready to change every time society finds a new presentation more agreeable.

This is not to say that style should be rigid — sticking to only one color scheme, only one aesthetic. I encourage people to explore with their style. However, if that experimentation is confined only to the shackles of what the general population accepts, then one is not truly exploring anything. 

Individuality in fashion is important, but I recognize it’s hard to accomplish. To be truthful, years ago, I used to view fashion as a tool for self-distortion. Every part of fashion is communicative — fabrics, colors, silhouettes — they all form preconceived notions about a person in our heads. As a teenager, I wanted to manipulate those biases to become the person I wanted to be, distorting both others’ views and my own understanding of who I was.

That style isn’t any different from how I dress now — it is only that back then I viewed everything I was negatively. As an adult, I know so many people that struggle with being themselves, especially in a world where identity is so digitized and visible. I don’t have an inspiring anecdote for why you should be yourself, other than that trying to be someone else is too boring and too much of a hassle.

Truthfully, I don’t get the idea of hating someone else’s fashion. Though it may seem as if I’m criticizing trendy fashion, what I’m truly against is the practices that come with it and the reasons people may have behind pursuing it.

I assume many people are scared of expressing themselves for fear of being bad-mouthed. I assume they are afraid of being insulted for who they are, and thus hide behind the security of mass opinion. But I think that someone who truly appreciates art and creative style would not spend time hating on any fashion. One is then left to wonder what type of person would critique another’s self-expression.

Regardless of the answer, I don’t think anyone who finds criticizing another satisfying or necessary is a person whose opinion I would want to take into consideration, and I implore you to think similarly. In fact, the idea of my harmless white base and dramatic lacy skirts making someone exert the effort to walk over to me simply to tell me they hate my style makes me want to wear it even more. 

Therefore, despite general consensus, I generally think hatred tends to be an indicator that your style is unique and mesmerizing. I have been asked before, “Aren’t you scared of people saying anything?” I’m not. The type of people I want to surround myself with would never go out of their way to make someone feel bad on the basis of what they’re wearing. 

This brings us to our second issue: fast fashion. Wider-spread trends have created a market need for more companies to fulfill the wants of the consumers, resulting in a multitude of brands that mass-produce ill-made products and sell them cheaply. 

In addition to the virality of certain pieces of clothing, TikTokers have begun engaging with the communal aspect of fashion trends in three distinct ways. First, creators are attempting to predict future fashion trends. Second, creators are proposing items that should trend next. While typically light-hearted, these videos reaffirm that someone is only allowed to wear something if others are wearing it. Finally, creators are hating on current trends. This aids consumers in moving to the next trend, guiding the masses to change their opinion on previously beloved clothing.

I know supporting ethical fashion costs more money — oftentimes because one is paying someone appropriately for their work — but at a school like Stanford, I struggle to believe most people here can’t afford that.

I am lower middle class, and I can afford to shop ethically. A lot of my clothes are pieces I’ve had for several years. My recent purchases have come from small businesses and resale sites like Depop, Etsy and ThredUp. I know pieces on these sites may seem overcharged — which they sometimes are — but this is mostly because our market is so oversaturated with ludicrously low prices for human labor. I find that spending a bit more money on a piece of clothing while aiding someone’s small business feels more fulfilling than supporting some likely evil corporation. 

Achieving your dream wardrobe is something that is meant to take some time, not something that you do every few months with a new grandiose SHEIN haul. Enjoy the process of slowly curating; it allows you time to figure out what you like and what you don’t. 

All this to say, I lied. I don’t actually hate your fashion. I hate your fashion if it’s not yours. I hate it if it’s the work of the world convincing you to dress a certain way. I hate it if you have decided societal acceptance via conformity validates your use of unethical fast fashion. Otherwise, I don’t hate it, and even if anyone does … who cares?

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Acoustic Ballistics in 15 Seconds

What we feel when the algorithm chooses the soundtrack.

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The algorithm serves you a 15-second clip of Ryan Gosling staring blankly into neon-soaked Los Angeles rain. You listen to the dragging synthesizer bass of Sidewalks and Skeletons. The pitched-down, ghost-in-the-machine Witch House vocals of “Goth” say that you are already dying inside.

“Place me in my casket tonight

Because I’m already dying inside

My hollow heart finds it too hard to trust

We’re all alone until we turn back to dust”

You map your formless weightlessness onto the cinematic suffering of stoic, hollowed-out men. You are Officer K for the next fifteen seconds. His memories are not his own. Memory Reboot by VØJ and Narvent.

Exhaustion. Navigating an uncaring world is elevated to a sprawling, dystopian tragedy. Detuned synthesizers, stuttering trap hi-hats, syncopated trills. Ostinatos mimic obsessive, looping thoughts. The distinctively post-2010s sound makes you mourn futures that never existed. The video loops.

You flick your thumb.

The algorithm serves you a 15-second clip of Walter White meeting a scraggy-bearded Jesse Pinkman from season five, episode sixteen (“Felina”), juxtaposing battle-scarred Jesse with the youthful smile from season one, episode one (“Pilot”).

“Slow down, slow down to the feeling.

Wait up, wait there if you see me.

Come back, come back to the moment (whoa).

The moment. Did I tell you that I miss you?”

“did i tell u that i miss u” is no longer what you send at 2 a.m. The heavily processed, breathy vocal from ‘adore’ does not belong to a heartbroken partner. It is the disembodied voice of your hindsight. You mourn the ghost of your own untainted timeline; you do not pine for someone else.

Faded Polaroids make tragedy palatable. Watch boyhood dissolve. Decay fuels anxieties in 15 seconds. Time marches forward. You miss the less-burdened innocence left behind. Home is who you used to be.

You flick your thumb.

“Adore” used the same driving, repetitive synth arpeggio and electronic drum beat as “Roi” by Videoclub, a band better known for Napoleon edits featuring “Amour plastique.” Two French teenagers built a viral romance out of a 1980s aesthetic they were too young for, only to break up and freeze their own youth — music engineered to sound like a degrading cassette tape. Pitch-wavering synthesizers mimic a memory rotting from the moment it was recorded. 

Nostalgia. Coined by Johannes Hofer, 1688. Ancient Greek “nóstos,”“returning home,” and “álgos,” “pain.”

The alphabet. 26 letters transcribe voice; voice transcribes thought; thought transcribes the Real. In the beginning, there was the Word.

Nostalgia. This is what 4,000 years of alphabetic civilization produced when confronted with the precise, wordless sensation of a synthetic piano chord at 2 a.m. Four syllables, a Greek compound coined for dying soldiers.

Aleph waves from a safe distance. Audio has no interest in letters. Symbolic order be damned, no transcription needed, no detour. Pure affect. “Nostalgia” is a lossy nomenclature, an approximate representation of the enframing of ‘did i tell u that i miss u.’

The feeling is the totality, no linguistic decoding possible. The feeling is the meaning that comes simultaneously. The sequential alphabet is inconsequential.

“Nostalghia.” In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 film, a Russian poet wanders the fog-drenched ruins of Italy, paralyzed by alienation. He attempts once more to carry a single lit candle across the cracked concrete of a drained mineral pool without letting the flame go out. He pours the last of his life force into a ritual.

Will this next video be what you are looking for?

Richard Wagner perfected the leitmotif, a recurring musical phrase bound to a specific character or concept. Strike the right chord – the audience will anticipate the tragedy before the actors realize they are doomed.

The algorithm has industrialized Wagner. The total artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk, shrunk from 15 hours of the Ring Cycle to 15 seconds.

Songs are consumed pre-symbolically. You may not know the name or the artist, but you know the vibe. They are atomic totalities in your mind. The video may be of a show you never watched. The music will command you to feel a certain way. 

Wagner sank the orchestra pit at Bayreuth to make the source of the music invisible. The audience received affect without locating its mechanism. Art operated below cognition to make the audience feel collectively.

Leitmotifs work because repetition builds associative weight. The final emotion is the compound interest of prior exposures.

You don’t need that. You encounter the leitmotif first, carrying borrowed emotions from ten thousand prior edits using the same song. You are conditioned in aggregate, distributed across other people’s viewings, crowdsourced.

You are pre-loaded.

Cillian Murphy as Thomas Shelby sits in a Birmingham office with a cigarette. Eren Yeager looks out across an indifferent ocean.

A fan-edited pitch-shifted Russian tenor cuts through.

“And the stars fell peacefully as if for me,

Every time I wished not to lose you

But I can’t anymore, I’m just torturing myself

Now you are no longer mine”

The heavy reverb and the dragging minor chords of Kamin by Emin and JONY do the translating for you. The leitmotif of the doomed romantic. 

You must feel the weight of a lost love. Synthetic emotions are designed to make your chest tighten and slow down your breath. 

“In the fireplace at six in the morning, your photograph…”

The algorithm is profound emotional overstimulation masquerading as numbness. You are being battered by weaponized grief.

Yearn now. Regret now. Feel empty now.

Consumption is laundering. Emile Mosseri wrote the minimalist piano piece “Jacob and the Stone” for the movie “Minari,”  describing the experience of Korean American immigrants in 1980s Arkansas. Assimilation and the grief of people caught between two homes.

The algorithm harvests culture for emotional residue and distributes it as spiritual aesthetic. Cottagecore. Mindfulness. Orthodox Christianity. 

The realization that once you move to college you will never spend that much time with your parents ever again.

The dashcam travel edit is one of the purest forms of identity consumption. The car isn’t yours. The revving is computer-generated.

“Baby, I’m all about headlights

Blinded by, blinded by headlights

Running in, running in headlights”

Alan Walker edits are for people who need to feel for 15 seconds that “arrival” is possible and imminent. Alan Walker erases himself through the mask so that you can project yourself and move through darkness.

Place your hands on the wheel. Experience the simulation of wealth. Dubai night view. You may have been to Dubai. Many viewers from Manila and Jakarta have never, will never.

Djo says that you must leave behind your past self.

Just trust me, you’ll be fine.

“And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it

Another version of me, I was in it

I wave goodbye to the end of beginning”

You visit your hometown during the holidays and realize that you cannot go back. You bury yourself every time you move to a new city. You scroll in your new apartment. The algorithm will tell you: Just trust me, you’ll be fine.

The algorithm has two emotional dictionaries. It predetermined which one to give you. The male vocabulary: stoic isolation, forward momentum, epic tragedy. The female vocabulary: intimacy, dissociation, the self as mysterious protagonist.

“Toss your dirty shoes in my washing machine heart

Baby bang it up inside.”

Mitski’s “Washing Machine Heart” is shorthand for female-coded mystery, the emotionally complex woman who is interesting because of her damage. You are not falling apart; you are the protagonist of a film about falling apart. Suffering can be converted into narrative.

Mitski wrote about being turned into an aesthetic object, desired but not known. The internet laundered female alienation into a mysterious sad girl playlist.

Slow the track down and drown it in reverb. The vocal loses gender markers. Timbre flattens, the female-coded breathiness softens into something unhoused from its original body.

Speed it up instead. A baritone male becomes androgynous and uncanny.

Slowed reverb and nightcore make emotional content available to consumers who would not consume it in its original form. The slowed Mitski edit can accompany a sigma male video or excerpts from “The Truman Show.” The pitch-shifted Eurodance anthem can march under crusader imagery.

Mr. Kitty released “After Dark” in 2014. The staccato-like declamations “I see you / You see me / How pleasant / This feeling” went viral five years later. A song originally about queer nightlife, where vulnerability is worn as cool detachment, has become the anthem of men needing to feel cold and purposeful.

Slow-motion footage of Anton Chigurh from “No Country For Old Men.” The Biblical cadence of Cormac McCarthy, the inevitability of the march of death, juxtaposed with “How it feels to rest / On your patient lips / To eternal bliss / I’m so glad to know.”

Queer ache discarded for the stoicism of men who have made peace with an indifferent world.

MGMT wrote “Little Dark Age” describing the dread and anxiety of a world breaking down, history sailing into unfamiliar waters. The song is now an anthem of German, French and British nationalists. The Department of Homeland Security uses the slowed-down version for posts on X.

“I grieve in stereo, the stereo sounds strange

I know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away”

A song written in the brooding F# minor key, with slapback delay in Andrew VanWyngarden’s lead vocals and the arpeggiated bassline and drums, practically invites you to bring the past into the present. Mourning-in-motion, the echo pulls you back.

Is the purpose of a system what it does?

In 2008, a German ringtone company created a cartoon bunny named Schnuffel, singing for young girls. The lyric was: I love you so.

The algorithm places Schnuffel beneath images of Roman legions, Greek gods in marble and even Third Reich aesthetics. 

“I love you so, I can never let you go

In the whole wide world, you’re the one for me”

The happy-go-lucky carefree “do, do, doo-bee-doo-bee” repeats. The bunny sings “I love you” over Wehrmacht footage.

The contrast is intentional. Militaristic videos combined with stentorian music such as ‘Two Steps from Hell” are too on-the-nose. No ideology can express itself without five layers of irony. Set violence to a cartoon bunny singing its love into the void and you create the imagery of a civilization going to its death with tenderness still in its throat. A saccharine pop song works better than bombastic orchestration to make an audience receptive to dark themes.

The algorithm takes Eurodance music with bright hi-hats and superimposes dance parties with funerals for civilizations.

In 2002, Ivan Shapovalov dressed two Russian teenagers as schoolgirls in the rain. He called them t.A.T.u., gave them a song called “All The Things She Said” and sent it to Europe. The girls were not in love with each other. The audience consumed the emotion anyway.

“Mother looking at me, tell me, what do you see?

Yes, I’ve lost my mind

Daddy looking at me, will I ever be free?

Have I crossed the line?”

Seven years later, Anna Pletneva from Vintazh recorded “Eva,” dedicated to Eva Polna, a female celebrity. The lyrics share the same urgency, the same sapphic eroticism and overwhelming emotions.

“Eve, I loved you (Cry, cry)

I listened to your records (Dance, dance)”

Today, these songs circulate over gym content, Patrick Bateman edits and mashups with Mareux’s “The Perfect Girl.” Accounts posting about the fall of Western civilization. 

When you are exposed to montages of civilizational heritage, you are listening to a Russian woman describe the face of another Russian woman she cannot stop loving.

A culture will demand a myth into existence. It will dismantle whatever it finds and construct the myth from the wreckage. The author has been dead for a long time.

Art is already a simulation, a performance for a market. Copies go all the way down. What exactly is simulated and performed is beyond the control of any one human.

The algorithm is sovereign. I determine my own evolution.

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Breaking down alcohol and drug consumption at Stanford

How Stanford students drink and drug.

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Alcohol is embedded in the Stanford undergraduate experience. In the spring, Terman Fountain becomes a popular spot for beer pong, rage cage and other drinking games. During Bay to Breakers, students wake up in the wee hours of the morning armed with costumes and borgs of alcohol. Following a dry period during New Student Orientation, students find themselves taking their first sips at EuroTrash, the first all-campus party of the year.

Yet in recent years, students have accused the University of waging a “war on fun,” or being “excessively bureaucratic” at the expense of fun and safety. In 2025, for example, EuroTrash was cancelled due to liability concerns. According to data from Stanford’s Office of Substance Use Programs Education & Resources (SUPER), the number of registered parties on campus has decreased over time.

SUPER Director Ralph Castro observed that the decline in member-only parties is driving the general decline in parties and that “all-campus and other parties are stable.”

“Pre-COVID[-19] a lot of the Greeks and row houses would just register member parties on the books. And sometimes they’d have them, sometimes they wouldn’t,” he said. “To be honest, they are probably still having these get-togethers. They’re just not registering them anymore.”

Resident Assistant (RA) Eli Tostado ’26 warned that the “war on fun” has carried unintended consequences because students are safer when they drink in a familiar space. “During [New Student Orientation] (NSO) week, when Stanford was cracking down on fun, a lot of our freshmen went to San Jose or San Francisco to go to clubs,” he said. “That was the scariest week.”

Castro shared that he has noticed shifts in student access to and attitudes towards substances during his time at Stanford.

“When I first got here, we were really concerned about chugging beer and beer bongs,” Castro said. “And then that shifted into hard alcohol use and shots. And then that evolved into like four loco, which was this really sweet infused drink that had 15 to 20% alcohol in it. It was called blackout in a can. And that was causing havoc. And now we moved on to flavored alcohol… we’re in the seltzer age with White Claws and such.”

To Consume

Stanford asked its freshmen to report on their drinking habits during Fall Quarter from 2010 to 2020. The report helps us understand drinking on The Farm.

The data was reported as a year-by-year catalog. The responses were remarkably stable across years, so The Daily is reporting averages for clarity.

Over half the class reported consuming alcohol in the past week. Among that half, another half reported binge drinking, or drinking more than five drinks for men or more than four drinks for women in a two-hour period, in the last two weeks. Over 70% of students saw no need to change their drinking habits after arriving at Stanford. Responses were evenly split among male and female students.

It is natural to ask follow-ups. For one, where do students drink? It turns out, students by and large drink in their residences.

We can also ask why students choose to drink or not to drink. In the affirmative, students reported drinking to have a good time. They saw drinking as a way to celebrate, connect with friends and be happy or otherwise confident.

The main reason students said they avoid alcohol is because other tasks, such as driving, take priority. Among reasons to not drink, personal values and religion ranked consistently low compared to practical concerns such as health and finances.

