The Stanford Daily Magazine Vol. I Issue 5 (05.07.17)

The Stanford Daily M aga z i n e VOLUME I

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Issue 5

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APRIL 7, 2017

THE PRIVILEGE TO FAIL Stanford students, startup ideas, and the socioeconomic status needed to pursue them p. 6

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Contents

The Stanford Daily

Volume I, Issue 5 April 7, 2017

MAGAZINE

OPINIONS 04 The Failing, no Good Stanford Daily Jasmine Liu and Tashrima Hossain sound off on the role of the media in Trumpland.

News 06 STARTUPS An exploration of what it takes to try, fail and, if you’re fortunate, fail again in Silicon Valley’s startup culture.

LIGHTROOM Photographer Angela Luo explores shape and color in Sacramento — p. 24

Arts & Life 10 NEMEROV On the cult of Stanford’s enigmatic, Alexander Nemerov.

14 ASIANS on TV The rise of AsianAmerican talent on Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services.

SPORTS 17 TRIPLE THREAT Erica McCall, Karlie Samuelson and Briana Robson could not be more different, but, as a unit, they carry the Stanford women’s basketball team. the grind 20 Me, an intellectual How acting overly educated and sophisticated can be a legitimate barrier to communication and progress.

22 JUSt PICK ONE Priya Satia, a Stanford history professor, interrogates the concept of interdisciplinary majors.

26 The introvert’s Dilemma Do introverts have to become introverted to excel at Stanford? Emily Schmidt on this and more.

Creative 28 SCRIPT An excerpt from Katie Adams’ black-as-night medical satire.

24 Photo gallery Photographer Angela Luo explores shape and color in Sacramento.

HUMOR 31 PATRICIDE Tyler Clark assumes his predecessor’s post.

32 CROSSWORD Crossword designer David Steinberg’s latest creation.

On the cover: Illustration by Victor Xu 3

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OPINIONS @Stanford_Daily

The tense relationship between press outlets and the Trump administration has attracted a great deal of attention, especially among journalists. For this edition of the magazine, The Daily asked two opinions columnists to discuss how they see the state of the media in the Trump era. Bigly.

The media’s difficulties under both Obama and Trump @Jasmine Liu

D

onald Trump has a notoriously antagonistic relationship with the media. In the past weeks, his administration has excluded major media organizations from press briefings, called the press “the enemy of the American people” and rejected objective truth in favor of “alternative facts.”

In contrast, Obama regularly lauded the press, addressing reporters and affirming in his last press conference that having a free press “is part of how this grand experiment in self-government works…

America needs you and democracy needs you.” The last president cracked charming dad jokes yet remained comedically youthful and relevant at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner; the current one has renounced these

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formalities, instead purposefully making himself the object of theatrical entertainment through platforms like Twitter.

While Trump’s fury with the media may be unrivaled in recent years, it may be surprising to many that hostility with the media was the norm for the Obama administration. Variously, journalists complained that the Obama administration was “one of the most secretive,” “the least transparent,” and a “closed door.” While we might find it convenient to dismiss Trump’s contentious relationship with the press as another arena of Trump’s disagreeable irrationality, it’s not so easy to do the same for Obama’s troubled interactions with the media.

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates open governance, released a piece last September with a list of indicators to evaluate a presidential administration’s transparency.

Among those highlighted were Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) compliance, media access, and the number of press conferences. On all metrics, Obama’s administration faced abundant criticism

during his years in office. FOIA requests permit citizens and foreigners to impel the government to release government records, unless the government cites an exception — for example, in the case that disclosing such records would jeopardize national security. The Associated Press revealed in 2015 that the Obama administration set a record for withholding the most FOIA requests, claiming exceptions a grand total of 554,969 times.

It also had the highest reversal rate of any administration. For those requests that were denied, on appeal, a third were acknowledged to be rejected on at least partially faulty grounds.

In terms of media access, grievances abounded. Former Obama spokesman Reid Cherlin pointed out that as early as the 2008 campaign, “senior advisers made a virtue, even a show, of shrugging off press criticism,” instead opting to connect with voters directly through email and social media. Press conferences were rarely productive. Yahoo!

News interactive poked fun at the 9,486 times former press secretary Jay Carney evaded substantively answering tough questions during press briefings. In late 2013, a frustrated press corps bombarded Carney with questions and complaints about lack of access in a tense confrontation during a press briefing over the administration’s lack of transparency in comparison with the Bush administration. All in all, the Columbia Journalism Review wrote that research that incorporated all official exchanges between the Obama administration and the press corps revealed “a White House

determined to conceal its workings from the press, and by extension, the public.”

