On Wednesday, former Stanford sailing coach John Vandemoer was sentenced to one day in prison and six months of home confinement for his role in the recent college admissions scandal. Judging by the headlines, there is outrage in America over this “slap on the wrist.” “Stanford Coach Avoids Prison in Admissions Scandal,” announced The New…
Last week an article in The Economist described the worst punishment our society has ever been able to conceive of – solitary confinement. It described a prison in Texas in which Tony Medina, “spends 23 hours inside a concrete box measuring 7 feet by 11 feet.” He is forbidden any human contact. Guards pass trays…
Last quarter, I wrote an article urging a serious reconsideration of the upcoming renovations to Green Library. To recap, the renovations are the result of a $25 million gift from Harold Hohbach, a patent lawyer and real estate developer who passed away in 2017. The newly designed wing will work with the Silicon Valley Archives…
There is no photograph that is not a failure. To take a photo of something (and not another thing) belies an implicit ethical relationship to that thing; to be seen is to be loved. The implicit goal of the photograph is to depict a portion of reality in exacting detail, to reproduce the world as…
The 2018 midterms shook our Congress to its core. The U.S. House of Representatives elected a record number of women, with at least 90 female candidates making their way to Washington, D.C. in January of this year. In my conversation with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at the Stanford Women in Business Executive Leadership Series this past…
Two years ago, a debate was thrown on this campus about whether or not to repeal Obamacare. At that time, I wrote the following: “At the time of this event, only 17 percent of Americans support the latest version of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the GOP replacement for Obamacare. While 17 percent doesn’t…
The Campus Workers’ Rights Coalition and members of CSRE35SI: An Introduction to Labor Organizing have put together a series of profiles drawn from both archival and current interviews with workers on-campus to highlight both the struggles that workers at Stanford face and the resilience that they bring to the work they do. Campus workers often…
The essential sociality of flakiness Talk of flakiness may appear trifling, but it is talk in which we engage nonetheless, and it is telling that we have a word for it. We evidently find some value in identifying certain actions and calling them as “flaking,” and this reveals something of our values more broadly. By…
