The senior column comes with an inevitable sense of pressure. Even if hardly anyone reads what I write, it will sit on my conscience whether I managed to faithfully reflect the highs and lows of the last four years. Part of that internal tension, I suspect, comes from typical self-absorption. But there is likewise a motivation to answer my peers and mentors who urged me to write this piece, many of whom I admire and to whom I am indebted. The Daily has been a revitalizing force in my life and helped me clarify who my allies are and what I consider important. The least I can do is engage in this disquisition.
In fact, I filled out the interest form to join The Daily during the second semester of my senior year of high school — ironically while I was supposed to be paying attention in English class. It was that important. From the brief interactions I’d had with Daily staff and the handful of Derek Chen’s ’21 M.S. ’22 Research Roundups that I’d inhaled from beginning to end, it was already clear that something in the plain-sense commitment of this newspaper to inform the community without fear or favor spoke to me on a deep level, and I was ready to dive head-first into college journalism.
Sure, in terms of academics, I was set to begin my Stanford journey as we all do: studying computer science. And yet, an unquestionable command of linked lists or stochastic gradient descent would be peanuts in the greater context of life. That, I believed and still believe, goes to the human touch. And toward the end of high school, I further learned that working in our student newspaper, The Parker Weekly, could provide a profound channel for curious minds to marry a breadth of interests while fostering community around the shared goal of producing stacks of content. Whether you’re an engineer or a reporter or an editor or whatever else, no department exists on a discrete, isometric island here. No, I could interact with data scientists, marketers, graphic designers, writers and photographers. I could interview fascinating people, truly hone the skill of listening and help my community by asking questions. It was exhilarating not to feel pigeonholed into where I could go or what I could do or with whom I could speak.
But of course, in the end, what really pushed me over the edge into college journalism was not the internalization of a set of virtues. Actually, it was that I found it highly amusing — too amusing — to imagine swapping the word “Parker” with “Stanford” and “Weekly” with “Daily,” and that everything else would be the same, even as my senior year of high school sputtered to a close while all of the Admit Weekend programming got punted into cyberspace.
You might’ve guessed from my tone that I’m bitter about never having an in-person Admit Weekend. Maybe you’ve heard it before, so I won’t bore you with a recap of the state of the world as the tulips bloomed in 2020. I will say, however, that The Daily’s nimble shift to an all-digital publishing model (about which I learned on a Zoom webinar) convinced me that I’d have a greater opportunity to contribute in a manner that would be, at least functionally, as meaningful as before that cursed year began its descent down the tubes.
Besides, immersing myself in the dream worlds of The Daily, even if prematurely, provided a welcome distraction from languishing days in Chicago like June 2, 2020. That morning, my father and I rolled out of the garage to run some errands and were met by a formation of Humvees and armed National Guardsmen, lining the streets. So that put an end to our ambitions for the day. It was fine, though, because I later learned that the store we wanted to visit had already been looted clean, and there was not much left to buy anyway. We couldn’t cross the Chicago River past Madison Street either, as the city had lifted the bridge, presumably in an effort to limit the spread of rioters who had already smashed in the windows of the buildings in my field of view around the South Loop, several times over. “Actually, you’ll be glad you lived through this,” my father said. “You’ll have stories to tell.”
Screw that. What was once the Magnificent Mile was now a grotesque assortment of boarded-up, half-recognizable rectangular prisms. I thought back to the thousands of times over the years that my mother, father, sister and I had traversed that asphalt for one reason or another. Too many times between pickup from elementary school and whatever was next on the itinerary, my father would contrive word problems on the way home or from one activity to another. (“If I decide to buy 20 gallons of gas at this station at a unit price of $4.11 versus $4.23 at the other station, how much do I save?”)