It wouldn’t be fair to assign blame exclusively to the Obama administration, though. During the hostile exchanges between Carney and the press corps, Carney made a reasonable request: He implored the reporters in the room to consider the massive changes incurred by the development of the internet. In responding to accusations that the administration deliberately avoided being held accountable by the press, Carney defensively argued that “what is never raised in op-eds or in other venues… is [sic] fundamental transformations in the media of which we and other institutions simply are participants.” Obama, wellloved by young people, was hyper-aware of these trends during his presidency.

What were passed off as benign stunts on social media then are symptomatic of the larger ills of the fractured relationship between our leaders and the media, triggered by the thoughtless shortchanging of real journalism for catchy tweets.

The internet has fundamentally altered the relationship between the president, the press, and the people. While the president’s personality has become more visible, his power has been diluted by the decreased control he has in projecting a coherent narrative on political issues. Surely, the president has access to tools never at his disposal in the past to craft his own image. Paradoxically, however, almost instantaneous dissent has weakened the possibility for authoritative figures to “control a story.” As soon as a headline is public, responses

ranging from the creation of a hashtag or a reaction video can gain traction and reach an audience of tens of millions of people in days. A White House staff’s capabilities to shape its presentation of an event to the public are limited once a sentence fragment summary of a particular news story has been pinged to every American smartphone. When original facts are too bland and everything is a slight derivative on objective truth, people lose their grip on reality.

In turn, communication between the president and press has become increasingly disjointed. In shifting away from conventional forms of communication, Obama’s administration abandoned an outmoded, outcompeted vehicle for relaying information to the people. The press has similarly adjusted its approach to accommodate the types of information people expect and consume. The CJR documents at length the dysfunctionality present at press conferences, where journalists have adopted a tactic of repeatedly posing the same questions to provoke a reaction instead of attempting to elicit real information. The preference for histrionics over substance is destructive. On both ends, changes in media consumption have instigated both the government and the press to disengage.

Second, media coverage has gravitated towards an obsession with controversial short-term issues at the cost of more important issues that just aren’t as sexy. In a world reigned by leaderboards of different sorts — most shared, most liked, most read — social media has become too democratic. Journalism has fallen victim to tyranny of the majority. Questions regarding the banal inequalities of everyday life that must be addressed by leaders in government simply will not be pertinent enough to the rapidly moving pace of life with social media. While to differing extents this has always been the case, social media encourages instant gratification. Which is a more jarring headline — “Number of poor living in high-poverty areas on an upward trend for second decade in a row,” or “5 ways to impeach Trump”?

Pressing, current issues are important, but they should not divert energy from reporting on initiatives for the long haul.

The CJR points out that increasing homelessness, child poverty in the U.S., and an important torture report were all neglected in favor of “breaking news.”

Obama developed one approach in response to the changing dynamics of the diffusion of information from Washington D.C. through the media to the people;

Trump has taken a path that is essentially different in some ways and quite similar in others. Obama was measured in his various conflicts with the press, while Trump is upfront about his radical break from the media establishment. While receiving nearly $2 billion in free media coverage during his campaign, Trump shamelessly bashes the “media establishment” as a uniform group of individuals. In this manner, Trump has successfully taken advantage of cable news’ predilection for catchy headlines while positioning himself as an anti-establishment savior.

In dealing with their ruptured relationships with the press, though, both have yearned to create more direct channels with the people they govern, forging their own distinctive voices unencumbered by diverging perspectives. The media is many things — sometimes reductive, and yes, often biased — but most basically, it is a forum for pluralism, a forum that complicates the one-sided story that the White House pushes.

Ultimately, important similarities can be drawn between Trump and Obama’s approach in communicating with the American people. Both have sidestepped the press and opened direct channels for conveying information with the populace, one more overtly so than the other.

Both do so to avoid confusing their message, one more directly trying to steer clear of criticism than the other. The significant distinction, however, is that Obama resented the changes brought about by the Internet for its tendency to oversimplify, while Trump loathes the complications media attention may bring by introducing facts.

Contact Jasmine Liu at jliu98@ stanford.edu.

The Trumpian Media @Tashrima Hossain

T

he 1924 presidential election was a contest between two voices.

America’s first radio election fostered a sense of intimacy between the candidates and 10 percent of families that owned radios. Known for his mastery of fireside chats, Republican candidate Calvin Coolidge’s high-pitched twang took a seat in living rooms across the country — so much so that he eventually earned the title of the 30th President of the United States.

Decades later, an unknown Catholic

senator faced off against an incumbent.