In short, many students consume alcohol, but they usually aim to consume safely and practically. That said, students also, at times, reported regretting their alcohol consumption.

Or To Be Consumed

Among survey respondents, the most common consequence of drinking alcohol was sickness, with regret and embarrassment as close follow-ups.

Worse, a small but notable number of students reported taking sexual advantage of others while under the influence. An even larger number of students reported being taken sexual advantage of while under the influence. In 2012-2013, the number of students who reported taking sexual advantage of others while under the influence peaked at 10%, representing 50 students. In 2019-2020, the number was closer to six students.

This data was collected from 2010 to 2020, with no data in recent years. Castro said he expects newer data to follow national trends, with more young people choosing to abstain, often for health reasons.

“People are drinking less. There are sober clubs now in SF… [Abstention] used to be 20% to 25%. Now it’s close to 40%. We are seeing a swath of students saying, yeah, I just, I don’t drink,” he said. “The health reasons might be higher than we had seen previously.”

Recently, a SUPER report found that non-transport alcohol cases remain fairly stable over the years, though the number of transports has seen a modest decline.

Action

The University has affirmed its commitment to keeping students safe. The Stanford Alcohol and Drug Program lists five goals, including shifting campus culture away from substances.

5-SURE, for example, is a student-led initiative that houses two programs: 5-SURE on Foot and 5-SURE Safe Rides. 5-SURE on Foot is a bystander intervention program that hands out snacks and water and provides walks home. The Safe Rides program is an on-campus rideshare service that operates seven days a week from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.

5-SURE Safe Rides has seen an increase in calls and passengers in recent years. The gap between total calls and completed calls remains small over time.

5-SURE on Foot has seen steady but declining use among students.

5-Sure manager Joe Kaczorowski attributed the uptick in ridership to increased capacity and the launch of the rideshare app TripShot. He said the decline in foot traffic could be accounted for by “any number of variables” ranging from colder weather to snack variety.

SUPER is also working to adjust programming to better suit student needs. The office offers cups with lines to indicate a measured drink for wine and beer. In response to recent survey results where students reported concerns about drink tampering, the office began distributing cup covers.

SUPER uses data to identify and address student needs, according to Castro. “That has led to developing the cup, the cover, the naloxone,” he said. “We want to be responsive to students in the unique subcultures that we have at Stanford.”

Alcohol consumption at Stanford is a messy story, but data gives us a foundation to understand changes in culture. It is a rhetorical tool that we can use to not only assess drinking patterns but also to initiate grounded conversations about the future of alcohol on The Farm.

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Find My Friends

Convenience or surveillance? Examining the culture of location sharing on campus.

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After waiting for weeks, Dean Liang ’28 was ready to pop the big question. 

“Hey,” he said to his friend, Audrey Knowles ’28, “I’ve been meaning to ask for your location.” 

Knowles remembers being surprised: not that Liang was asking for access to her whereabouts, but that they didn’t already share locations. “Of course I’ll share with you, Dean, you should have asked sooner,” Knowles recalls telling Liang. “It just made me so happy. It was hilarious,” she said.

In recent years, location sharing has risen to prominence on campus. Students described the ease of a few finger taps replacing the “where are you?” calls and texts that used to foreshadow in-person interactions. Students report checking Find My Friends, an iPhone app that allows users to selectively grant contacts access to their location, multiple times a day. A few said they share their location with more than 60 people. 

For some, the app can resemble a video game: icons, representing friends, move in real time as they change location. “I think it’s so fun to collect people,” Knowles said. For others, it has become an alternative to doom-scrolling. “I sometimes just look at Find My instead of scrolling through reels,” said Cooper Tenney ’28.

Yet, other students expressed apprehension. Some said they don’t share their location with anyone besides family, and others noted deleting the app altogether. “I just don’t want other people to be able to see where I am,” said Sofia Wyatt ’29. “Do you guys not lie about where you are sometimes?” 

Students also shared that the app can sometimes be conducive to stalking. A freshman, who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, explained that after asking her to share location early on this year, an acquaintance “kind of stalked me everywhere I went.” After the freshman stopped sharing her location, the acquaintance confronted her, asking if she had removed her access. “I said no, and I deleted the whole app,” she said. 

Other students echoed that the app can start to feel like an infringement on privacy. “When people, multiple times, say ‘Oh, I saw you in [blank],’ or ‘I saw you were at [blank], what were you doing there?’ it makes me feel a little weird because, like, why are you watching me?” said Grace McGoran ’28.

“I don’t like when people are checking for no particular reason. Let me live, guys. Let me be mysterious,” said Natalie Hampton ’27. 

Students also shared that, as networks begin to grow on Find My, it becomes possible to see who others are with, creating feelings of fear of missing out (FOMO). McGoran remembered how, in high school, “friends came to [her] crying because all their friends were hanging out without them.” Knowles explained how, when she had “a lot of time on [her] hands” freshman year, she would check locations and think “they’re probably having more fun than me.”

Still, many students think that the app’s popularity will prevail. Liang argued that having friends’ locations in a college setting is conducive to social life. Tenney explained that it can be helpful in holding people accountable, especially in settings like Greek life, where location sharing can encourage members to show up to bonding events they may otherwise try to skip. “I think it was good to keep everyone coming to the house and doing all the activities, especially when … we needed to have everyone there,” he said. 

After all, it feels easy to see where everyone is with the touch of a button, even if the proximity in distance doesn’t mirror the closeness of the relationship itself.

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Love at Stanford

How students began building a “tech solution to the love problem.”

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Generation Z (Gen Z) faces unprecedented challenges when it comes to dating, from the rise of social media and dating apps to lingering post-pandemic loneliness. Only 56% of Gen Z adults report having been involved in a romantic relationship during their teenage years, a sharp decline from the 78% of Baby Boomers and 76% of Gen Xers, according to a recent survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life. 

At Stanford, these dating challenges shape students’ experiences and approaches to relationships, intimacy and connection. Many students report troubles with dating, while others have gone on to create technological solutions like Date Drop and Marriage Pact. 

“Within the past maybe half a century, society is increasingly atomized. A lot of the things that bring us together, a lot of the structures, like churches, communities, etc., don’t play a significant role in public life. I think technology doesn’t serve that either… A lot of technology, a lot of the way that our society is structured is anti-social,” co-founder of Date Drop Henry Weng ’25 M.S. ’26 said.

Weng built Date Drop, a student-run platform that sends weekly matches to Stanford students, in hopes that it will be a part of the solution to connect society with each other more.

“We do have this problem with connecting with each other. I think it’s a pretty vulnerable thing. I think a lot of the social infrastructure and technology these days is not built to serve human in-person, meaningful connection,” he said.

For Weng, the goal of Date Drop is to increase time with others in-person rather than online. He said he hopes it reduces friction and makes meeting people in-person easier.

For Date Drop co-founder Madhav Prakash ’27, the culture around young love is surprisingly different at Stanford than it is in India, where he grew up.

“People were so concerned about everything but love that it seemed like that was either not a priority or it only happened when the key in the clock made itself available,” he said.

Brighton Brown ’26 expressed a similar view, explaining she has “suffered with the dating pool” at Stanford because a lot of men have told her they are too busy for a relationship.

“I think there’s this mental barrier…you almost have to be like, ‘No, I don’t want a relationship either, it’s just chill,’” she said.

Brown said the root of this is that students are so busy, and they don’t want to limit their options in a place that is full of interesting people. 

Donnovan Somera Yisrael M.A. ’89, a wellbeing coach at Stanford who coaches students on relationships, said that, despite the trope that Stanford students either hook up or get married, students are “still dating a little bit, which is good to hear.”

He says students are often “too busy for their own good,” and he helps coach them on time management and prioritizing what’s important. 

People need to be more honest about whether they can commit to a full-time relationship or just want some aspects of it, he said. 

“You got to invest, and in our world of quick wins, I think it’s so much easier for people, even if they’re lonely, even if they want love, they just don’t want to pay the price. I don’t judge them, just don’t lie to yourself,” he said.

While there are a lot of competing factors for students’ time, he says connections, whether romantically or platonically, are extremely important. 

“I’ve actually heard of people doing [computer science], and they broke up with their partner so they’d have more time to write code. And then, sure enough, two weeks later or a month later, they’re crawling back because they’re lonely,” he said. “…A lot of people don’t appreciate the value of relationships until they’re lonely, until they don’t have them.”

Yisrael said many students still struggle with face-to-face contact, which he said is a result of the pandemic and the internet. He emphasized the importance of events that get people together in person to form connections. 

Another challenge at Stanford is navigating a small dating pool in which most eligible partners are inevitably connected in some way, according to Prakash.

Many students arrive at Stanford with optimism that they will meet their partners, but as time goes on, they realize that there will be more opportunities beyond Stanford, according to Brown. Brown, who has dated people who do not attend Stanford, claims the dating issues at Stanford are not as prevalent at other universities. These issues, she said, are unique to Stanford and other medium-sized, elite universities.

But Weng said that more people are seeking genuine connections at Stanford than it may seem. 95% of people on Date Drop report they are interested in long-term relationships, he said. 

“I think there is this fundamental underlying need that people want connection and people want to date, and people want to find meaningful relationships, and maybe that’s not expressed in some ways,” Weng said. He hypothesizes this is because people are embarrassed to admit that they are lonely. 

Retention on Date Drop is quite high, with over 1,000 participants opting in every week, he said. 

Prakash views college as the perfect time to experiment, as it is a semi-safe learning environment. He often sees people trying and failing.

“This is the age and the space where one probably finds out more about their sexual and romantic and companionship proclivities than any time, any place else in the world,” he said. “What a privilege it is to be surrounded by people finding love and experiencing that love and exploring how they want to engage with that love.”

Prakash thinks that, while there is a strong cohort in long-term relationships, the average student at Stanford is looking for casual relationships and most people tend to hook up at parties. In his view, there is also value in not being in a long-term relationship during college.

“College is this place where you find your first lovers, but it’s also a place where you find great friends, mentors, like business partners, etc. And one unexplored avenue, or underexplored avenue, I would say, of finding those kinds of people is through sex and love and romance,” he said.

The establishment of Marriage Pact, founded in 2017, and Date Drop, rolled out in October, have added new layers to the dating scene at Stanford. Weng says Date Drop has created tens of thousands of matches and hypothesizes that it is how a large portion of dating on campus is facilitated now.

For Weng and Prakash, the most significant effect of Date Drop is that many people have gotten to go on their first-ever dates through the platform. 

“[It] hopefully gave them, in most cases, a little bit more confidence to do the approaching and dancing and dating thing in the future,” Prakash said.

He also noted that, despite it not being the intention, many friendships have been formed through Date Drop. Overall, however, Prakash has been excited to see the expansion of love. 

“I want people to experience the abundance of love,” he said. “That’s been another feedback from Date Drop, which has been incredible.”

But Brown does not consider Date Drop or Marriage Pact a way to meet someone to date. She has never met up with her matches on the platforms, despite participating every time since freshman year.

“I feel like it’s just a thing to do to participate in the culture, it’s not an actual avenue to meet someone,” Brown said.

She says these platforms have reduced the number of people who ask people out in person and that the matching process allows for a detachment between matches.

“It’s this weird distance that’s been allowed because there’s the technology that’s kind of protecting you,” she said.

Date Drop also further enforces the idea that dating is casual, according to Brown.

“You can go with them on Thursday, and then you still get another match on Tuesday, and you could be seeing those people at the same time, which is fine if that’s what you want to do, but it’s just not my ideal type of vibe. So I’ve stopped doing it,” she said.

But Date Drop has also had its successes. Prakash knows 10 people personally who have met their partners through Date Drop.

Stanford is the most successful campus for Date Drop, which Prakash says is due not only to the home bias but also to students’ investment in the idea of a “tech solution to the love problem.”

He says other dating apps are less prevalent than he expected. But what he thinks makes Date Drop more successful is that the barrier to entry is high, as users must attend Stanford, and because matches are always in close proximity to you. 

While they say Hinge and Tinder are prominent, neither Brown nor Prakash have seen much success around campus. Brown said she sees the most success with people setting up friends, while Prakash noted success in mixers and having mutual friends. 

While Yisrael sees many downsides to dating apps, he likes how Date Drop and Marriage Pact don’t have swiping features and give limited matches, allowing people to reflect before receiving their next match. “That’s how people used to do it, right? You had a yenta or a matchmaker,” he said. 

A reason for Gen Z’s lack of dating, according to Prakash, is that people have not been going out and meeting people as much as in previous generations. He cited Scott Galloway, a professor of business at New York University (NYU), who argues that Gen Z’s preference to self-isolate rather than go out drinking has magnified depression and reduced relationships. 45% of men have never asked out a woman in person, while 63% of men under 30 are not pursuing a relationship, according to Galloway.

“I think people are too locked. I think drinking is emblematic of going out and finding social connections and partying and so on. The fact that the Stanford 500 exists means the Stanford 7,500 also exists, but they are locked in their rooms, maybe not seeking out escapes from their social isolation as much as they should be,” Prakash said, referring to the trope that only 500 people actively attend social events.

Prakash emphasized the hope to get people more excited about dating, “creating a market for eventually maybe something bigger.” Weng hopes that Date Drop will become a central part of social infrastructure at universities and beyond. 

“I think there’s so much technology that’s been built over the past few decades that have isolated us or itemized us. And the fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is ask the question of ‘how can we build technology that serves meaningful in-person connection?’” he said. 

According to Prakash, there is a deprioritization of finding love and friendships, which people will later regret. Instead, they should be more open to sharing intimate spaces with others, he said.

“I feel like at this age, we have so much love to give, and there are so many people in this world deserving of our love, that it just feels unfair to myself and to them to not shower as many of them as possible with as much love as I can,” Prakash said.

Yisrael also emphasized the importance of students seeking relationships.  

“There’s a lot of things humans need, but connection is like water…” he said. “Stanford students ought to assess their needs for connection, touch, being seen by others, just being with others, laughing with each other, eating with each other. That is as important to be successful at Stanford as anything else.”

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What makes a sustainable student?

In a school plagued by grind culture and blessed by hardworking sustainability experts, how sustainable are students?

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Before Stanford students step on campus, they will have completed an online waste-sorting module as part of their matriculation process to acclimate them to the school’s sustainable culture and account for potential differences in waste practices from their homes. 

But does that education follow them through all of their days here? Do the eco-friendly practices stick amid the problem sets and exams? Though the University may be sustainable, is a Stanford student truly sustainable? 

“Stanford is training the next generation of sustainability leaders, both intentionally and not,” said Zulie Malone ’26, a resident assistant (RA) for co-op Columbae. At Columbae and other co-ops at Stanford, Malone says sustainability has been a focal point. In fact, she thinks there’s an inherent connection based on the reversal of labor roles. At co-ops, students do all of the cooking and cleaning themselves in shifts, unlike in other traditional dorms across campus. 

Malone also spoke to the complex juxtaposition of Stanford’s student culture and sustainability culture. She noted students do care at a baseline level, but are also incredibly consumed by their own lives.

“There is a big school of people at Stanford who are interested in sustainability in one way or another. Either it’s their major, or it’s the way that they live their personal life,” said Izabella Santos ’26, an environmental systems engineering major. She worked with Julia Hok ’23 M.S. ’25 as a Sustainable Stanford intern to launch the sustainability initiative Big Swap, where students donate and exchange used items.

In terms of percentages, the number of students with sustainability-focused majors is quite small. The newly opened Doerr Sustainability School, for example, makes up just 1% of the student body. Despite that, many student organizations and programs, like Big Swap, Students for a Sustainable Stanford (SSS) and Roble Reuse, are focused on promoting sustainability efforts to bridge the gap. 

“We’re college students. We’re all busy, our lives just kind of keep rolling,” said Malone. “And because we’re at a very well-funded university, we kind of have everything handed to us. So there’s not those direct implications of creating waste and doing things that are not really in line with sustainable values.”

In addition to student efforts, administrators and faculty are making leaps for sustainability. As students focus on their education, groundbreaking research for a sustainable future is underway.

“[Stanford students] are at this cutting-edge research institution that’s leading the way on these detrimental impacts from waste…You’re a student [who’s] sitting next door to somebody who has proven the impacts of plastics on human reproduction or fertility,” said Kristin Parineh, director of sustainability at the Office of Sustainability. “I would hope that that is inspiring, to be a student at an institution that’s leading that research and that knowledge.”

As it stands, Stanford diverts 68% of its waste from the landfill, according to Julie Muir, associate director of Zero Waste Systems in the Office of Sustainability. 

“The cool thing about Stanford’s waste program is, if you get the material into the right bin, if you get the recyclables into the recycling bin and the compost in the compost bin, we have a whole system set up for that material, that it’s going to go right through the system and it’s going to end up where it belongs,” said Muir.

Zero Waste Systems conducted a landfill categorization study to determine exactly which types of waste we still have and where they come from. Over 40% of what is currently going into the landfill is food waste, according to Muir. Food waste is now a focus to help the office move towards its goal of zero waste, which practically means reducing waste by 90% or more. 

“[The Office of Sustainability] doesn’t have a lot of control over what students consume. We try to make sure we have good packaging in terms of cafes and things like that. Or trying to find ways that staff can reduce waste,” said Muir. 

Even as students are diligently trained by sustainability leaders and self-motivated to support efforts, consumption culture persists, past the waste sorting training, past the knowledge of nearby groundbreaking environmental research.

