Skimming the superlatives Esa-Pekka Salonen has earned from critics and collaborators, it would be easy to mistake the San Francisco Symphony music director designate for a Silicon Valley tech visionary. “Disrupter,” The New York Times declared when he landed his post. “Technological innovator,” the SF Symphony’s own press release boasts. When I first read his…

•

Classical music presents itself as anomalous in a world dense with stories. Much of classical music, including symphonies like those of Mahler’s, cannot be well or fully described in narrative form, for the simple fact that there is no language involved.

•

Stanford students, alongside their colleagues at peer institutions, have too readily surrendered ownership over forging our lives in the mold of excellence, whatever that may mean for each individual.

•

“STANFORD THREATENS LIMITS ON NUMBER OF CS MAJORS,” the sensationalist all-campus email newsletter The Fountain Hopper (better known as The FoHo) alerted readers in fall 2016, during my freshman year. There wasn’t a lot of substantiating evidence beyond the fear mongering title, and the information was later revealed to be false. Nevertheless, a panic ensued in my freshman dorm, although most of my friends were a ways away from even thinking about declaring.

•

Two weeks ago, the newly appointed faculty advisors of Cardinal Conversations sent a campus-wide email inviting students to provide feedback on a proposal to “reboot” last year’s inaugural speaker series. Cardinal Conversations generated considerable backlash last year, inciting protests against the invitation of Charles Murray and more general critiques of the stupefying lack of diversity…

•

Whether you saw it first broadcasted on our mailing lists by concerned citizens, read it in the FoHo or heard it from friends over dinner, virtually everyone on campus knows the statistic: Fewer than 1 in 5 eligible Stanford students voted in the last midterm election. Stanford’s voting habits are uniquely bad: We vote at…

•

Judging the intellectual value and rigor of courses of study through a blood, sweat and tears quantification leads to a learning environment in which grades are placed at the center of the educational mission.

•

Blogger Mike Gene suggests that intellectual honesty involves publicly acknowledging when we are wrong, demonstrating a commitment to critical thinking, and questioning our own assumptions and biases. This approach to education needs to be adopted inside the classroom and out.

•

How do we reconcile the difficult problem of being attracted to what should be reviled?

•

Psychological tricks manipulated to maximize profit are not new, but the amount of data companies have accumulated is — now more than ever, information is power.

•

The successor of exploitative enterprises, like the East India Company, lives on in the modern-day tobacco industry.

•

Such a liberal defeat was all the more demoralizing because progressivism was assumed to be a given. It stopped being an ideal that had to be strived; instead, it became perceived as inevitable with the passive passage of time.

•

When it comes to ideas that are really “out there,” it is natural to require extensive and well-reasoned rationale. Unfortunately, people rarely stick around long enough for women to achieve this task.

•

Nationalism, not only in the sense in which alt-right enthusiasts have exploited the concept in this election cycle, but as a larger political system of sovereign statehood, increasingly feels like an unfulfilling solution to timeless questions of governance. The idealist within me screams, “we can do better!”

•

As much as voters have desperately recused themselves of blame this election season by lamenting about their disjointed relationship with the “establishment,” we must engage in introspection about our own complicity in the loss of intellectualism in political conversation.

•

Especially consequential for the advancement of social justice is Proposition 62, which seeks to end the death penalty. Unless we are to be complicit with the systematic killing of the dispossessed, or even merely support the codified ability for our government to have such a tool at its disposal, then ending capital punishment is a critical first step.

•