After an hour-long debate on 74 million TV screens, the handsome underdog became America’s favorite. While those who heard the debate on radio thought Richard Nixon won, the 88 percent of American households that now had televisions thought the newcomer, John F. Kennedy, was the clear victor. Two months later, Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States.

Twice before in the last century, a new medium has transformed elections.

In the 1920s, radio reduced candidates to voices, and in 1960, the introduction of television stressed sound bites, good teeth and an easy manner. 2016 marked the rise of social media, as the “public’s trust in mass media dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history,” with fewer than one in three Americans expressing confidence in the traditional media.

Today, the 45th President of the United States calls the media an “enemy to the people.” As distrust in reporters grows, the 21st- century voter has begun to abandon tried-and-true news outlets in favor of experiencing the election in real time through video streaming, live updates and most of all, social networks.

Despite President Trump’s animosity toward the press, he certainly benefits from its constant attention. While most media did not initially take his candidacy seriously, they offered Trump a significant amount of uncritical air and print time.

Since his rise to power, he has completed more media-grabbing tasks than many presidents do in an entire four-year administration — all the while tweeting about his antics at 6 a.m. to ensure they are featured on the morning news.

Although Trump reaps the benefits of the spotlight, he continues to defy major news outlets. He suggests reporters make up unnamed sources for “fake news,” insults countless political pundits and accuses the press of covering up terrorist attacks. By vilifying the media, Trump has successfully used social media to cut journalists out of the picture.

Removing the intermediate mass media has allowed Trump to control what the audience consumes, reinforce his platform and belittle his critics as illegitimate.

Trump’s manipulation of social media is the lifeblood of his brand. During the presidential campaign, widespread distrust of mass media caused many voters to tune out political television advertising and instead tune in to social media for political awareness. For Trump, who views social media as his own newspaper, the rise of Twitter and Facebook

presents the opportunity to craft an easily popularized presidential brand.

The wide reach of Trump’s campaign affirms American willingness to consume his social media diatribes. Even in the fall of 2015 — an entire year before the election — Trump was mentioned in 6.3 million conversations, three times as many as Hillary Clinton. He was retweeted more than twice as often as Clinton and was most mentioned on Google, Twitter and Facebook. Trump’s online dominance certainly gave his brand a leg up, especially in a society that has grown to reject traditional media.

Trump’s relationship with the news is a paradox: while he has mastered the media to serve to his advantage, he has simultaneously attempted to discredit each of the traditional outlets. In fact, in a recent tweet, Trump lamented that reporters have treated officials from his administration rudely and advised the media that they “will do much better” if they simply be nice. Trump’s delegitimization of the media has resounding effects throughout the United States. Not only has it diminished the credibility of reporters, but it has also injured a bastion of American democracy.

Furthermore, Trump’s war on media has given cover to despots around the world.

Venezuela and Cambodia have recently threatened to expel news outlets that disagree with their political leaders. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Chinese state media outlets have denigrated foreign media as “fake news.” Trump’s animus toward the press has spurred worldwide intimidation of the media.

The media is intended to limit political authority. Indeed, the First Amendment counts on mutual suspicion between the president and traditional news outlets to keep power in check. Though the press is equally as important as the three branches of of government, since the peak of campaign season Trump has engaged in a serious media war.

Twice before in the last century a new medium has transformed elections. In 1924, it was the radio. In 1960, it was the television. In 2017, perhaps it is the election of the 45th President of the United States. The demise of traditional media, and the rise of social media in its place, signals another revolutionary shift in presidential politics. As President Trump’s crusade against the press continues, a sole question arises: What does the Trumpian era of media hold in store?

Contact Tashrima Hossain at thossain@ stanford.edu.

5

The Privilege to Fail.

For startup founders at Stanford, “anti-establishment� and privilege go hand in hand.

A bird guided between pipes with a few snappy turns of the wrist. Virtual assistants hired ondemand. A photo that vanishes in moments, adorned with finger drawings and new effects. An “invention platform” where people vote on their favorite newfangled ideas. A delivery system for doughnuts, coffee, sushi.

For undergraduates at Stanford, the air has become so saturated with startups it’s hard not to choke. To stand out from the slew of projects posted to class pages and requests for app downloads, undergraduate founders have to be zealous, persistent and completely convinced of the sanctity of their ideas. But above all, they must be in a position to risk their academic standing and a shot at a stable income. For some would-be founders at Stanford, taking this risk is a far-flung luxury.

I traced three Stanford-originated ventures from their roots in a world where failure is forgivable to the obstacles that plague them today.