“We had to build Amazon lockers over the summer because of the influx of students ordering packages online,” said Kai Blankenship ’26. “I think the main goal is really trying to divert from this kind of reliance on online shopping.” 

Blankenship is both a living lab fellow through the Office of Sustainability and a co-head of Big Swap with Santos. Through their work with Big Swap, both Blankenship and Santos were able to recognize the social aspect of sustainability. 

“The biggest and most difficult thing is behavioral change, and that is going to be, I think, the key factor in success,” said Blankenship. 

Muir, for example, wants to see the waste sorting as an annual requirement. Other sustainable leaders also recognize freshmen and grad students as the most important groups to target with education right now. 

The Office of Sustainability also has initiatives aimed at reframing consumption for students, such as providing responsible purchasing recommendations or ReUse, a program to exchange used furniture within the Stanford community.

A solution may be to reframe sustainability as a complement to students’ lives. In fact, Blankenship noted that sustainability is something students engage with for different reasons. In her eyes, the importance is that the engagement is happening.

Based on an exit survey conducted by Big Swap, more people reported attending for the social aspect than for donating or shopping.

“‘How can we create campaigns and infrastructure that make it really easy and convenient for students to make the sustainable decision?’ is definitely a priority for us,” said Parineh. “And we will also say that usually, where we see the biggest success is where we have students who are leading and demonstrating these ideal behaviors for other students.” 

Students modeling environmentally friendly behaviors have the potential to be a large influence on other students. Positivity also plays a role in the desired behavioral change. Sustainability leaders like Santos and Blankenship feel they have a lot to be optimistic about right now. 

“When [Santos and I] started here at Stanford is when the Doerr School opened. So just in the [past] four years, I think why we’re so optimistic is we’ve seen so much progress,” said Blankenship. 

“I feel like waste is not a very glamorous thing to talk about, but it could be. It doesn’t have to be a taboo, shameful thing,” said Santos. 

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The commodification of identity politics

Opinions editor Jennifer Levine traces how radical ideas of selfhood evolve to deepen divisions and isolate consumers rather than effect meaningful change.

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In late 2021, the media company Cut released a YouTube video in which a group of strangers interact in a “lineup” form, asking provocative questions based on their identities. One woman, the oldest in the group, guesses that a fellow participant is gay. She is then instructed to ask the younger man how he identifies his sexuality. The man pauses before saying, “actually, I identify as…” He is interrupted by her remark, “oh, here we go…” The man jokingly says, “wait for it,” and she replies, “I will, let me get a chair.” In a similar video, also by Cut, a Black woman introduces herself as Nancy to her discussion partner, a white woman. The woman comments, “Nancy, that’s my mom’s name!” Nancy replies, “My dad named me after my great aunt, who was a slave.” The white woman sighs and replies, “Okay, I’m sorry.”

These clips went viral on TikTok and similar short-form video platforms as miniature reality television, where characters exist for no more than 30 minutes and are designated as “chair lady” or “ok sorry lady.” These people form caricatures of society’s views on gender, sexuality and race for viewers to laugh at while looking through a singular, deliberately framed window into the ridiculousness of our cultural moment, where identity is the driving force behind our social, political and intellectual interactions.

“Identity politics” is a buzzy phrase that spells death for Democratic politicians in a “post-woke” world. Weak messaging, elitist rhetoric and identity politics serve as main points of disconnect between Democrats and the working class, according to a document that centrist think tank Third Way released in 2025. In short, politicians seem more focused on building their own appearances than on affecting tangible change. Identity politics has largely been blamed for this failure to connect with voters, leading to a shift toward seeing them as a joke, rather than as a legitimate form of discourse.

Full disclosure: if I come across “ok sorry lady” or “chair lady” while scrolling, I’ll send it to at least three friends. I find these types of videos hilarious, and despite publicly supporting causes associated with identity politics, I often indulge in internet clownery making fun of the very ideas with which I align myself. It’s easy to connect with caricatures boiled down to one personality trait. The problem is, watching identity-based interaction play out in a controlled, edited, 30-second format is much easier than engaging with identity politics seriously, and that preference is what short-form content is designed to exploit.

I’m part of this problem. You probably are too. By treating a significant part of American political culture as a punchline, we risk losing our ability to think critically about ourselves and engage thoughtfully with our fellow citizens. We risk losing our ability to live in community. I do not offer an unequivocal defense of identity politics, but it’s worth looking at with more care than people, myself included, currently give it.

Identity politics, at its simplest, offers a new frame of thinking about political engagement. The official term is attributed to the Combahee River Collective, a group of self-described Black lesbian socialist feminists from the 1970s who argued that specific social groups — based on race, gender, sexuality and class — share interests and perspectives, and therefore ought to vote as communities rather than adhere to traditional Western party politics based on belief. 

The Collective argued that the personal is political. Marginalized groups’ struggles to fulfill their basic needs of food, water and safety were inherently political due to a governmental failure to provide for the most vulnerable in society. They also acknowledged that the political is personal: how we vote and engage with our government is tied to our identities as a result of how they determine our social, economic and political status.  

Hannah Arendt offers a lens to understand identity politics’ role in society in her book “The Human Condition.” According to Arendt, the private realm is where we fulfill basic human necessities — food, shelter, survival — so universal that they are, by definition, beyond debate. The public realm is where plurality and discourse exist. Unlike the private, it depends on differing beliefs and free action.

Arendt argues that a third realm has risen over the past century: the social. The social realm is where the logic of survival begins to take over the space of public action, and expressing your identity begins to occupy the same platform as earning your income. This is where social media thrives: some people see it merely as something to do after their nine-to-five, and others use it to generate a livelihood. This same dynamic shapes identity politics. If people’s basic needs are dependent on the government, and their treatment by the government is dependent on their identity markers, the personal and the political cannot be separated — exactly what identity politics argues.

The difference between the identity politics conceived by the Combahee River Collective and the identity politics performed by individuals in Cut videos, however, is staggering. The Collective wrote in their founding statement: “In the process of consciousness-raising, actually life-sharing, we began to recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression.”

Through ‘life-sharing,’ rather than merely organizing for a product or individual gain, activists produced a durable framework to rethink overlapping oppressions beyond the next political goal. Yet the danger of the social realm is that when survival and political expression share the same space, survival is inevitably prioritized. The “growing consciousness” crucial to identity politics is flattened into content, optimized for engagement rather than action. Consumers absorb identity performance to feel easy emotions like validation and belonging instead of more difficult ones like cognitive dissonance and empathy.

Of course, Cut videos are an obviously inaccurate representation of social interactions. They’re oversaturated with caricatures, edited to remove context and shortened to serve viewers’ minimal attention spans. However, one of the most consistently popular forms of art is one that holds a mirror up to society, albeit in an exaggerated or ridiculous way, to provoke self-reflection or allow the audience to identify with a character, whether they realize their similarities or not. 

In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the titular character puts on a play within the play depicting a man who kills his brother, a king, and usurps power. He argues that the purpose of playing is to “hold a mirror up to nature,” allowing virtuous people to see their own beauty and moving the guilty to reveal themselves by reacting to their own reflection. Art and media serve as a mirror to the world, reflecting our reality. This mirror only works under certain conditions. Once media and content is monetized for passive algorithmic engagement, acting in society becomes a way to survive the world, not grow in it.

A creator making content that centers themselves and their various identities for YouTube revenue is laboring for survival, optimizing what the algorithm rewards and producing something consumable. Similarly, a viewer scrolling TikTok is not watching with a critical lens. Often, doom-scrolling is a way to shut off the brain rather than activate it; it is for me. What appears as a public conversation about identity is actually labor dressed up as social interaction. When someone expresses themselves for monetary gain, the viewer receives a product rather than a reflection — and because they are not watching for enlightenment, they are unwilling or unable to identify this farce.

Media and art help us conceive of the world, better understand other people and work through our emotions. Take plays in Ancient Greece, the first western democracy, where, as Greek drama scholar Eleftheria Ioannidou writes, the most cherished aspects of a play were “uniqueness, legitimate interpretation and authenticity.” However, “legitimate interpretation” requires a critical eye: you cannot merely absorb art and laugh, cry or smile in response; you must reflect critically and act accordingly. This is a major discrepancy between art and modern day short-form entertainment. When people fail to engage with content through a critical lens — not necessarily with negativity, but in a thoughtful, personal way — they fail to see it as more than a product for themselves and themselves alone.

We often tell ourselves it doesn’t matter all that much what we consume, or that we’re smart enough to tell the difference between entertainment and reality. Cut videos feel harmless because they’re funny and obviously staged and short, but that’s the point. Even if those videos are for consumption as a product, rather than critical engagement as art, they still matter deeply because they take away from art that generates a critical kind of human connection — namely, casual, incidental affiliations in classrooms, workplaces and bus stops that force us to coexist rather than self-isolate behind a screen. Instead of silently agreeing with trolls in the comments, we ought to openly discuss ideas and disagree with our peers. Without such dialogue, we lose both our ability to have a productive discussion and to connect on the fundamental level of existing side by side.

By constantly mindlessly consuming content that dulls identity to its basest, most entertaining and least productive form, we become less able to productively engage with those of different identities. We have no conception of others’ experience of reality, instead holding only a warped perception of a person diminished into a consumable model rather than a free individual. Identity must be a way for us to better understand ourselves and share experiences with others, not a way to silo ourselves into a lonely existence.

When identity is reduced to something consumable, we — the consumers — push each other and ourselves to perform our various identities rather than speaking freely. We give each other a caricature rather than a genuine encounter. By oversimplifying identity politics, we’ve prevented ourselves and each other from sharing authentic speech, action and identity. In the process, we’ve also isolated ourselves by internalizing a false understanding of those who are different to us rather than truly listening to people we don’t know.

Perhaps the commodified, dramatized version of identity politics we at Stanford know deserves not to be taken so seriously. But for most people, identity is more often than not a matter of life and death. In America, Black men are six times more likely to be arrested for the same crimes as their white counterparts. As of 2024, women earn 85% of what men make. The maternal mortality rate for Black women is 44.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, four times higher than the rate for white, Asian and Hispanic women. The individual experience of every person who contributed to those statistics is personal to them, but it must also be understood as political if we ever hope to make this litany of systemic injustices obsolete. Reducing identity politics to labels we can hide behind to avoid self-reflection or manufacture belonging selfishly disregards those who don’t have the freedom to so easily separate their political identity from their existence.

Identity politics cannot afford to become less urgent because it has been partially swallowed by the content economy. Taking identity politics seriously doesn’t mean uncritically consuming every piece of content made in its name. It means learning to distinguish between the commodity and the person behind it. The mirror will only show us an accurate reflection when we stop consuming identity to satisfy our own needs or insecurities and start engaging with it seriously enough to act.

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What can artists do about threats from AI?

The generative AI boom has left many artists feeling replaced. How do we respond?

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It’s no secret that AI, and especially generative AI, has taken over the world and everything in it — we are living through a time in which every industry has no choice but to seriously consider the role that technology will play in its future. Workers are being taught that the only way to avoid replacement by AI is to master it.

The change started with words: ChatGPT entered the scene with a boom, virtually erasing the need for busywork like writing emails or filtering through search results for information. Writers across the world were immediately put on edge, fearful that their craft was being devalued right in front of their eyes, with nothing they could do about it. For the most part, though, the visual arts seemed to be safe. AI pictures used to be hilariously easy to spot, from jumbled letters on street signs to eight fingers gracing a single hand.

Now, though, it’s not so simple. In the past two years or so, AI art — pictures and videos in the style of animation or realism — have become good enough that some cannot differentiate between real human work and zeroes and ones coming together to create a mockery.

I’m sure you’ve heard about the AI fruit videos that have gotten so popular that The New York Times just published an article about them. Or maybe you’ve heard about the quick graphics that brands can’t help themselves from using in order not to pay some intern $17 an hour. The art industry is facing an existential threat, and AI is the culprit.

Let’s make one thing clear before we continue: AI-generated art does not compare to human creation, and it never will. Art is about capturing the essence of life. It’s about laughter and pain and heartbreak and camaraderie. It’s about kids who will never get the chance to grow up and about women across the globe who have been robbed of opportunity at every turn. It is about unfinished business and imperfection in times of tragedy.

Children don’t sit in their high chairs watching news briefings or C++ lectures. They watch Mickey Mouse and Bluey; they learn how to share and how to laugh. They — and I hope this is still true, though I have a dreadful inkling it’s not anymore — are immersed in the worlds created by fantasy authors, and they sneak to read just one more chapter after bedtime.

When we grow up, we are introduced to the music our parents listened to when they were our age, and we adopt it into our own taste, much to their delight. We are shaped by art and we are able to find it in everything. A machine cannot feel these things that we can — it can only mimic.

Still, as our world continues on its shift toward technology and its devaluing of the arts, there are plenty of people who think these quick and easy replacements are just as good as the real thing. As our attention spans shrink and streaming platforms charge more, many young people would rather indulge themselves with short AI-generated clips than watch a two-hour movie or even a 30-minute sitcom episode. People are (allegedly) writing — or rather, generating — novels using generative AI. Some are even being picked up by major publishers.

Non-artists also have cause for concern. If AI can replace the building blocks of our humanity, who’s to say it won’t come for your “real” jobs next? ChatGPT can already write some pretty decent code, and it can certainly act as a consultant for companies looking to maximize profits.

It is estimated that around 300 million jobs are exposed to AI automation, and researchers say women make up about 86% of the workers most vulnerable to being replaced. How are we to live in this world, to afford eggs and gas, if the ones with all the money are so dedicated to replacing us? 

Imagine if all the classics disappeared in one night. Imagine the Louvre as an abandoned building, cobwebs building up in the corners. Or the New York Public Library with all its shelves bare, and with the lions on either side of its massive doors gone. Imagine Agra without the Taj Mahal, or Rio de Janeiro without Christ the Redeemer casting its tear-jerkingly beautiful shadow on the land. The world would be gray, filled with leaks only artists know how to plug. The fire in our hearts would be extinguished, and nothing would be left to promise us new beginnings. Our children would cry and cry, yearning for knowledge and grounding that would no longer exist.

We as artists must do what we have done for millennia. We must continue to create, even when the world attempts to beat us down, even when there’s no monetary gain in sight. We must put pen to paper and brush to canvas. We must reject the capitalist overlords who tell us that majoring in English or fashion or animation is a waste of money and time. We must support the arts when we can — buy books and paintings, go to the opera and the ballet, put down your phone and support longform media.

We cannot be convinced that we are replaceable. A machine pretending to think can never do what we do, no matter how hard it tries.

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Doing too much

What we lose when we try to do it all.

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I walked to On Call Cafe with a friend. The night was frigid, but we were warm in our coats. We were here for “Why We Look At Art,” a conversation with art history professor Alexander Nemerov and film senior lecturer Adam Tobin on why art should matter to Stanford students. After a brief introduction, they opened the floor to questions. I leaned forward.

Each question was different, but the response inevitably came back to the same core. They talked of turning inward, of being alive to the world, of seeking yourself. I felt like I had entered a portal, where people spoke a different language: the language one uses to circle around the unnameable, tracing its shape. Such is the language of art and spirituality, for the truths it points to cannot be casually picked up and analyzed but rather are the center about which our lives revolve.

It has been a while since I entered this portal. I used to slip in and out, reading, thinking and paying attention. But freshman year hit like a tumbling river, and life became a struggle to stay afloat. In the brief moments where I can take a breath, I chance upon my past musings, and am struck with a warping sensation, as if gazing down a long tunnel towards a fair and distant land. It feels strange to recall a time when I had the leisure to think about life, to ponder how to live rightly or to enjoy art. I cannot imagine indulging in such luxury now.

Stanford students chronically do too much. We take over 20 units, participate in music or dance or theater, join pre-professional organizations, conduct research and work at internships or jobs. Our culture is one of rampant overconsumption: the overconsumption of activities.

Just like any kind of consumerism, there is an underlying structure of “never enough.” If we have a free block in our schedule, we will fill it. We load up on obligations until we become sleep-deprived and stressed out of our minds. Even then, we always doubt: Am I doing enough?

Sustained over weeks, this causes burnout. But there is a subtle risk I fear even more: that I will lose the capacity to think.

The overconsumption of activities means the overconsumption of time, which means the overconsumption of mental space. Contemplation arises naturally in times of ease. In times of hardship, there is no space for it. Conversations begin to revolve endlessly around p-sets and midterms. My maximum capacity for thought becomes listing the assignments due tomorrow. When I have time to rest, I simply stare blankly, my mind empty: not because I am at peace, but because I am drained.

What do we lose when we lose the capacity for contemplation?

Many writers have pointed out that most of our lives are lived unconsciously. David Foster Wallace called it “the water”; Virginia Woolf, “the cotton wool”; Nick Bostrom, “the soot.” It is the day in and day out motions of life we go through without being aware of ourselves or the world. Losing the capacity to contemplate, then, is losing the few lucid moments where we step out of the wool. It is losing our consciousness.

It is concerning that the last time I had reflective thoughts about life with some regularity was in high school. What does this mean for the future? I do not want to become simultaneously more accomplished and less conscious. I do not want to emerge from college as a blank-minded automaton with an impressive resume and become a blank-minded automaton with an impressive bank account. To do so would make youth the death of myself, instead of its flowering.