These cityscapes were now exceedingly difficult to look at in such a degraded state. So, I drafted an email to the editor-in-chief of The Daily. In a breathtakingly gratuitous cascade of overwrought prose, I explained that I had “expected an invitation to the Slack workspace but never received one.” Send. In retrospect, it was a convoluted way to cope, and since the leadership had recently changed, I mistakenly addressed the email to Holden Foreman ’21, who had since stepped down from his role. Five days later: “Hi Matthew … My name is Charlie Curnin and I’m the new editor-in-chief at the paper, taking over after Holden,” his reply read. Whoops. At the same time, the general sense of confusion in the world, in addition to my youth, afforded me the grace to make these errors and learn, instead of feeling that I needed to have an answer for everything. Not to mention, this disastrously disjointed start to college did make for some hilariously unlikely sequences of events on any given day. Aug. 8, 2020, might have started with a trip to the driving range with my father, and it ended with a call with a history professor about his newly won Hundley Award.
In the intervening years, what followed at The Daily was a thrilling adventure across disciplines that interwove both an intellectual and emotional exploration. And amid my reporting, I began to overcome a shapeless sense of grief that had been lodging itself deeper into my heart since my threadbare, remote introduction to higher education in September 2020.
Writing is its own reward, and writing at The Daily has been a dream come true. Sure, I consider my time at Stanford far from ideal, but I tried not to let the grass grow under my feet. In the span from spring 2020 to fall 2021, I’d later realize, I helped my sister move in or out of three separate apartments in three different states before I got to set foot in California. Something about that felt metaphysically insulting, as if some deity had facetiously arranged my fate because a carnival barker had said it was a good idea.
My father tells me that God has a good sense of humor, but I’m not so sure about that. I started to feel like I was being left behind. Without The Daily, I might have stayed that way. Thankfully, it is part of The Daily’s enduring culture to look out for aspiring journalists and provide access to professional opportunities. Erin Woo ’21, then editor-in-chief of The Daily, put the Texas Tribune’s summer 2021 political reporting fellowship on my radar, and I never looked back. Since God has a “good sense of humor,” I ended up in the engineering fellowship that summer at the Tribune rather than the reporting one, but in the end, I felt as much a part of the action as anyone else.
Thereafter, when I shifted into more editorial roles at The Daily, I worried that leadership responsibilities would hinder my benefit of the writerly life. While I had fewer bylines on average, I was just as active, if not more, in the content production process, and I found that I had more of a runway for my in-depth series on the Marriage Pact and other enterprise reporting. More significantly, however, the experience of fostering community, cultivating ideas and watching the development of the work and character of student journalists under my leadership has been endlessly rewarding. Some of my proudest moments have been those that resulted from simple gestures of the kind that my elders made to me when I was getting started in The Daily.
The Daily has kept me up a lot of nights, but it is meaningful and therapeutic work, and when hanging out with other staffers, I was able to find a community from time to time and maybe even a vague, diffuse sense of fulfillment, which eventually crystallized into a mission. Indeed, it may have been that the work was just what so many of us had been desperately seeking: something meaningful into which I could pour my whole heart. It is a blessing to be needed, and it is a blessing to have something to contribute.
In my most recent positions as managing editor, chief technology officer and data director, I prioritized spending time with new student journalists looking for a foothold. I helped them with their internship applications, taught them how to make web scrapers, answered their questions and provided pitches that I thought would complement their strengths. Again, it’s small, but I suppose you never truly know how far one of those gestures might actually go. I, for one, still remember how at the first news desk meeting that Athena Xue ’24 and I ran, my desk editors from freshman year stopped by to watch us and wish us luck. That eliminated the remaining self-doubt in my mind that day. Thank you, Esha and Ujwal, for believing in me when I did not believe in myself. And thank you to those on the Board, at The Washington Post and in the Department of Communication. I’m about to graduate and leave Stanford, but please remember that this is not a goodbye.
In any case, I was reminded that the goodbye is a tricky, if not ill-defined, art form the other day. I came across a heartfelt video on YouTube paying tribute to the legacy of the iconic Audi R8 supercar as it rolls off the lot for the last time and leaves way for the German automotive manufacturer’s shift toward electrification.