One founder is convinced his app will make it big after several years without profit. Two more see themselves as renegades in a town of fluffy ideas and misguided social good. Another just loves business. They use the words “growth hacking” and “bootstrapping” while embodying the privilege of the bubble they want to disrupt.

Moving on from failure, or not Failure in Silicon Valley — or, less dramatically, a lack of stunning success — doesn’t always lead to the most thrilling stories. (Unless you’re Theranos). Nine out of 10 startups close their doors, some with a spectacular bang, others with a slow and miserable creak.

Over spring break of his sophomore year, Teddy Jungreis ’18 sat in an airport punching out shapes from a foam sheet with a paper clip.

His startup, SolTat, produced foam “tattoos” to wear in the sun, but the Chinese factories that produced the little sticky figures hadn’t punched them out correctly. He couldn’t figure out a faster way of doing it – so he and his cofounder Konner Robison ’18 frantically poked holes around each shape to free them from the

foam sheet.

In fact, Jungreis and Robison poked out almost every shape their company made that spring.

“It was miserable,” Jungreis said. “So that sucked.”

SolTat was constantly untangling snafus.

Early on, they had to fire a money-hungry designer with the help of Robison’s lawyer father.

After that, it took months to get Chinese factories to make their product correctly; Jungreis’s brother happened to be living in Shanghai at the time, but even fluent Chinese couldn’t help the tattoos from coming out warped and wrongly-sized. They didn’t have the pitch or the pricing right and couldn’t get the product into cruise ships, hotels, music festivals or just about anywhere they had hoped.

Still, the important thing was the process.

“That’s really how you grow as an entrepreneur, is just by doing it,” Jungreis said. “You have people who say ‘don’t start a company just to start a company’— I totally disagree with that.”

Jungreis moved on, though he did come to see Stanford students as “cynical about everything.” Meanwhile, Adam Halper, who dropped out of Stanford to start the app Whatsgoodly, is still holding onto hope despite the venture’s lack of profitability.

Whatsgoodly lets users create anonymous polls for “hyperlocal” communities such as fraternities, where the app was born, but has suffered from initial booms of popularity that wear off on college campuses. The app is now marketing itself as an alternative to SurveyMonkey, and recently worked with Silicon Valley Bank (“Actually, fuck it, I think it’s fine,” Halper said after debating whether to share the name).

“If your app’s not gonna be an app like Snapchat, Facebook, with really high retention of users, you have to develop a model that, you know, makes that work regardless,” he said, adding, “That’s the nice thing, every year there’s thousands of new students.”

Whatsgoodly co-founder Chris Sebastian ’17, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, went back to school after a one-quarter absence working on the app. In fact, everyone on the original team besides Halper has since left. Halper attributes this to the “opportunity cost of losing the college experience,” noting that he, at times, particularly misses his fraternity SAE’s social events.

The privilege to fail For some students who hope to found startups, however, the “opportunity cost” is much more immediate: financial insecurity. Halper was able to ask his father, who works in private equity, to provide the starting capital for his venture, and his father also participated in angel round funding last fall.

Students who lack the same resources may find it much tougher to “stay self-funded as long as possible,” per Uber founder Garrett Camp’s advice. According to Romeo Umaña ’19, a low-income, first-generation computer science student and Irving Rodriguez ’16, a machine learning engineer at doc.ai, not having parents who can write the check for the starting capital is just a small part of the problem. Some students need to provide for their families immediately, which often creates enormous pressure to attain stellar grades and land a stable job.

The effects of income level on risk aversion has been well-studied in behavioral economics and psychology — individuals who earn incomes below the poverty line tend to be significantly more risk averse compared to those who are better off.

“It’s not like you have the luxury of saying, ‘If this doesn’t work out, then I can find another means of providing for myself pretty easily, or I have my parents to fall back on, or have some source of wealth to support me while I go through this very risky process,’” Rodriguez said.

At the same time, Rodriguez explained that many low-income or first-gen students have been so focused on education and upward mobility that they have not had a chance to reflect on who they are, what they really want and the path to achieving their ambitions. This sets them apart from peers who have had leisure time and constant encouragement to develop those aspects of themselves. College, in this sense, can be a chance for first-gen students to come into their own.

But as they’re trying to understand their calling and purpose for the first time, as Rodriguez put it, being held up as “model citizens” in their communities back home can be a barrier to breaking out on their own, said Umaña.

“While a first-gen/low income student is out there taking risks, their families may be struggling to put food on the table,” Umaña wrote in an email to The Daily. “All of this is assuming the student would have somewhere to live and at least be self-sustaining, which may not even be the case.”