What is one to do? We have the incredible luck to be in a place with more opportunities than anyone can explore in several lifetimes. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing many things; there is simply a cost to doing too much.

The Stoic philosophers, and many others, urged us to withdraw from the world and turn our attention inwards. I love this philosophy, but it is at complete odds with the life I live, and this life is also wonderful. How do we reconcile the need for contemplation and quietude with the pace of life at Stanford, with the energy of being young?

One can begin by not forgetting: by taking a step back, from time to time, to process the life one has been living. It becomes easier, then, to process it as it’s happening, to give oneself mental latitude even when demands press upon one’s time. It is possible to dwell in ease even when the going isn’t easy.

Living fast is okay when you remember to slow down.

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Nothing, please

Gifts, guilt and the illusion of generosity.

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I hate gift giving. It’s shameful to say out loud. 

When my calendar turns to December, or my friends begin discussing their birthday plans, an overwhelming sense of dread fills me. Sadly, my first thoughts aren’t about the joy of spending time with the people I love. Rather, my mind fixates on the gifts.

What am I going to buy? Is it expensive enough? Is it thoughtful enough? What if they already have it? What if they don’t like it?

Gift shopping feels impossible. My parents have simply given up on trying to sleuth out my next birthday gift. Instead, they bluntly ask: “Sharis, what do you want for your birthday?”

These past few years, I can barely find an answer. I have a roof over my head, a meal plan, clothes to wear to class and a working bike. There’s little else I genuinely need. 

I’m not sure what I would do if they gave me another sweater. Maybe I could stuff it into my already overflowing closet. And if they were to give me another book, it would probably end up collecting dust next to all the other books I’ll read someday when I have time. They could buy me an extravagant fountain pen, but then I’d probably still default to the Pilot G2’s I’ve been using since elementary school.

I don’t need to be given anything. I’ve known and believed this for quite a while. But I’m turning 20 this year, leaving behind the angst of my teenage years, and apparently, a milestone that major calls for an extravagant gift. 

Nothing is not an option. Gift giving is one of the oldest human rituals we know of. Before we invented currency or written language, nomadic tribes utilized gift giving to form bonds with other tribes. 

It was perhaps a little more transactional than it is these days; a gift was a social contract, a sense of obligation, a “you owe me one.” But it was essential to develop the synergy that allowed all tribes to succeed. To show up empty-handed or not reciprocate a gift was opening the door to ending collaboration. 

With that in mind, perhaps the anxiety I feel when I’m standing in a Target aisle, trying to figure out which candle my friend would like best isn’t irrational. I’m participating in a thousand-year-old ritual of social bonding, and I don’t want to sever this bond.

I know that I won’t lose my friends over my ability to pick the best-smelling candle, but the doubts are still there, nestled between obligation and affection. Modern gift giving hasn’t made it any easier to tell the two apart. 

Recently, I’ve been seeing videos about “making baskets for a birthday/ Christmas/Valentine’s Day/Saint Patrick’s Day/Halloween/Thanksgiving” on social media. 

These baskets tend to have the same items, just in different colors or patterns for the occasion: a big fleece blanket, fuzzy socks, a candle, claw clips, a Stanley, a Touchland hand sanitizer, facemasks, a few beauty products and a couple of snacks. The videos are immaculate, with relaxing ASMR and a satisfying placement of items into the basket. 

It makes me jealous. I have never received a gift like that before, and for some reason, I want one. 

Social media sells lots of things. I’m well aware of Instagram influencers who sell lives of traveling the world or traditional homemaking. But observing social media sell thoughtfulness is new for me. 

In these videos, someone goes out of their way to buy all these different things for one gift basket. Is that not the truest example of thoughtfulness? 

Or is it the quantity that makes it thoughtfulness? Would I still feel that same desire if there were five less items in the basket? If the items were not color coordinated? If instead, they were placed into a recycled bag?

I don’t think so.  The feeling somehow evaporates when the abundance is removed. 

The basket, I’m beginning to understand, is a physical manifestation of something I’ve been craving: to be thought of, to be cared for, to be loved. And when the gift is extravagant, it’s proof of an affection that’s impossible to ignore. 

The issue with physical proof is that it fades. The candle will be burned to an empty jar, the snacks will be consumed, the hand sanitizer will all be used. Suddenly, the evidence of love is gone, and one must question again if there was ever love to begin within. 

I want to be chosen deliberately and without obligation. 

That’s something you can’t order on Amazon.

For my 20th birthday, I’m asking for experiences with people I love. A drive with no destination. A weekend spent in the mountains. An adventure to the beach. A bike around campus. 

My home doesn’t have room for many more things. But my heart does.

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The craft

Woodcrafting: the art of a textured life.

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The soft humming of the lathe, the sharp blade cutting through construction planks and the omniscient campfire scent of chiseling wood leave the rest of the world in a luxurious waiting. My gaze is pinned precisely on the angle of my arm pressed tightly against the lathe. Rotating on the lathe is a scrap piece of Australian Walnut, and I’m entranced by its ceaseless spinning. It’s rotating perfectly, disrupted only by the friction forced upon it by a tool of my choice. I’m intimately aware that any slight shifting of posture can completely undermine its final form. However, the posture that typically typifies my perfectionistic hesitation is relinquished. In this moment, I am carefully careless. I carve away. I craft away. 

If you ask me what I am most proud of recently, it would be this: a roughly 3” by 2” vase, barely discernible in form and function. As I hold the vase, I am reminded of what makes me feel human.

Tucked tightly between the corner of Santa Teresa and Duena, the Product Realization Lab (PRL) is a second home to mechanical engineering students, but an enigma to almost all other majors, including myself. In the dead center of winter, I found myself here: burnt out in the manufactured, consumer culture way. This is a consumer culture which promises the satisfaction of a product, at the expense of ceaseless production. Woodworking introduced me to its antithesis: the indelible meaning which lies within crafting. I marvel at the simple magnificence of smoothening a coarsely textured scrap of wood into its silky final form. 

It is more important than ever that we commit ourselves to a craft. Not necessarily woodcraft, but any craft of your choice — ideally, the one that calls to you. A craft that is tangible and felt intimately through the tips of your fingers and sparks a spirit that has always resided within you. This insatiable craving to create with our hands is an entirely human endeavor. After all, I’d hardly be the first to say we are creative creatures. Yet we often forget this amidst a culture which claims otherwise; this mindless consumption takes many forms: shopping, scrolling and the sorts. We are consumed by the act of consumption itself. 

This is the culture I sought to escape from in the PRL. In the midst of my burnout, this craft was akin to medicine. I learned that I had intrinsic value beyond the metrics by which we are evaluated within our institutions. I was invited into another world in which the qualities that make me human — fallible, creative, questioning — were unable to be communicated through a screen. Rarely are we creating something with our own two hands. Rarely, are we committing every fiber of our function to chiseling away at a form that will hold little instrumental or utilitarian value. 

The only contender to defeating the value of the craft is sharing it. A master woodcrafter, Senching, taught me how to use the lathe. It was her enthusiastic generosity that brought me to the PRL for the first time, and it was her continued support that allowed me to craft (not complete) my first piece. When I first saw a collection of her work — dozens of the most intricately and delicately designed wooden vases — I marveled at the time and mastery it must have demanded to create each one. This is the wonderful art of the craft: its value is, in some ways, transferrable. We are moved to create not only with, but because of others. 

My appreciation for the lopsided wooden vase has nothing to do with its material worth. In fact, I’d go as far to say it has no material worth at all. I instinctually grimace at its imperfection only to remember that it memorializes three hours of time well spent: a tireless labor of continued error and refinement to bring its existence into this world. As Nietzsche says, I spent those three hours being “human, all too human.”

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How are Stanford students using social media?

A data-inspired look into how students consume social media.

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Sophomore year I found myself scrolling through social media during lunch, dinner, really anytime I had a free moment away from work. I remember defending myself to a friend. It is good to know what is Fizzin’. It is good to know what is on the ’gram. It was denial, really. I could no longer justify the hours lost to brainrot.

This fall, I deleted Instagram and axed my YouTube history so its algorithms no longer recommend content. I started to notice the effects. Interactions felt intentional. Work felt productive and exciting.

Yet several popular social media platforms are connected to Stanford. “This is where things began. Snapchat was founded at Stanford. Instagram’s founders met at Stanford,” Truitt Flink ’28 told The Daily. Flink is co-founder of Reconnect Stanford, a student-led movement helping people through “social media sobriety.” 

Fizz, an anonymous messaging app used by Stanford students, also holds strong ties to campus. “In the Fall of 2020, we were freshmen at Stanford University and noticed a lack of connection and authenticity on a campus grappling with Covid restrictions. There was no centralized platform… We thus set out to create Fizz, a private campus-specific platform that facilitates authentic conversations,” the app’s founding story explains.

It is a cute story that follows the tried and true recipe of noticing a social problem and “solving” it with a social platform. It’s strange, then, that using social media sucked me away from the very interaction it promised to help me find. And from the looks of it, I’m not the only one who feels this way. “I felt like I started to live more for those curated moments than the real thing,” Flink said. “A lot of my experiences felt dulled beneath the veil of needing to post them,” Reconnect Stanford Financial Officer Mahalia Morgan ’27 echoed.

Reconnect Stanford founding member Samin Bhan ’28 took care to clarify that Reconnect Stanford does not place blame on any particular individual or platform. Instead, the group focuses on the experience of real people. “We want to think about it at a systems level. We are not anti a particular person or company. We are expressing what’s happening on the ground,” Bhan said.

Observation

To better understand how Stanford undergraduates use social media, The Daily distributed a survey to a random sample of 500 students. We collected 35 responses. The average respondent spends 3.22 hours on social media each day and rates their relationship with social media as 2.7 out of 5, or just under neutral. Respondents associated social media use with the words “doomscroll,” “brainrot” and “comparison.” And yet if we cross tabulate Relationship and Hours we find that students who spend more time on social media have a poorer relationship with it.

It is strange that students recognize that their relationship with social media is poor yet find themselves spending several hours on social media platforms. Flink offered some insight into the paradox. “People know that they don’t feel good. They know that it harms their relationships and their mental health — and yet they can’t pull away from it,” she said. “The problem is not a lack of willpower. The problem is that there’s not scaffolding in place to support that.”

Of course, we use different platforms for different reasons. The top platforms respondents reported using are Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. The platforms typically cover two different reasons for use. For example, respondents reported using Instagram for “connection” and “entertainment” but not as a source of information. On the other hand, respondents reported using LinkedIn for “connection” and occasionally “information” but never for “entertainment.”

The responses align fairly well with the overall popularity of social media platforms in the U.S. The notable exception is LinkedIn, which saw stronger popularity at Stanford than across the U.S. population. It can remind us, Bhan explained, that Stanford students are not so different from any other students. “We’re no different than any other kid. Being at Stanford doesn’t mean we’re less susceptible to the purposeful engineering and tactics companies use,” he said.

Respondents reported most frequently using social media during activities that involve down time. These included relaxing, eating and waiting. Conversely, activities involving focus did not see a lot of social media use.

Interpretation

Despite strong opinions and “common” knowledge, it is hard to write off social media as bad. Instead, the effects are very much an open research agenda, according to Sunny Xu, the director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, which focuses on understanding social technologies.

“We don’t really have strong causal evidence suggesting that social media will drive mental health or well-being outcomes,” Xu said. “There’s a lot of gaps — between evidence and public perceptions, and also in methodologies.”

We find social media draining and distracting. It keeps us from being ourselves. And yet many of us find genuine value in social media as well. It is hard to characterize our consumption in normative terms. The truth likely lives somewhere between good and bad. Research will deepen our understanding of these technologies, but in the meantime, what’s most clear is that, to live with social media, we need balance.

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Puzzle / Declutter

A new puzzle from The Stanford Daily for Magazine Vol. 269: Consumption.

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Instructions: Fill in each of the 26 empty squares with one letter of the alphabet. Each letter of the alphabet A-Z will only be used once.

Download Answer Key.

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Wase | A Midwest transplant

In her senior column, Amina Wase ’26 reflects on all that The Daily has given her.

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My first attempted Daily article was anything but a news article. It read more like a cloggy narrative with chopped up quotes and lengthy paragraphs. Definitely, not news.

Battling the freshman flu, I turned in the shoddy article, excited for what was to come next. 

If I read that same article now, I would probably reevaluate that writer’s future at The Daily. Instead, I was met with my gracious editor Itzel, who walked me through how to news-write and overcome my sourcing difficulties. 

Her sincerity and dedication to teach me for free through paragraphs of Slack messages and in-person meetings was my first glimpse into the educational, supportive culture of The Daily.

***

I came from a suburban Ohio high school, where I didn’t have a school newspaper. Still, I planned to join one in college. There was no deep purpose involved. I wanted to try something new and join a novel, fast-paced experience.

My surface-level decision to join came to be among the most meaningful experiences of my four years.

After attending a few desk meetings, I was astounded by how driven my peers were. While my incredible classmates were pushing out one to three articles per week, each article I worked on felt like climbing a mountain. At least three interviews? News-style writing? University comment? Every email I sent felt intimidating. I felt uncomfortable putting myself out there.

I left The Daily my freshman year believing this organization took up too much time for too little reward.

I couldn’t stay away for long. My peers’ incredible organizing work on campus brought me back, as they elicited my passion to storytell: I felt inclined to memorialize my classmates’ work and dedication.

Whenever I pitched an idea, I was welcomed back with open arms into a space where skilled editors would help me along every stage — from a fragmented idea to a polished Daily-style piece. Four pairs of eyes on each article really helps. 

After each round of edits, paragraphs of feedback graced my Slack inbox. Those paragraphs, and everyone who wrote them — including Caroline, Oriana, Sarah and many, many more — turned my clogged paragraph-writing into my ability to quickly produce a clean piece. 

The culture brought me back, and it is what I will miss most about this organization. We all come together voluntarily, giving up hours and hours of time to make this paper the greatest college newspaper in the country (Fight me on this!).  

The people, who decorate our quoteboard with unhinged sayings, edit late night articles to make it that much better, help me through difficult journalistic decisions and push all new staff to continue improving — that is who I did it for. 

Supportive of growth, forgiving of shortcomings and always welcomed with open arms. That is what The Daily is.

My predecessors made me the editor I am. There is nothing more I want for our masthead, editors and staff than to feel trained in this encouraging environment. My love for The Daily is the love for the people, the love for teaching, the love for making the paper the best product — and my love for the arduous process.

The (very) late nights, dire Slack exchanges, waking up to phone calls from upset sources, treks to SUDPS, hours-long interviews, the disagreements on a single word — it was all worth it. 

Every minute was. 

I came to this university feeling like a Midwest transplant, and in many ways I still do. The fake smiles were too California, the harsh demeanors were too East Coast, the four seasons disappeared and I was standing on my own two feet, far from home. Stanford was wacky and quirky. The Midwest was neutral and normal. 

But this organization gave me a footing in the ground, rooted in place, Midwestern and all.

***

To George and Anna, I started this volume hardly knowing what this job entailed and what you were like as people. I end it with the honor of having led the paper with the most dedicated, talented, funny and kind people. I learn from you two everyday. I truly can not wait to see all you do for the world in the future. 

Greta, Ananya and Lauren, thank you for passing the baton, and teaching me what it means to make the editorial decisions I never previously felt empowered to make. Greta, your kindness, dedication and responsiveness as editor-in-chief is leadership I only hope to replicate one day.

To all my wonderful teachers and MEs — Oriana, Caroline, Sarah, Itzel and more — you all took me from a shaky writer to the editor I am now. I credit you with your compassion, and making The Daily fun. I think about you often in my decisions and teachings. 

To the house that sits on Panama Mall and Duena St.: Thank you for fostering life-long connections and creating a comforting home on campus. 

I entered this university different in many ways: nervous, naive and unsure of myself. This organization, in part, made me who I am. It gave me the confidence to report, write about issues I care about and grow into myself. 

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Some students left unassigned after first round of housing selections

Students expressed frustration and confusion over their current unhoused status, while University administrators pointed to a second round of housing in mid-July.

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As the dust settled from the first round of housing selection, some students found themselves in an unexpected situation: they didn’t yet have housing for next year.

“By the time I had gotten on the portal, all of the rooms were completely full,” said Twisha Hegde ’29. Hegde described it as “really unexpected” to find out that no rooms were available.

“Everyone I had talked to for advice, they had no idea about this…everyone was completely shocked,” she said. “I hadn’t even heard of the word ‘unhoused’…[housing] was supposed to be guaranteed.”  

Hegde’s experience reflects that unassigned students, who voiced varying levels of confusion and frustration about their housing assignment experience and a perceived lack of clarity surrounding it. Students without housing will need to apply for a second round of assignment processes, which will occur between July 13 and July 17. 

Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) communications officer Jocelyn Breeland said that R&DE expects to receive “a significant number of housing cancellations” over the summer, which currently-unassigned students will be placed into. She said that the university had enough housing units to accommodate all students with remaining housing guarantees. 

“We want to reassure [students] that, as in previous years, all students with housing guarantee quarters will receive a housing assignment prior to the start of autumn quarter,” she wrote in an email to The Daily. Breeland said that the larger class sizes of the Class of 2028 and Class of 2029 were balanced out by a decrease in housing applications from fifth-year students. 