Yes, this analogy is a stretch, but that car, like people I’ve known, has a funny way of reappearing in my life, with uncanny periodicity, punctuating the moments that have shaped my understanding of the arrow of time. I remember how the R8 made a grand entrance into my childhood in 2006. It served as a marker in the flow of time, reminding me of significant moments and milestones, much like a song or fragrance that takes you back. Its inclusion in popular media over the years boosted its status and secured a spot in my colorization of lived experience; for instance, its appearance as the vehicle mode for the Decepticon Sideways in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” on the cover of “Forza Motorsport 3” and as Tony Stark’s personal ride in “Iron Man” showcased its futuristic, achingly idealistic appeal.
The R8 is a classic example of a halo car, a sensational vehicle that an automaker creates not to drive significant sales volume, but to showcase its ultimate capabilities in design, performance, technology and luxury across its entire lineup. And it sure did have a good run. It could not last forever, though. The decision to retire the R8 signals, in part, a broader industry trend toward electric and hybrid vehicles. I even alluded to it in these pages two years ago, concurrently lamenting the end of the Aston Martin V12 Vantage, which I believed would mark the end of 12-cylinder engines. It turns out that I was slightly premature in my assessment. To my great delight, I know that at least one person read that article, a fellow student who approached me at the Lorry I. Lokey Stanford Daily Building with some feedback just weeks later, on the night of our Vol. 261 Banquet: “Yeah, I liked the piece, thought it was nice. You’re wrong.”
With disturbed fascination, I asked him to tell me more about his reasoning. We ended up trading perspectives on the evolution of modern powertrains and what the next V12 to hit the market could be. Lamborghini was due for a new flagship model right around the corner, I conceded, but surely they would not be so audacious as to go for a whole 12 cylinders — and then those rascals really went for 12 cylinders. Naturally aspirated, with an electric motor on top of that. As if on cue, Lamborghini released the announcement video on March 29, 2023, almost exactly 12 months afterward.
Lamborghini Revuelto – From Now On
“Have you seen it?” I asked my father on the phone the next day. “It’s like a spaceship. And it can be yours for an eye-watering $890,000.” With an undoubtedly modern design, it also respects decades of tradition in craftsmanship, even hearkening back to the poise of the engineering marvels in the Bugatti Veyron and its successor, the Chiron. Inevitably, though, with each passing day, the cars that I grew up revering are more akin to the final generation of cassette tapes — exorbitant, sophisticated, bare.
That’s Father Time, I suppose.
Stanford has a history of holding graduation ceremonies on Father’s Day. It was the day that my father graduated from Stanford in 1986, and it was the day that my grandfather died 19 years later in 2005, which will soon be 19 years in the past relative to today. I realize that my grandfather’s death was as close in time to my father’s graduation from Stanford as it was to mine.
The ceremony of it all didn’t mean much to me until I realized that a couple of weeks ago. I suppose that I had been minimizing the significance of Commencement as a defense mechanism resulting from the learned behavior of anticipating that it will go wrong or get pulled at the last minute.
Now, I will graduate from Stanford, ever perceiving its idyllic aesthetic yet knowing it as a plaster cast whose haunting emptiness mocks me if I stare for too long, but somewhere deep inside I do recognize the gravity of this moment as framed in the context of so many moments that came before this one. I recognize that, of the unfathomable number of possible combinations of family members, circumstances, chance events and choices, I ended up with the ones I have, despite deserving none of them.
I am not sentimental, and I am certainly not nostalgic, at least not in the standard sense of the word. It is possible that somewhere inside I feel anemoia, which is to say that I occasionally yearn for a past that never happened. I yearn for the friendships I did not develop in Casper Quad, the New Student Orientation I did not attend, the subject material with which I did not fall in love. Instead, the idea of writing this column made my stomach churn a little. Yet the places that I occupied on this campus will be handed over to new occupants, as if this land were facilitating the transfer of all that is eternally evanescent. And something in that thought brings a smile to my face. Maybe even one day, with the help of Father Time, I may look back on these days and laugh, and that will be good enough.