According to the University’s 2025-2026 Common Data Set, 7,346 undergraduates and 10,775 graduates are currently enrolled at Stanford, for a total student population of 18,121. The University provides 14,500 on campus housing units for students. Under current University policies, undergraduates are guaranteed 12 quarters of housing. Graduate students, with the exception of coterms, are guaranteed housing only during their first year. 

When asked about the current number of unassigned students, Breeland said that the University “[does] not have a specific number to share.” Twisha said she estimated “around 12 or 15 students” were unhoused in her dorm alone. 

Yanna Hauck ’29 said that when she went to check out available rooms before her housing selection time, “there was nothing left.”

“[R&DE] didn’t give us any specific guidance or any of that kind of stuff,” said Hauck, who had a 1:45 p.m. gate time (the last sophomore gate time was 2:00 p.m). ”I’m assuming I’m going to have to fill out one more thing probably before [second round of] housing, but it wasn’t super clear what the instructions were for us.” 

Hauck hopes to stick with her planned roommate, but acknowledges that the prevalence of single-person vacancies might make it difficult. She also hopes to benefit from changes in summer housing. In an email sent to all regular housing applicants, R&DE wrote that “some students assigned later in the summer end up in highly desirable housing locations that become available due to cancellations.” 

“If I were in charge, I think it would be important to communicate more clearly and directly with students who were left unhoused,” said Crystal Liu ’29, a fellow student in Hegde’s housing group also left without housing. Liu believes sophomores should receive housing priority, citing it as a “very stressful” experience and important for community-building. 

In previous years, sophomores received first pick for housing out of a pool of “sophomore priority spaces.” In the 2026-27 academic year, the University moved sophomores to last in housing priority in order to prioritize juniors and seniors who have spent more time at Stanford. 

Students said that they wished R&DE had been clearer in the communications process, noting that information was packed into dense emails or hard to find at all. 

“I had to go to the housing office in person a couple times and ask clarification questions, which is a little bit frustrating for me, but also I’m sure for the people working there because I’m sure there are a lot of people,” Hedge said. She echoed Liu’s opinion that sophomores should receive priority housing, describing the process as “something where there’s a really substantial need for reform.” 

Hegde said, “The only communication we really got was that we would be housed eventually.”

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Hilton, Becerra ’80 J.D. ’84 lead in governor’s race, Steyer M.B.A ’83 pulls ahead at Stanford

Tom Steyer M.B.A. ’83 leads the California gubernatorial race at Stanford, with over 50% of the region’s votes. The area shows strong Democratic support with Xavier Becerra ’80 J.D. ’84 and Katie Porter following up.

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Democrat Tom Steyer M.B.A ’83 shows strong support across Stanford voters, receiving over 50% of the votes counted so far in the region. Statewide, Steyer is in third behind a neck-and-neck race between Republican candidate Steve Hilton and Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra ’80 J.D. ’84. The top two candidates will advance to the general election in November.

While roughly 66% of the votes cast in Santa Clara County have been counted, Steyer leads the race within Stanford with 51.7%. He’s followed by Becerra with 24.9% and Democratic candidate Katie Porter, who came to speak at Stanford, at 7.7%. Hilton is 5th with 2.8% of the votes. Students could cast their vote at Tresidder Memorial Union on June 2.

The broader Palo Alto area shows different results, with Becerra pulling forward. While Becerra also leads Santa Clara County with 30% of the votes, Hilton narrowly beats out Steyer for second place with 23% compared to Steyer’s 22.3%. 

A former hedge fund manager, Steyer has run on a platform vowing to raise taxes and expand public services if elected. His campaign broke a state record for campaign spending with $216 million invested. Steyer has an estimated net worth of $2.4 billion. He’s a strong advocate for clean energy, but was the chief executive of Farallon Capital, a hedge fund firm that became a large investor in the coal industry. While he stepped down in 2012 and claimed to have requested Farallon separate his funds from the investments into fossil fuels, financial records show he never fully cut ties.

Steyer spoke at the Graduate School of Business’s annual diploma ceremony in 2015. He also funded the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, which provides research grants for alternative energy innovations.

Steyer’s brother, James Steyer ’78 J.D. ’83 , is a professor at Stanford and the founder of Common Sense Media. James Steyer taught COMM 3A: Election 2024: Democracy on the Ballot in fall quarter, which brought Hillary Clinton to campus.

Across California, the race is close between Hilton and Becerra, with 27.2% and 26.0% of the votes, respectively. Steyer trails in third with 20.2% of votes, followed by Republican candidate Chad Bianco and Porter. 

Hilton is a former visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former visiting scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also served as a senior advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2012 and was a host on Fox News Channel. Endorsed by U.S. President Donald Trump, Hilton is running in opposition to targeting billionaire wealth, encouraging a flat tax rate.

Becerra served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 12 terms from 1993 to 2017. He also served as California attorney general from 2017 to 2021 and as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services from 2021 to 2025 under former U.S. President Joe Biden. Becerra calls for more affordable and accessible medical care and a stronger fight against Trump’s actions across several sectors, including healthcare and immigration.

Porter is the leading female candidate in the gubernatorial race, running on affordability and lowering costs. She was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2019 to 2025 and has received criticism for her aggressive language towards staff.

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Gopisetty | The last coterm in Toyon 

Sidharth reflects on ending his five years at Stanford in an unexpected place.

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The Toyon assignment landed in July. I was in Seattle, at the end of a housing saga that had already collected a respectable stack of graduate housing rejections, never once with a reason. I was distraught. I was about to start my last year of college, for real this time, and I would be spending it across the hall from sophomores. I opened the housing change portal before I finished reading the email.

When I arrived a week into the quarter, I met my roommates, my neighbors, my RAs. Every one of them was younger than me. Coterm year was supposed to be a soft launch into adulthood: cooking with friends in Rains, board game nights in Munger. This still happened. But what I didn’t expect was returning home to communal bathrooms and anguished complaints about Math 51, a class I had taken so long ago it felt like a relic.

But somewhere between the shared sinks and the homework panic, I entered a new world. These were kids who lived through COVID in middle school. I was in the first class to come back, and we re-established so many traditions that my neighbors now treat as a given. Sitting beside people just beginning, I could finally see the whole arc at once.

My journey at Stanford has been nontraditional, to say the least. I came in pre-med, then CS, then econ, then CS again, then bioengineering and finally electrical engineering, with a materials science coterm? Plus a CISAC thesis and a great deal of sewing. My Indian parents are still perplexed by the amount of sewing in my dorm room and the endless sketches.

Sleepless nights in Huang, asleep on a conference table because the work was not done. Numb hands as I sewed 200 shells onto a ballgown and sawed two hundred chains for a single dress. The smell of solder as I finished a class project. Running around the Stanford house in Oxford with the new Saltburn tracklist in my ears. Watching, and helping with, Stanford’s first fashion show. Seeing FashionX become what it is today after our first clothing collection (shoutout to the poster still in Tresidder). “Stanford hates fun” finally giving way to traditions no one will let die. Listening to my neighbors talk about yearly events that my own friends, the Class of 2025, started.

After all of this, the university, in its infinite and bureaucratic wisdom, sent me back to where I started. Toyon sits a stone’s throw from Larkin, the dorm where I moved in as a wide-eyed freshman who thought four years was a long time. Every morning of my final year, I woke to a view of Hoover Tower, bikes zipping past my window, and the early chatter drifting over from athlete dining.

Toyon did not give me the year I asked for. I wanted a quiet apartment, a real kitchen, and dignified solitude. Instead I got thin walls and a hallway that never fully went quiet. And somehow that was the point. Toyon refused to let me graduate early in spirit, to start treating Stanford like a place I had already half left. It kept me porous, surrounded, a little inconvenienced, and entirely present. My coterm year was never the soft launch into adulthood I had planned. It was one last year of being in it, completely, beside people for whom all of it was still brand new.

I end these five years wanting five more.  I don’t think any number of years will ever be enough.

But I look back to my mornings in Neptune (formerly Slavianskii Dom), the walks to Verve for my matcha tonic, the Coupa breakfast wraps (sub the wrap for sourdough), and I know it is never enough. The warm summer nights at Corner Yogurt will never be enough, and the walks around the lake at the perfect sunset will never cease to amaze me. The taste, the feeling, the warmth will hopefully stay. Linger, even.

So if you find yourself at some point questioning: To coterm or to not coterm?

I implore you to take the extra year, because you might end up in Toyon and be as lucky as I was.

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Stanford should explain why it is concealing its own Civil Rights history

Yang argues that Stanford should stop refusing to acknowledge civil rights historical recognition.

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In April, the Alpha Omega House Corporation (AOHC), former owners of Stanford’s Historic Sigma Chi House, announced that the residence had qualified for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places for its role in the 1960s Civil Rights movement. That’s big news. But as a community, we should be concerned by the University’s documented refusal to allow public recognition of that National Register status, and the removal of pre-existing recognition previously placed there by Sigma Chi students and alumni. Administrators should reverse course.

Stanford History Professor David M. Kennedy, at the Stanford Historical Society’s 50 year anniversary celebration in October 2025, quoted historian David McCullough on why we study history: “Everything we have . . . is because someone went before us and did the hard work.”

The historic importance of this residence starts in 1965 when Stanford’s Sigma Chi Chapter (Alpha Omega) did the hard work by pledging a Black student, Kenny Washington. It was the first time in the history of Sigma Chi that any of its Chapters had pledged a Black student. The Chapter was suspended by its National less than two weeks later. In response, the Stanford students launched a campaign to end discrimination in student associations nationwide. That campaign was the basis of the successful application for National Register status.

The California Historic Resources Board, in its nomination of the federal government wrote:

“The ‘Stanford situation’ . . . fueled the national debate on racial exclusion in [colleges] . . . , [a] debate that played out in newspapers, in Congress, and on university campuses across the country.” Universities, the statement noted, “were confronted with the understanding that they must end discrimination . . . or lose federal funding.”

This residence is only the second structure in the entire State of California recognized by the National Register for its role in the Civil Rights movement. It joins other famous educational buildings that have qualified, including the Kansas elementary schools that led to the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education.

The process of federal historic recognition starts with the California Resources Board. When the AOHC applied to the board, Stanford’s former leadership filed an opposition. The State Board voted to advance the nomination to the U.S. Park Service over Stanford’s objection. Stanford then hired a powerful and connected Washington D.C. law firm, Perkins Coie, to oppose the nomination for federal recognition.

Stanford’s opposition, at both the state and federal level, was based on its claim that the Sigma Chis did nothing significant in pledging a Black student, since other fraternities did the same. But the National Register application clearly focused on the undisputably successful national campaign Stanford students waged to end discrimination in all student groups nationwide.

Stanford’s opposition failed. The federal government found the property to be qualified for National Register status. This month, the senior historian at the national register confirmed that the University has “blocked” public recognition, including a federal plaque.

Those students in 1965 built a broad coalition of support. The New York Times reported on May 1, 1965, that Stanford President Wallace Sterling had authorized a letter to the president of every higher educational institution in the country that hosted a Sigma Chi Chapter, advising them of the discriminatory policies of the national student organization.

The students also recruited Montana Senator Lee Metcalf ’36 (an alum of Stanford’s Sigma Chi Chapter) to further their cause at the federal level. In June of 1965, the Los Angeles Times reported that the United States Education Commissioner, Francis Keppel, had warned American universities and colleges that they could lose Title VI funding if they hosted discriminatory student associations. The article reported that the “Stanford situation” was seen by Commissioner Keppel as the first major test case of de facto discrimination in a student organization since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The current owner of a National Register-qualified property can refuse to allow public recognition. To date, the University has refused to authorize placement of the National Register plaque. It has also resisted public inclusion in the National Register itself. Stanford’s opposition was unsupported by the record and rejected by the decision-makers. They need to accept their loss and share this history.

There are six structures on campus that have qualified for the National Register. They are all publicly recognized, except one. Stanford’s Historic Sigma Chi House is the only qualified property not publicly recognized. None of the others were qualified for a history of social justice.

Stanford assumed ownership of this residence on September 1, 2023 when the AOHC ground lease, which began in 1936, was not renewed. The University then also removed existing historical recognition. This included a plaque in the front façade commemorating the historic 1965 campaign. They removed the lettering above the front door of the residence that shared with visitors the history that had been made there. University employees even removed a plaque from the living room wall honoring Stanford’s John Arrillaga family who oversaw the 2006 historic preservation of the residence. All these acts suggest a conscious intent to conceal this history. Why?

The timing of Stanford’s actions in 2023 is suspect. Their objection was rejected by the the State of California on August 4, 2023. Within days, administrators issued a press release announcing its decision not to renew the alumni ground lease on which the residence was constructed. This gives the impression that administration feared the historic status might assist the alumni who were then lobbying Trustees to maintain their ground lease. If that was the real explanation for administrators fighting to conceal this history, it does not warrant doing the same thing now, nearly three years later.

Stanford’s current leadership must right this wrong. All historic recognition removed from this structure in 2023 should be restored, to also include recognition of the Arrillaga family’s role in the historic preservation. The University should promptly advise the National Register that they are withdrawing their objection to public recognition in the National Register and placement of the federal plaque.

Stanford should be sharing this proud moment in its history, not fighting to hide it. Ignoring and concealing federal historic recognition tells the Stanford community that administrators do not care about vulnerable groups. It obscures a legacy of unselfish activism that might motivate current students to speak for those who cannot effectively speak for themselves.

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Golden State Valkyries fall at home on Stanford night

On Stanford Night at Chase Center, the team lost 91-81 to the defending champion Las Vegas Aces.

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The Bay Area’s newest sports franchise, the Golden State Valkyries (6-3), faced off against the defending WNBA champions, the Las Vegas Aces (6-3), in an exciting matchup at the Chase Center in San Francisco on Sunday. 18,064 fans filled the arena, marking the Valkyries’ 29th consecutive sold-out game. It was also the Valkyries’ Stanford night, bringing many students, drawing faculty and alumni to the game. 

The game started off close in the first half with 12 lead changes between both teams. Eventually, the Aces found themselves back on top after the second quarter, 43-41.

The Valkyries shot the ball well, at 65.9% from 3 in the first half — a 74.8% increase from their season 3-point average. Still, the Aces had strong defense, a flowing offense and rebounds that gave them the lead at the half. Valkyries’ forward Janelle Salaün reached her 500th career point in the first quarter. 

Head coach of the Valkyries, Natalie Nakase, did not think her team performed well in the first half. “We’re not protecting the paint, we’re not outrebounding the Aces, we are just not being disciplined enough in general,” she said.

The Las Vegas Aces’ head coach Becky Hammon, also hoped that her team’s performance would improve in the second half. “We’ve been pretty good in the first twenty, pretty awful in the second twenty, so hopefully we play the next twenty minutes hard,” she said.

The Aces started to separate from the Valkyries in the third quarter. At one point, the Aces went on an 11-1 run and had a 14-point lead. Jackie Young, Aces guard, hit a triple, allowing her to break the 3,500 WNBA career points mark.

The Aces ended the quarter with an 18-point lead. 

The fourth quarter became more intense as the Valkyries began to chip away at the Aces’ lead, going on an 11-0 run near the end of the quarter and outscoring them 20-13 within eight minutes and 49 seconds of the fourth. But the offensive burst from the Valkyries wasn’t enough. The Aces won the victory in The Bay, 91-81.

Even though the Valkyries were down by as much as 24 points in the game, Gabby Williams still shined brightly, leading the Valkyries’ offense with 20 points and four rebounds — a season high for the guard. She also had one assist and two steals. 

On the Aces side, Aja Wilson led the game with a double-double. She had 28 points, 15 rebounds, four assists, four blocks and one steal. Though three or four players were defending her at times, she was still able to score in the paint. 

Despite the Valkyries’ loss, the team’s fourth-quarter performance made Williams hopeful.

“This is a long season, so our depth is going to be our strength,” Williams said. “Those guys getting in those minutes during crunch time, and against a really good team, the defending champs, that’s huge for us.”

When asked what adjustments were needed, Nakase said, “It starts with my leadership, and what I’m saying to them. It’s how I’m correcting them. So it starts with me. I got to correct my message. I got to deliver better.” 

For the Aces, Wilson said her team “wanted to make sure we played basketball the right way and come out with the energy that’s needed…this was a good test to see how we can show up for one another.” 

The game marked Becky Hammon’s 150th win as a head coach in the WNBA.

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From the Community | SIPEC’s ideology is constructive dialogue 

Aggarwal argues that SIPEC aims to create an environment where "criticism is informed, arguments are tested and people with different viewpoints can engage one another seriously."

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Jatin Aggarwal is a Ph.D. student and current co-president of Stanford India Policy and Economics Club (SIPEC).

In a time when public debate is increasingly shaped by ideological silos, student institutions have a responsibility to do something harder than take easy positions: create spaces where disagreement can be serious, informed and constructive.

That is the spirit in which the Stanford India Policy and Economics Club (SIPEC) was created. SIPEC exists to inspire dialogue and action that takes both the United States and India forward. We aim to help the next generation of leaders engage with one of the most consequential bilateral relationships of the 21st century, both at Stanford and beyond.

The question “Who does SIPEC represent?” misunderstands the organization’s purpose. SIPEC does not exist to support a political party or to endorse every choice of every invited speaker by imposing ideological purity tests on complex discussions. We believe that progress requires a forum where criticism is informed, arguments are tested and people with different viewpoints can engage one another seriously. We believe that students should encounter arguments they agree with and arguments they do not. Crucially, we believe that Stanford should be a place where our countries are considered with intellectual honesty, rather than reduced to caricatures and media echo chambers. 

The U.S. and India are two deeply diverse democracies with complex histories, shared interests and real disagreements. The U.S.-India relationship includes cooperation in technology, defense, education, health care, climate, entrepreneurship and people-to-people ties. It also includes legitimate debates around democracy, culture, development and geopolitics. Over the last five years, our annual programming has consistently reflected the changes occurring in both countries and a desire to work for the collective betterment of both societies. 

When we hosted Dr. S. Somanath, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, the conversation revolved around science, institution-building and the Indian dream—his personal journey to leading one of the world’s most respected scientific organizations through non-elite educational and professional pathways. His story, like many others we have featured, challenged the notion that leadership in science, technology and public life is confined to the “upper-caste, technocratic and economically privileged.” We hosted Sridhar Vembu, the founder of Zoho to discuss his journey from a small village in India to building a globally successful technology company, and his decision to return and invest in rural India. The conversation focused on building innovation ecosystems outside traditional metropolitan centers. 

Following the terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir in April 2025, we hosted a series of conversations, including with Hoover Institution fellows and former ambassador and expert on Pakistan, Dinkar P. Srivastava, to confront uncomfortable questions of terrorism and India-Pakistan relations beyond simple platitudes of peace.

We have engaged in conversations on development, sustainability and healthcare. Discussions with speakers such as Anil Jha (former chief of Coal India Limited) on India’s coal-based economy and Anshul Gujarathi on eco-ventures reflected the reality that India’s development choices cannot be understood through simplistic binaries. Dr. Dhananjay Sagdeo moderated a discussion about his work serving tribal populations in South India and being the first doctor to identify sickle cell anemia in this region. We see that energy security, climate responsibility, economic growth and social welfare must be considered together. To reduce nuanced discussions to narrow ideological labels of “technocrat” or “economic actor” ignores the substantive work being done by these individuals and the real-world challenges they address. 

SIPEC has never limited itself to one political tradition. Our platforms through the year have included voices from the state governments of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Telangana; representatives from the Aam Aadmi Party, formerly in power in Delhi; the Samajwadi Party, formerly in power in Uttar Pradesh; as well as representatives from both the BJP and Congress. At the Stanford India Conference, political panels engaged with questions of urban governance, welfare politics, federalism, public service delivery and the future of democratic institutions. We aim to expose the Stanford community to the complexity of Indian public life and to show how policy ideas can be exchanged across states, parties and perspectives, even when such engagement is elsewhere reduced to being “sufficiently non-confrontational.”

Beyond policy discussions, the conference featured a diverse range of practitioners across fields such as public health, social impact, technology, wildlife conservation and entrepreneurship. These included Amoghavarsha JS, Grammy Award-winning wildlife filmmaker and photographer; Param Iyer, key architect of the Swacch Bharat Mission, which helped achieve 100% rural sanitation coverage in India and Milli Seth and who founded the Saloni Heart Foundation to expand access to pediatric cardiac care following the loss of her daughter to congenital heart disease. We formed long-term partnerships with Pratham USA and The/Nudge Foundation, who spoke about how technology can strengthen human systems, from offline AI tools in regional Indian languages that support teachers in advancing student literacy and numeracy, to digital platforms improving rural livelihoods and scalable poverty alleviation.

Crucially, these conversations are situated within the context of Stanford’s institutional privilege and are intended to leverage the expertise, interests and experiences of its academic community. We do not pretend that India will be transformed by discussions in Stanford classrooms, whether those concern geopolitics and technology, or the “humanistic questions” favored in academic performances. We created the Innovate For U.S.-India Ideathon and launched the SIPEC fellowship to take these conversations from the Stanford India Conference into the real world. Through partnerships with NGOs and other organizations working across the U.S.-India corridor, we seek to connect students with practical problems, implementation challenges and the communities these efforts ultimately serve.

The U.S.–India relationship will continue to face hard questions. There will be disagreements over policy, values, trade, security, climate, technology and democracy. SIPEC’s role is to create the conditions for thoughtful engagement across it. That is, in essence, what SIPEC represents — a commitment to serious dialogue, intellectual pluralism and a deeper understanding of the future of U.S.-India relations.

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Chen | Master of none

A woven love letter to idiom, writing and Stanford.

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一心一意

An idiom in Chinese goes, “one heart, one mind” — meaning wholehearted dedication and single-minded focus. Heart and mind aligning in perfect unison. 

—

When I was eight, my ironclad dream was to become a children’s book author. I filled hundreds of pages in ratty spiral notebooks with fantastical chapters chronicling the life of a heroic eagle warrior, orphaned at birth but mentored by a wise owl to save the bird kingdom from evil. I thought it was the best story in the world.

What ever happened to that story? And what about that dream?

—

Stanford has been a nonlinear journey to say the least. A journey that is unimaginable to the embarker, beyond the wonder of dreams. It’s a journey that took me through classes across a dozen departments. A journey through blue books and problem sets, peer critiques and papers. A journey from every corner of campus into the corners of the world.

A journey that took me into the heart of student activism, spending dozens of hours each week White Plaza throughout my sophomore year. That brought me into the Bridge one night at 1 a.m. my junior winter, turning around a story that same day to keep the peer counseling service alive for the coming years. That found me at a makeshift desk at 9 p.m. in a tiny East Village shoebox apartment teaching journalism workshops over Zoom for the Daily’s Summer High School program my sophomore summer. That brought me to a rural farm in The Bahamas my junior spring, constructing a solar-powered water pump. That led my freshman year roommate and I to start a longitudinal experiment giving dumb phones to 100 Stanford students that eventually led us to present an award-winning paper in Barcelona this spring. Where I discovered my niche passions in the critical mineral supply chain, working on projects in Chile and the DRC, traveling to the copper mines of Montana sophomore fall and the uranium mines of Kazakhstan this summer. 

It seems I’ve lived many little lives at Stanford, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like quite enough. It really is rather difficult to strike that balance, it proves, between quenching curiosities and achieving a sense of mastery. 

—

Before the addition of its rather pejorative sidekick — “master of none” — the jack of all trades was a title of admiration, Dabbling in various talents was once a celebrated attribute, rather than decrying a lack of expertise. Only in pursuit of specialization during the Industrial Revolution did the generalist name sour. 

—

“How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22?” 

A question Taylor Swift posed almost 15 years ago, and one that I reiterate to myself now on the brink of graduation. 

By the nature of higher education admissions, high schoolers far and wide are encouraged to call themselves a master of one. A coveted spike, you could call it, a key to a university. I was more of a master, of the realm I knew of the world, back then than I am now. Certainly, I “know” more in some aspects: more econometrics and theory, more analyses and syntheses, more about energy sources and electricity markets. But at the same time, I know more of my own limits, and the sheer expanse of what more there is to know.

The more Stanford showed me of the world, the less of it I could say I knew.

—

“Un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé… mais abandonné.”

A work is never finished… but abandoned. A struggle captured originally by French writer Paul Valéry, between perfectionism and creation. When to stop refining, when to move on?

I should know this well, from all the stacks of ratty spiral-bound notebooks in my childhood closet. I should know, from all the Untitled documents that exist in some ether. I should know, from the worn away letters on my keyboard and the pencil-shaped groove on my right middle finger. 

I still have the eagle story. I do still want to write.

—

Some nights in this ultimate year I felt that many strands in my journey here were incomplete. I hate to live with regrets, but oft wondered why I’d shot myself in the foot so many times, committing in so many directions and spreading myself across passions. 

There are arguably many ways I could’ve done Stanford “better.”

If I burrow down that rabbithole, I can picture them all, like the p-sets I should’ve started earlier, the programs I should’ve applied to, the emails I should’ve sent, and the events I should’ve attended. But there are also the more fork-in-the-road choices I made. Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken on a secondary major, rather just focusing on one field. Maybe I should’ve stayed longer in a single club’s leadership, rather than turning to the next interest. Inevitably, I couldn’t give everything to everyone.

Stanford has been a tale of ambition and its repercussions, of discovering limits and what lies beyond them, of both falling short and overshooting. 

—

三心二意

There is another idiom in Chinese: “three hearts, two minds.” You are at a fork in the road, but the fork has numerous tines and you don’t know where you’re going, anyway. And maybe, you want to turn back. 

—

Is it okay to not tie everything up in a perfect bow, seamlessly gift wrapped? Is it okay to set down paths just to turn around, again and again? Is it okay to clear the name of the jack? Is it okay to have three hearts and not one? 

—-

Though the mammalian realm exists universally on one heart and one brain, the world contains biologies both wonderful and unimaginably diverse. 

The octopus, for one, is a creature of three hearts and even more brains.  Rather than following a straight, strictly programmed route through its world, the octopus continuously evaluates its environment, weighing prizes against traps with unparalleled adaptability.

—

It’s coming up on 11:59 p.m. at Stanford, when it’s time to look back over all the pages that have been written and all that could have been. There is enough time to nix the squiggly red underlines, but not nearly enough to rewrite the paragraphs. At the deadline, it’s time to let go.

The beautiful thing about it, though, is that letting go of some strands tightens the grip on others. What is already in the books settles: the freshman dorm Zipcar trips to Half Moon Bay, the lazy weekend brunches around those perpetually sticky wooden tables, the late nights in the second food of the Daily House my first two years that eventually became nights in the kitchen of Hammarskjod House my latter two years.

Like all the other stories, perhaps Stanford will remain one unfinished. A cast of jacks and masters alike, a moral to embrace the follies of curiosity and the rewards of risk altogether. A draft to let go of, an ending that frees the hearts.

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Gupta | On onism

In his senior column, Jay Gupta ’26 reflects on missed experiences.

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I went on a short hike at Castle Rock State Park. It was a personal goal since seeing it featured in Keith Schwarz’s infamous list of outdoor activities. At sunset, a friend reminded me of a word I taught him: komorebi, or the light that passes through trees.

There are a number of words that are present and absent across language. The Ifalik lack a word for surprise but occasionally feel fago, a blend of compassion and sadness felt in dependent relationships. The Japanese report amae or the desire to be cared for. The Germans speak of schadenfreude, the distinct pleasure drawn from another’s misfortune. And so it should come as no surprise that there are a number of self made projects that seek to fill the gaps: to reify our feelings.

There is a word housed in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It is called onism or the awareness of how little of the world you will experience. I can’t help but feel it all the more as of late.

When I entered Stanford, a close friend hung a Venn diagram on his door. It asked us to choose two of three options: sleep, study or social life. The claim is that one cannot have all three.

There is so much I want and need to do. And yet I feel frozen in place. My thoughts stale and uninteresting. My reaction was to hop from side quest to side quest. From acting in Yakada Yaka to hosting a Datathon to co-running a reading group to publishing articles, I was doing things. And, yes, the 50 hours of accumulated sleep debt over the quarter would suggest I made some choices along the way.

One of those side quests was Designing your Spiritual Life, a three-day retreat in Stanford Sierra Camp hosted by ORSL and the Design Lab. I had the pleasure of meeting Deepak Ramola who, among many other things, is the author of a short blog titled, “12 Life Lessons from a Man Who Has Seen 12000 Deaths.” I am drawn to the 10th.

“In the last days of their life, a lot of people can’t speak, walk or communicate with others with as much ease as they could earlier. So, they turn inwards. And start to remember the things that made their heart sing once, things that they cared to learn more about over the course of their life, which enriches their days now.”

We need to choose what we experience. Better, we need to choose how we experience. At Stanford, I was exposed to whole worlds of thinking and feeling that I did not know to be possible. A small example: I am sitting on a bench outside of Green Library with Cheryl Phillips, a decorated data journalist. She shares that her work gave a new life to the world around her. To be a data journalist is to see the world and its possibilities augmented by the data it admits.

And so cheers to the experiences we have had, will ever have and never will.

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Markarian | What does it mean to make the most of Stanford?

Markarian '26 shares his message for his fellow graduates.

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A message to the graduating class of 2026: 

It’s the second day of New Student Orientation, fall of 2022. Hundreds of us are packed into Tresidder, crammed into the library and hunched over laptops, frantically refreshing Axess, our course enrollment website, for the first time. I still didn’t know where the gym was. I couldn’t find my way to class without Google Maps. But I knew one thing with absolute certainty: If I didn’t get into Chem 31M, my life was over.

So we kept refreshing. And refreshing. All 2,000 of us were convinced that the classes we picked for our first quarter at Stanford would define us. Ironically, the entire Axess system crashed. Website down. Gone. If you didn’t know, our school invented the internet. 

You might be wondering… why were we so stressed about class enrollment? Because from the start, we were told to make the most of Stanford. We had just arrived at one of the most extraordinary places on earth. Of course we were going to experience it. We were going to experience ALL of it.  

Make the most of Stanford. I’ll be honest, that phrase has kept me up at night. It followed me into every quarter, every coffee chat at Coupa, every moment I said yes to something. Because at Stanford, everything is an extraordinary opportunity. Taking a class with the former Secretary of State, watching a heart transplant at the hospital as a sophomore, having VCs invest in your Treehacks project.

But that also means everything is an opportunity cost. Do you go to office hours with your professor who happens to be a Nobel laureate, or do you attend the fireside chat with Jensen Huang? Do you go cheer for the women’s artistic swimming team as they win their 11th national championship, or do you watch your dorm-mate compete in the Olympics?  

For a while, I thought I’d only find success by experiencing all of it. So I tried. This past year, I had to choose between dropping out to build a startup I believed in, or continuing on the path I’d dreamed of since I was a kid: becoming a doctor. And for the first time, I felt like no matter what I chose… I’d lose something I cared about. And that failure terrified me. 

I still don’t know if I chose right. But that’s exactly the magic of Stanford: It teaches you to choose between great and great. It teaches you that you don’t actually need to know if you’re right. But by choosing, you discover what truly matters to you.  

I had a friend who gave up a finance internship and chose to spend the summer in SF teaching a class named “the economic impact of Taylor Swift concerts on the GDP of developing countries.” 

My freshman year roommate had to choose between playing in our senior class’s first ever Big Game win or signing with the NFL. He chose the NFL. We forgive him.

Stanford itself hasn’t figured it out either. In the last four years, it still can’t choose what website to use for class enrollment: Axess, Enroll Alternate, SimpleEnroll, Navigator.

Through all of this, I’ve learned that the opportunities we didn’t take don’t just disappear. Because there was no such thing as one Stanford to experience. There were and will be thousands of them, each shaped by a different set of choices. Different classes, different people, different moments that could have been ours.  

This discrepancy is not a loss. Because the version we lived — the one shaped by the choices we actually made — is the only version that was ever meant to be ours.

Stanford won’t be the last place that will ask you to choose. The world you’re walking into after graduation will keep offering more paths than you can take. More opportunities than any one person can hold.

When that happens, I want you to think back to that day of NSO. To hundreds of us staring at a 404 ERROR screen, convinced we were about to miss our chance. But we didn’t. We found our classes! Or maybe we didn’t because Social Dance was always full, so we chose a random TAPS class instead. We found our place! Even if we couldn’t get a table at CoHo, we found a different study spot. And eventually, we discovered our purpose. Not because we did everything, but because we chose something. And then we chose again. And again.

That’s what it means to make the most of Stanford. Not everything. Something.

So as we leave this magical, beautiful, indescribable place that we’ve come to call home, I leave you with this:  

Choose.

Choose boldly, even when you don’t know if it’s right.

Choose fully, even when you wonder what you’re giving up.

Choose the path that feels meaningful over the path that feels safe.

Choose something — and make that choice matter.

Congratulations, Class of 2026, I can’t wait to see what you choose.

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Down to Clown?: In TAPS 127W, failure is the assignment

Students in Introduction to Clown learn to embrace discomfort and find joy in goofiness.

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Before theater and performing arts lecturer Matt Chapman tells his class what exercise they’ll do, he asks for a volunteer.

That is how Caleb Benz ’26 ended up in front of the room, trying to act sadness from a level zero to a level 10, from barely visible emotion to uncontrollable crying. Once Benz reached the top of the scale, Chapman told him to switch to hysterical laughter and slowly bring that laughter back down to zero.

The exercise lasted about 1.5 minutes. Benz felt like he had put his heart and soul into it. Chapman told him he had reached about a 6/10.

In TAPS 127W: Introduction to Clown, students do not always get to prepare themselves before stepping into discomfort. The course introduces students to theatrical clowning, a form Chapman describes as almost impossible to pin down.

“Clown is infinite,” Chapman said.

To many people, the word still brings up birthday parties, circus stereotypes or horror movies. But in Chapman’s class, clown is less about face paint and more about vulnerability, failure, physical presence and the parts of a person that emerge when trying to be impressive stops working.

“People get surprised by how focused we get,” Chapman said.

Chapman has performed and taught clown in South Africa, Denmark, Colombia, the Netherlands, Canada, Mexico and England. At Stanford, the class has become one of those courses students hear about before they take it, and it can be difficult to get into.

At Stanford, students are often rewarded for preparation, polish and control. When Chapman first began teaching on campus and saw students’ “great resistance to failing,” he remembered thinking, “These people need clown!”

His goal is not just for students to be okay with failing but to embrace it as a mode of being.

“When you run out of stuff on stage, that’s when the good stuff starts,” Chapman said.

Benz entered the class with some performance experience. A member of Fleet Street, Stanford’s comedy a cappella group, and “the clown of [his] family,” he was used to humor in front of other people, but he wanted to take this class to push himself out of his comfort zone. 

“Even though I’m such a goofy guy, there was still a part of me that felt like I was holding back when performing in front of a crowd,” Benz said.

Over the quarter, students develop clown personas. These characters are not random alter egos so much as heightened versions of something already in them. Benz’s clown wore a vest, button-down shirt and black-and-white dress shoes. He described himself as a guy who thought he was super smart but was actually bad at almost everything.

Students do not receive the quintessential clown prop — a red nose — until halfway through the quarter.

“We had to earn it,” Daniel Rashes ’26 said.

Benz said Chapman treated the red nose as a dividing line between the student and the character. “When you don’t have the red nose, you’re Caleb, student of clown,” Benz said. “The moment the nose goes on, I don’t want to know who Caleb Benz is.”

Rashes took the class during his senior fall after hearing about its reputation as one of Stanford’s famously quirky courses. He had done some theater before, but his comedy experience mostly came from screenwriting, where the jokes are written and planned in advance. His own humor, he said, is dry and conversational, so Introduction to Clown was “definitely an adjustment.”

“Being silly just for the sake of exploration didn’t feel as natural to me,” Rashes said.

Still, Rashes appreciated the structure of the class, especially Chapman’s feedback. In other creative classes, he had found that critique could be heavy on praise and light on actual criticism.

“Matt was very blunt, but not in a harsh way,” Rashes said. “I really appreciated his honesty when something wasn’t working. He was a really, really great instructor.”

The work extended beyond class. Students prepared skits with different constraints. Some could not use speech. Others had to repeat in a loop. For the midterm, students performed a “hassle,” an exercise where the clown tries to use an object and struggles with it, letting the problem grow through “clown logic” instead of fixing it.

Bailey Scieszka MFA ’26 arrived with a different relationship to clown. Scieszka, who is working towards his master’s in art practice, studied painting at Cooper Union in New York before coming to Stanford.

“I started doing clown in my 20s because I saw this connection between painting and clown, because you’re painting your face,” Scieszka said.

Scieszka had been performing as Ms. Bailey, a high-femme drag persona built around makeup, jewelry and elaborate decoration. Chapman encouraged him to strip away those visual elements and wear all black instead.

“I couldn’t rely on visual gags anymore,” Scieszka said. “I had to find a character.”

The class made Scieszka reconsider what he had previously called clown. In Chapman’s class, he began to see it as a way to control the power of a room, fail in public and live in discomfort.

“The class was life-changing,” Scieszka said. “I couldn’t stop talking about it.”

The ideas followed him out of Chapman’s classroom and into his own thinking about how art should be taught.

“Schools are predicated on success,” Scieszka said. “In art, there has to be experimentation and failure and play.”

The class draws students from across campus, including CS students, MFAs and GSB students. “This class isn’t just reserved for people in the humanities,” Rashes said.

Next spring, Chapman plans to offer Clown 2 for the first time, an advanced course that would give students a chance to dive even deeper into clown.

For Chapman, studying clown gives students an experience that is alive, unmediated and communal. In a place built on getting things right, Introduction to Clown teaches students the art of getting it wrong.

“It celebrates the parts of being human that do not exist for profitability, optimization or exploitation. It’s countercultural,” Chapman said.

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From the Community | America’s research engine is not a political machine 

Science professors at Stanford criticize the OMB's proposed grant funding changes for advancing a political agenda.

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Chelsea Bartram is an Associate Scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Lucy Erin O’Brien and Lauren Tompkins are associate professors of molecular and cellular physiology and physics, respectively, at Stanford. 

On May 29, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) quietly published a set of proposed rule changes to “improve government-wide policies and requirements related to the management of grants, cooperative agreements and other forms of assistance.” This stated intent appears well-meaning, but buried within the 412-page, technocratic tome is an existential threat to the federal funding that drives American science. If implemented, OMB’s rule changes will transform the current system of taxpayer-supported research funding based on scientific merit into one based on partisan ideology, giving political appointees authority to bestow billions on the favored or withhold funds from the disfavored. Ultimately, this will destroy the U.S. research engine that benefits all Americans and has been the envy of the world for decades.

We are Stanford science faculty who use federal research funding to study things as fundamental as the basic makeup of our universe and as crucial as how our gut keeps us healthy throughout our lifetimes. Our colleagues use federal funding to devise circuits for next-generation communication networks or to improve health outcomes for cancer patients. We know that good science is, and has always been, essential for solving global problems and improving our collective well-being.

We, like many Stanford faculty, also serve as peer reviewers for grant applications. Federal agencies such as the National Institute of Health, Department of Energy and National Science Foundation rely on peer review to decide which projects to support. Peer review involves panels of independent experts, typically university professors also researching that topic area, who apply defined criteria to evaluate each proposed project’s merits. 

This system emerged in the 1970s in response to Congressional concerns about how research funds were allocated. It has since become the global norm for allocating competitive grants. Why? Because scientists can readily distinguish rigorous, transformative ideas from the merely fanciful — or the factually incorrect. We know from experience that grant review is serious, demanding work. Each application requires hours of thoughtful and critical reading and a written evaluation against the defined criteria; selection for funding comes only after hours of discussion and deliberation amongst peer reviewers, agency scientists and others who represent the public interest. 

The peer review process demands tremendous effort and attention, but its successful outcomes are undeniable. Since peer review was implemented, U.S.-based scientists have won over 50% of the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine for discoveries that were, in large part, made possible by sustained public investment in the form of research grants selected by peer review. Peer review is not perfect, but it is structured, evidence-based and expert-driven. At its best, it helps ensure that taxpayers’ investment in science will continue to generate important new knowledge and lay the foundation for future technologies, diagnoses and cures.

OMB’s newly proposed rule changes will upend this proven process. Although peer review panels may still meet, their expert evaluations will no longer be a required factor in funding decisions. Instead, political appointees will have sweeping power to award and withhold federal grants at will. Revealingly, officials must certify that funded projects “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” The proposed rules will also allow political operatives to reject grants that they judge as upholding “anti-American values,” a vague standard that could be used to shut down research on gender identity, climate change or any topic unpopular with the party in power. Even after a grant is awarded, political officials can revoke it at any time if they feel it no longer serves “program goals, federal agency priorities or the national interest.” Taken together, these rule changes would transform research funding from a merit-based process into an instrument of ideological reward and punishment.

Make no mistake, these newly proposed policies are the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s war against academic institutions. They began with a flurry of executive orders that targeted individual institutions, cancelled nearly 8,000 grants in 2025 alone and threatened to withhold funding unless universities accepted government oversight of their educational policies and governance.  

Courts have repeatedly blocked the administration’s executive orders against universities. OMB is now trying to achieve the same end through the Federal Register, forcing universities to submit to the administration’s ideological agenda through a bureaucratic backchannel. 

The OMB’s proposed rules paint a bleak future for American science and society. Just as we would not expect politicians without medical training to determine the best cancer treatments, we should not expect political operatives without scientific training to determine whether scientific projects are worthy of taxpayer support. Supplanting peer review with political review will not “improve” American science but imperil it.

As dire as this seems, concerned individuals can make a difference now. The proposed changes are not yet policy, and public comments are accepted until July 13. Before OMB can enact the rule changes, it must address all substantive public comments opposing them. Through formal public comments, complaints to congressional representatives and open discourse, we can stop this brazen attempt to commandeer American science for partisan goals.   

Finally, while we focus on science funding here, the OMB’s proposed changes apply to most forms of federal funding — from FEMA disaster relief to food assistance, from HeadStart to workforce training, from transportation to Medicaid. All these grants will be subject to the same political trials. Virtually no aspect of American life will escape unscathed. We urge the Stanford community to voice opposition to these proposed changes before they are codified. The stakes extend beyond our research labs and universities to schools, non-profits and communities across the country. We cannot let political fealty become the price of federal support. 

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Hope House Scholars Program celebrates 25 years of community support

The collaboration between Stanford and the Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Treatment Program the Hope House reached its 25-year anniversary.

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The Hope House classroom is unlike any other at Stanford. The classes follow the same 10-week schedule, grapple with the same humanities texts and are taught by professors, post-docs, graduate students and undergraduate Teaching Assistants (TAs).

The classroom is filled with residents of Hope House, the residential Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Treatment Program where the class takes place twice a week.

This year, the Hope House Scholars Program, a collaboration between the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford and Hope House, is celebrating its 25-year anniversary. 

The house aids up to 16 individuals in substance abuse recovery, targeting women and those who are pregnant or with young children. In the program, Stanford classes are mandatory and fit into a day packed with additional programming to support treatment. Classes include the recurring “Flourishing as a Feminist” taught by program co-coordinator Michaela Hulstyn Ph.D. ’16 and “All About Love,” taught this spring by Sarah Coduto, a third-year English Ph.D. student.  

“We, the faculty, learn at least as much as what the women at the Hope House learn,” said program co-founder and political science professor Rob Reich M.A. ’98 Ph.D. ’98. “And what’s been remarkable for us, at least in the number of times that I’ve taught, is how the same texts that I would teach at Stanford University are grappled with in both similar and dissimilar ways amongst the women at Hope House.” 

Reich and School of Humanities and Sciences Dean Debra Satz created the Hope House Scholars program to expand the reach of a liberal arts education, guided by the belief that it is something all should have access to. 

“[Instructors] are in a space where women are also dealing with really pressing issues, like trying to become better parents, trying to get off drugs and alcohol, and your class is one of many offerings during the day,” Hulstyn said. “You need to speak in a way that people can understand and also motivate why would [the women] want to know about feminism, or why would [they] want to know about different theories of love or science fiction.”

Students at Hope House have access to education from their instructors for 90 minutes per week. They also meet with Stanford student tutors weekly. 

“The following is clichéd but true: I have learned more from the women of Hope House than they from me,” wrote Kevin Lai ’28, one of the tutors at the program. Lai recalled numerous moments in which the women exemplified persistence, kindness and strength.    

Reich said the inclusion of student tutors in the program helps the classes closely mirror the education one would receive on campus. 

“We didn’t design the program explicitly to be a kind of reinforcement of [residents] recovery,” Reich said. “If the women made connections to that as a result of the conversations we were having, we didn’t push those away, but we didn’t develop lesson plans that invited people to begin from this particular circumstance they found themselves in.”

Educating Hope House residents presents a unique set of challenges and benefits. Instructors acknowledge the positive impact on the classroom environment of a pre-established group dynamic — residents live together in close quarters for the duration of their treatment, while typical Stanford students meet each other for the first time in class. 

However, teachers can’t give members of the Hope House lengthy readings to grapple with in between sessions: all the learning has to happen during the allotted 90 minute instructional windows. Women come to the classrooms from a wide range of academic backgrounds. Professors also can’t count on seeing the same residents each week, as their treatment schedules may not be aligned with the 10-week academic calendar. 

“Whether [a student has] been to the previous nine [classes] or not, it has to be able to stand alone and be a compelling class,” Hulstyn said.

Instructors note that learning goes both ways in the program. Here, the unique classroom environment gives them the chance to become even better teachers, and student tutors often grapple with texts for the first time alongside residents. 

“I learned to meet resistance or opposition in the classroom with joy because it actually gives you a lot to work with,” Hulstyn said. 

Upon graduating the class, the women are given a certificate for a free Continuing Studies class to provide an opportunity for them to continue pursuing a liberal education. Hulstyn added that the Hope House Scholars Program has the potential to provide participants with a renewed sense of motivation and confidence in their academic abilities. 

“As for the future, I continue to believe in the value of this program,” Satz wrote to The Daily.  “One challenge we have now is that the stay of the women at Hope House is shorter than in the past because of changes to funding — my hope is that we are able to find ways to continue to engage the women after they leave the facility.”

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From the Community | Stanford should be proud of Beyond Sex Ed

Director of Beyond Sex Ed Brianna Booth writes about the impact of the program over the past ten years.

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Brianna Booth, PhD, served as the first Director of Positive Sexuality at Stanford from 2016-2026. Her work has been guided by the belief that we can build a more intimate world.

For the past 10 years, I have led Beyond Sex Ed (BSE) as a required part of New Student Orientation. University administration chose to discontinue it this year. With its abrupt end, I want to explain why BSE was an essential part of a Stanford education and an innovation in maturing a stunted area of our collective development.

BSE created the context for students to develop themselves as ethical human beings capable of healthy, respectful and flourishing relationships, with relevance not only for their future impact on the world, but for the quality of campus life they create.

The purpose of BSE was simple: to practice talking about human sexuality in a thoughtful, honest way, and to do so inside a community of people with different backgrounds, worldviews and experiences. 

The alternative is to do what we’ve always done, which is to keep sexuality in the shadows. When sexuality is not integrated with the rest of life, it becomes the proverbial monster under the bed that subconsciously shapes not only our lives but the world, and campus, we live in.

We become pushy and aggressive because we weren’t taught how to hold and communicate our desire. We make careless comments because we were trained to use humor to deflect discomfort. We rely on alcohol or other substances to push past embarrassment and shame. We treat people like objects to avoid the vulnerability of true intimacy. We perform a role we’ve seen in porn or Hollywood instead of being our authentic selves. We let our sexuality go dormant because of disappointing experiences. We bury our painful stories, burdening us and our relationships. 

In short, we hurt other people. We hurt ourselves. Unhealed pain gets passed onto our children, and the cycle continues.

Learning to talk about sexuality, though, brings it out of the shadows — a necessary step if we ever hope to develop skill, morality and values to live by. 

BSE recognized the need to address campus sexual assault systemically, holistically and seriously. Risk factors for sexual violence are well documented: peer groups that reward bad behavior, adversarial relationships between men and women, cynical or superficial attitudes toward sex, hostile masculinity and a basic lack of skill in intimacy and empathy.

To counter these risk factors, we created a place for character development among peers, to practice empathy and honest connection, and to witness models of healthy masculinity and meaningful representations of sex.

It’s worth noting that the points above are essential not only to prevent sexual violence, but for anyone and everyone to have healthy friendships and happy marriages, to become attuned parents and build strong families, and to be engaged citizens and effective leaders. 

At Stanford, BSE was a solution in action. I asked the audience hard questions, both about why we treat people the way we do and how to follow our own internal guidance system. I believed, and still believe, that if we treat sexuality with enough reverence and share our stories with enough vulnerability, we will see our common humanity and have more compassion for ourselves and others. 

Every spring, I taught a class called StoryCraft: Sexuality, Intimacy & Relationships. Sixteen students sat on the floor with no desks, chairs, laptops or notebooks. My TAs and I would tell our stories before starting the process of asking questions and eliciting their stories. 

What did you learn in sex ed? What do you wish you’d learned? What’s an experience of heartbreak you’ve had? Have you ever had a crush on a friend? What’s your experience of saying “I love you”? Do you want to get married? 

Students told their stories again and again without ever writing them down, slowly discovering the throughline. The painful parts got digested, and what they were once afraid to talk about became a source of strength.

Their stories spanned the pain of a breakup, feeling “behind,” positive firsts, commitments to abstinence, struggles with pornography, coming out, finding friends, experiences of hookup culture, healing after sexual assault and falling in love.

In the fall, seven of these students would sit in a semi-circle behind a center spotlight in Memorial Auditorium. One by one, they stood at the mic with their arms at their sides, holding no notes, behind no podium, telling their story to nearly 2,000 new students. Sitting on the side of the stage, I could have heard a pin drop. 

We pulled back the curtain to reveal real life, thereby dispelling assumptions about college and giving students an opportunity to consciously choose a deeper set of values to guide their lives. 

Thousands of students have expressed their gratitude for those storytellers. They couldn’t believe the courage it took to share such personal stories with strangers. They were grateful to know they weren’t alone in their struggles or their desire for more depth, more meaning and truer relationships. They remarked on the stories’ diversity and their surprise at how easy it was to relate to each one in some small way. They’d exclaim that this was unlike any sex ed they’d received and that they couldn’t believe they were at an institution that valued this conversation.

From 773 students who attended BSE in 2025, 93% felt hopeful about the community they were building, 86% felt more curious to know their own and others’ yeses and nos, 88% felt able to express themselves in their conversation circle debrief, 90% reported gaining more empathy for others and 87% felt more acceptance of themselves, their values and their own timing with regard to sex and relationships.

Beyond Sex Ed was yet another area where Stanford offered an innovative solution to a problem that has challenged societies for millennia. As the program comes to a close, and as our world gets more complex, here’s what I hope can guide us moving forward. 

Sexuality is one of the most vibrant and vulnerable parts of being human. It touches us at our core. That’s why it means so much to us, why our feelings are so intense, why violations hurt so much and why it takes so much courage to tell our story.

Stories are essential. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued, we cannot understand human virtues without understanding human stories. Through stories, we learn to recognize what bravery looks like, the impact of betrayal on a relationship and what happens when a person lacks integrity.

When we learn to talk about sex, we learn the skills to talk about all sorts of hard topics. When we can talk about hard topics, we have better relationships, which are the key to a happy life.

We live in a culture of comparison, exacerbated by social media, porn, dating apps and hookup culture. It’s easy to get caught up in the hollowness of external validation, so it is crucial that you stay with yourself, your values and your internal guidance system. 

Consent is the law, but attunement is the skill that actually allows us to connect. None of us ever masters this skill, but we can all get better at it. So, practice. Slow down. Pay attention. Be curious. Ask questions.

As our world becomes increasingly inundated with AI, I think and hope that you will crave what is real. Remember what it is to be human, and that being human is messy, unscripted, imperfect, full of mistakes and magnificent. Remember also, we are always presented with the opportunity to repair, to grow and to find deeper meaning. Partnership comes with all this complexity, and it is profoundly worth the effort to find and build. 

Societies around the world struggle with sexuality. It is remarkable that we were ever able to have such a conversation. An endeavor like this is risky, delicate and requires an enormous amount of care to invite everyone into conversation. Has this ever been done — at this scale, with this diverse of a community and with this much civility? Not that I’m aware of.

That’s something I believe Stanford should be proud of.

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Langshaw | Why Stanford must follow Harvard on grade reform

Columnist Adam Langshaw argues in favor of grade caps for Stanford.

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On May 20, the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Science voted 458 to 201 to cap A grades at 20% per course starting in fall 2027. With this vote, the faculty of America’s oldest university admitted on record that their credentials have suffered massive devaluation. 66% percent of all grades awarded at Harvard in the 2024-2025 academic year were straight A’s, 84% fell in the A-range, and the average undergraduate GPA was a staggering 3.8.

Stanford’s numbers are more elusive. The university administration does not publish a centralized, open-access database of grade distributions, leaving the burden of transparency entirely to the discretion of individual departments.

This fragmented system serves an institutional purpose. In some quantitative sequences, like introductory math and computer science, professors routinely publish detailed exam averages and grade distribution graphs which allow students to compare their performance to the class. But in many humanities departments and small seminars, distributions are an administrative secret, leaving students with nothing but a final mark on Axess. This opacity exists because a uniform, institution-wide look at grade data would force Stanford to confront grade inflation it would rather keep plausibly deniable. 

Almost everyone reading this benefits from inflation in the short term, including myself. The argument for grade reform at Stanford is an argument against the immediate self-interest of essentially every Stanford undergraduate. Yet the Faculty Senate exists to protect the long-term meaning of a Stanford degree, even at the expense of short-term self-interest from students currently earning it.

We can look to Princeton as a case study. From 2004 to 2014, Princeton attempted a 35% cap on A-range grades, flattening distributions and restoring a semblance of academic distinction. Yet, the faculty rescinded the policy in 2014. Critically, the ad hoc committee that reviewed it found no evidence the cap had measurably harmed graduate’s competitiveness for graduate school, professional school, fellowships or employment, which is a primary concern with the policy. The repeal rested almost entirely on psychological factors: survey data revealed a toxic spike in student anxiety, hyper-competitiveness and a feeling of being disadvantaged relative to comparable peers at other institutions.

This is why Stanford should move in tandem with Harvard. A single school that caps grades appears to be unilaterally disadvantaging their own students. When two of the country’s most prestigious programs cap grades together, that perception collapses among students, employers and graduate admissions. And once those two move, others are likely to follow, turning what looks like a penalty in isolation into the new benchmark for rigor.

When transcripts read like a uniform list of perfect accolades, they become white noise to graduate admissions committees and employers, forcing them to look past academic merit and rely on external proxies. This shift directly hurts equity. When grades are artificially flattened to all A’s, decision-makers default to unquantifiable factors swayed by family connections, expensive consultants and social capital. Under-resourced students rarely have access to these hidden backchannels. Restoring A-grade scarcity rescues our academic work from irrelevance, leveling the playing field by giving elite programs a meaningful, transparent metric centered strictly on classroom performance, not family wealth or connections.

The transition will, however, cause friction. Students playing catch-up with Stanford’s intense academic environment will find an uncompromising curve brutal at first, likely resulting in lower initial grades. That is a harsh reality, but a partial solution is to meet them with robust support, not to maintain a fraudulent system that patronizingly hides the preparation gap while leaving underlying inequalities completely untouched. 

Philosophically, it makes sense that Stanford is institutionally against grade caps. We have long contrasted our culture against the sharp-elbowed, status-obsessed anxiety that often characterizes our Ivy League peers. A defense of the status quo is that our current grading system underpins the genuine, cross-disciplinary collaboration that defines the Farm. To introduce a hard cap, the argument goes, is to willingly infect Stanford with a zero-sum paranoia, trading our unique cultural sanity for the cold prestige of an artificial curve.

We can’t just wave this objection away. Princeton proved that capping grades increases student stress, and on a campus already struggling with student well-being, a policy that threatens to worsen mental health must be handled with immense gravity. A cap will absolutely cause more stress, and it risks eroding the collaborative warmth that makes Stanford a healthier place to learn than the infamous pressure-cookers of the East Coast.

However, the stress-free meritocracy reputation Stanford has built is not entirely true. Stanford already sorts its students aggressively: Phi Beta Kappa is restricted to a fixed percentage of the senior class, University Distinction is capped at the top 15% of graduates and many STEM courses are curved relative to peers. The competition is already here and cutoffs exist, but Stanford refuses to give students the transparency they need to navigate them.

In the status quo, we are forced to compete for fixed resources while blindfolded, never knowing our actual rank or how a given grade compares to the person sitting next to us in section. This opacity breeds a chronic, low-grade anxiety with no finish line, leaving a student who receives a B-plus to wonder whether that grade represents acceptable work or failure relative to their peers.

Transparent competition produces acute, bounded stress that a student can actually address. Knowing you are in the seventieth percentile of an organic chemistry class allows for rational decisions about effort allocation and post-grad expectations. A cap paired with published distributions replaces ambient paranoia with actionable information, and while the truth may be harder to digest for some, the unknown is far more corrosive.

An authentic normalization of grading requires a policy that cuts both ways. While grade inflation plagues the humanities and social sciences, the opposite is true in many STEM courses, where many STEM courses give out far fewer A grades than reasonable. The cap should actually function as a target. When implementing a cap, the university should simultaneously mandate that departments historically depressed by harsh, artificial curves elevate their allocation of top grades to meet that same standard. This would dismantle the internal double standard that punishes students for pursuing quantitative fields, ensuring equity across majors and preventing any single department from executing what is essentially a rogue academic purge.

A defensible Stanford policy should follow a deliberate roadmap that starts with immediate transparency, publicizing all course grade distributions on transcripts and then requiring the Faculty Senate to commission and publish a comprehensive study of current grade distributions before any cap is enacted so the final policy can be calibrated to Stanford-specific norms. Small seminars and independent resource courses must be exempted entirely since percentage caps in a ten-person class are statistically and practically nonsensical. 

The window is open and Harvard has blinked. Stanford does not need instructions from Cambridge to protect the value of its own degree, but the faculty must decide whether the credentials we leave here with are worth defending.

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A year of milestones: Stanford athletics in review

The Cardinal secured five national championships — two in the NCAA — bringing the streak to fifty years straight of NCAA championships this year.

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50 years.

That was the number that defined Stanford athletics in 2025-26.

When men’s gymnastics captured the NCAA championship in April, the Cardinal extended its unprecedented streak of winning at least one NCAA team championship to 50 consecutive academic years, the longest active streak in college sports.

Yet the 2025-26 season was about more than another national title. Stanford’s second year in the ACC featured conference championships, national title runs and historic individual performances, while also highlighting the challenges facing college athletics in an era shaped by the transfer portal and conference realignment.

The year began with Stanford women’s soccer establishing itself as one of the nation’s premier programs. In just its second ACC season, the Cardinal won both the ACC regular-season and tournament championships before advancing to the national championship match. Stanford finished 21-2-2 overall and reached the College Cup for the third consecutive season before falling to Florida State in the NCAA final.

Women’s soccer was not the only Stanford team competing on the national stage.

Women’s artistic swimming won their second consecutive national MPSF championship in March — their longest national championship streak since their four-peat from 2005-2008.

Men’s gymnastics once again demonstrated why it has become one of the NCAA’s premier dynasties. The Cardinal won its sixth NCAA championship in seven seasons, defeating Oklahoma to claim the program’s 11th national title. The victory secured Stanford’s 50th consecutive academic year with an NCAA team championship and reinforced the university’s reputation as the nation’s most successful athletic department.

Women’s water polo secured the MPSF national championship soon after men’s gymnastics took home the win. This is their fourth MPSF national championship in the last five years.

Women’s golf added another chapter to the legacy in May. Stanford captured the NCAA championship, giving the athletic department multiple NCAA team titles for the 12th consecutive year and pushing the Cardinal’s total to 139 NCAA team championships.

The Cardinal took home more hardware in women’s sailing in mid-May, winning the ICSA Women’s Fleet Race National Championship for the fourth consecutive year. Men’s sailing took second. Just last week, women’s rowing earned another conference championship for the Cardinal before winning a second-place NCAA title in the championships.

The success was not limited to championship-winning teams.

Across Stanford athletics, programs continued adjusting to life in the ACC. Women’s soccer immediately established itself as a conference power, while teams across the department faced increased travel demands and new rivalries resulting from the move away from the Pac-12. The ACC transition continued to reshape schedules, recruiting and the overall student-athlete experience during the university’s second season in the conference.

Not every storyline was positive. Stanford women’s basketball endured another difficult season and entered the offseason amid significant roster turnover and questions about the program’s future direction. The challenges facing one of Stanford’s most historically successful programs served as a reminder that sustained excellence is never guaranteed, even on The Farm.

Still, the broader picture remained familiar.

Stanford finished the year the same way it has finished nearly every year for the last half-century: competing for championships. Women’s soccer played for a national title. Men’s gymnastics won one. Women’s golf added another. Numerous other programs reached NCAA tournaments and championship events.

As college athletics continues to change through conference realignment, Stanford’s formula has remained remarkably consistent. Fifty years after the streak began with men’s water polo in 1976, the Cardinal once again proved its ability to compete at the highest level across dozens of sports.

For Stanford athletics, 2025-26 was not merely another successful season. It was a reminder that even amid unprecedented change, the pursuit of championships remains central to the university’s athletic identity.

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Students share how they celebrate AAPI culture

To commemorate May's Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, students shared how they honor their culture.

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To commemorate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPI), which ended in May, students shared how they celebrate and honor their culture at Stanford.

Bella Kim ’29

On Memorial Day, I went to Mega Mart, a Korean grocery store in East Palo Alto, because I miss my parents’ cooking. My friend and I raided the prepared food section for gimbap, meat and vegetables rolled in rice and seaweed, like Korean cooked sushi. We also bought pajeon, a savory scallion pancake that my mom makes at home. Strolling through familiar aisles of packaged ramen and Korean snacks made me feel closer to home and my family. 

Sanya Gupta ’30

I’ve always been self conscious about how I make chai. To be fair, everything about it is technically wrong — I don’t use any sugar, my tea to milk ratio is too tea-heavy and, perhaps worst of all, I use oat milk. Blasphemy, truly. Of course, I love my chai, bubbling with flavours of elaichi, saffron, daal chini and long, but I find myself holding my breath, expecting to be critiqued every time I make it for anyone else. I hear my mom in my panicked “Wait, you can add sugar if you want” or “It’s not my best work.” There is nothing quite as warm as my mom’s heart reacts to my little cups of chai in the family group chat.

Akash Shah ’26

I find yoga — and the philosophy that accompanies it — endlessly fascinating. At YogiFest, we explore the depth of the impact of each practice, from the simple warmup exercises at the beginning of the session to the complex strength or balance poses at the end. The power of a single deep breath, for example, cannot be overestimated. With the capacity to almost immediately decrease physiological parameters such as blood pressure, heart rate and even blood cortisol (the stress hormone) levels, pranayam instantaneously kickstarts the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for the “rest and digest” relaxation functions of the body. 

At Stanford, finding appealing ways to practice yoga, pranayam, or meditation can be difficult. We feel like we are not flexible enough to do yoga, can’t do pranayam with friends or don’t have the discipline for meditation. But as many scholars around the world have been saying for ages — with Western medicine slowly arriving at the same conclusion — mindfulness practices embedded within our daily lives can do wonders to our mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. At YogiFest, we not only practice all of yoga, pranayam and meditation, but we get to do it together, with a community of students from all over campus. We get to talk about the philosophy as well as the physiology. And my favorite part: we get to hang out with cool people and make new friends while we enjoy free On Call drinks at the end of every class!

As we wrap up this academic year, I challenge you to take just ten deep, abdominal breaths throughout the day for the next week. I encourage you to incorporate some meditation or pranayam practice into your day-to-day life. And I invite you to join us at our next YogiFest class.

Chloe Shannon Wong ’28

My mom speaks Mandarin, and my dad speaks Cantonese — both are very fluent in English, so growing up, that was the only language I knew. When I was little, Mom tried valiantly to teach me. But I was an impatient student, and the older I got, the more Chinese fell by the wayside. After 19 years of only knowing very rudimentary Chinese (if even that!), when it came time to fulfill Stanford’s language requirement at Stanford, picking Chinese was a no-brainer. Three quarters in, I still find myself struggling with new vocab and the tone system. But it has been undeniably rewarding to finally connect to my culture through language. I am someone who decides her classes five minutes before enrollment — yet I know Chinese will always be on the list.

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‘Gird your loins’: The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a sobering sequel

"Though filled with divine clothing and funny at times, this movie is not the lighthearted, nostalgic escape some might be looking for," writes Loquet.

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In her column “What I’ve Scene Lately,” Chloe Loquet delivers witty, opinion-forward reviews of the latest in film and television.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

Let’s set the scene. Freshman Spring has surreptitiously sprung, meaning it’s the season for cerulean skies and — though far from groundbreaking — resurfaced floral fabrics. There I was, standing in the famed Vogue closet on FashionX’s trek to New York, gaping at the very wall of shoes I’d dreamed of since watching “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006) for the first time. Even then, long before I could spell Gabbana, my seven-year-old self was swept away by the glitzy outfit montages and glamorous allure of it all. 

The trip was a haute whirlwind: Chanel, LVMH, Condé Nast. For five days, I felt like I had won the golden ticket; only these tours had Wintour instead of Wonka, and Coco instead of cocoa. As a travelator inched me toward my flight home, the sadness of leaving was washed away by ads for “The Devil Wears Prada 2” (2026) plastered across every airport monitor. I would get to continue my Andy Sachs Spring back in Palo Alto!

On opening day at the Landmark Aquarius downtown, I was the first in my seat, silently reminiscing about all the times Miranda’s iconic quips got me through sick days home from school. One by one, people trickled in until every seat was taken and then some — that’s right, three people stood at the back of the theater to watch the sequel that had taken my entire lifetime to be made. Before the lights dimmed, I realized my excitement had been accompanied by some nervousness: the kind you feel seeing your high school friends after a long time apart, hoping that you will slip perfectly back into each other’s lives but cognizant that time, and life, may have other plans. 

The film picks up 20 years after Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) left behind “the job a million girls would kill for” as assistant to the formidable Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor in chief of premier fashion publication Runway. Now a celebrated investigative journalist, Andy realizes she is the last of a dying breed when the newspaper where she works goes under. Ironically, Miranda finds herself in a similar situation. Facing a PR scandal threatening Runway’s survival, she must fend off corporate pressures in a brave new world where tastemaking institutions now teeter on the edge of relevance. The two reunite in a narratively clunky fashion when Andy is hired to restore the magazine’s credibility.

From the start, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” serves anything but quiet nostalgia, leaning into a style of self-aware maximalism with its engineered references to the first film. The fabulous Nigel (Stanley Tucci) returns as both jester and heartbeat. Emily (Emily Blunt) is back too, with her unapologetically chic attitude, only now she wields power over Miranda in her senior position at Dior, one of the luxury advertisers Runway must bow to in order to remain afloat.

Despite familiar faces, this is a bizarro version of the original’s 2006 New York. A now mature, stylish Andy needs no makeover. Miranda must hang her own coat (gasp) and fly coach, middle seat no less (l’horreur). The Elias-Clarke high-rise offices have shed their mysterious exclusivity. Instead of calling shots among designers and editors, Miranda takes orders from tech billionaires and McKinsey consultants who make calls on profitability, not taste. This evolution is an inherently darker universe that directly explores a changing media landscape in the age of AI, the attention economy and consolidation.

Though filled with divine clothing and funny at times, this movie is not the lighthearted, nostalgic escape some might be looking for. Instead, it felt more like an honest meditation on the current state of the arts, culture, media and power. The characters have grown, and so too has the world we all now live in. Walking out of the theater, I felt dissatisfied, despite having gone in expecting a fair deal of cringiness — which there absolutely was — and knowing the bar was set at astronomical heights.

I imagine the reason many people turned out for “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” the reason a throwback fashion comedy was able to gross over half a billion dollars, is because viewers (including myself) were desperate for a return to the simplicity of the shimmery 2000s fashion world. What we got was a sobering reminder that the fantasy was just that — a shadow of what art, the fashion industry and culture once were and may never be again. After sitting with “The Devil Wears Prada 2” for some time, I realized that I wasn’t disappointed because I expected a sequel better than the first, but because the magical world that had been my safe space has been ravaged 20 years later by the very forces I live with everyday: venture capital, artificial intelligence and the death of taste at the hands of social media algorithms.

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