Other hopeful entrepreneurs may be drowned out by the buzz of white male voices in the Valley. In 2014, 93 percent of California founders were men and 87 percent were white.

Black women startup founders receive on average $36,000 in venture funding while white men receive $1.3 million.

Like Halper, dropouts Axel Ericsson and Zach Lawrence are “bootstrapping” — Valley speak for self-funding — their venture, which they hope will lead to the internet’s decentralization. Holed up in a two-story apartment in downtown Palo Alto, they describe themselves as primarily dedicated to the intellectual pursuit 7

Photos by EDER LOMELI/The Stanford Daily Axel Ericsson (left) and Zack Lawrence (right) dropped out after their sophomore year to work on a startup called Ethereum, which aims to “decentralize the internet.”

of their project, not the potential monetary gain.

Jungreis and Robison’s parents also provided their starting capital, which Jungreis said was “just a little bit of seed money.” They eventually made it into Ron Jon’s Surf Shop on the East Coast and sold out their units, though Jungreis declined to share how much money they made or how many units were sold.

“The money’s not really an issue,” Jungreis said.

Two faces of “anti-establishment” If the four founders have anything in common, it’s a commitment to ideas over income — even if many would challenge them on their ideals.

Whatsgoodly’s founder Adam Halper said he’s still committed to his profitless product because it unearths “uncomfortable truths.” Part of the app’s purpose, especially in the beginning, was dismantling what Halper saw as a troubling Silicon Valley orthodoxy: political correctness.

When interviewed by The Daily Beast, Halper said that he launched the app in hopes of “finding out what is considered good through the silent moderate majority.”

This model led to bullying in the app’s initial stages, most notably of then-sophomore Tess Bloch-Horowitz ’17, who was falsely accused of reporting SAE to the Title IX office for misogynistic jokes. SAE members used the site to make her name “synonymous with tattletale” alongside in-person harassment. Halper noted that Whatsgoodly’s creators have now banned certain words from the app, including the “Nword” and “Jew.” Still, Halper isn’t one to regret: He attributes the company’s early indiscretions to the growing pains of a “scrappy startup” and said that the app’s controversial nature made it easier to go viral. His favorite recent poll on the site was one that asked users if they would agree to receiving a certain amount of money if they 8

knew a random child would die; his team asked another set of users the same question, but changed the word “child” to “African child.”

Another question, “How long should [guys] wait before asking for your [girls’] number?” stratified responses in part by whether female respondents were virgins.

Although Halper may see himself as a renegade, his mission may be less radical than he thinks. This commitment to upending PC culture — or “empowering” people to share their unpopular opinions — has been described as an appropriation of activist rhetoric that paints the wealthy, white male as victimized in college contexts. Whatsgoodly in particular has received notoriety for its role in expelling SAE from Stanford’s campus and its crude language; The Daily Beast went so far as to say the app was “born out of privilege, and laden with classism,” alluding to Halper’s prep school pedigree and his legacy status at Stanford.

More troublingly, the political correctness that Whatsgoodly takes aim at may be cosmetic rather than genuine. Silicon Valley’s dogma of diversity and globalization have always been at odds with its workplace representation, while Uber and Palantir have recently come under fire for sexism and anti-immigrant efforts, respectively.

When pressed on the exclusionary nature of some of Whatsgoodly’s polls, Halper said what matters is who is asking. The question “Would you date a black guy?” for instance, was allowed to remain on the site because it was asked by a black man, although users cannot see anything about the identity of the asker.

He added that the app has an LGBT section and that everyone should feel welcome.

Meanwhile, Ericsson and Lawrence, who dropped out with ambitions of decentralizing the internet, see themselves as revolutionaries in a much different way. They have profound gripes with computer science culture at Stan-

ford, particularly the kind of ventures that Jungreis has tried.

Most ideas that come out of the Valley, they say, are devoid of any intellectual value.

“We’ve gotten super used to the one-hit wonder in CS,” Ericsson said. “There’s some guy in a dorm room doing some piece of code, and the next day everyone starts using it and it becomes super popular, and that’s the company.”

Instead, the would-be juniors aspire to completely restructure the internet. They contrast their plans with the staid interests of most Stanford CS students — machine learning and artificial intelligence. True to the revolutionary impulse that birthed it, the details of the startup are off the record, and what the founders can say is filled with inscrutable tech jargon: It involves building protocols on Ethereum, a platform for blockchain applications.

The current Internet stores most data in a small number of corporations who share users’ personal information amongst themselves, and the blockchain movement hopes to change this.

Its basic function is to store data on a peer-topeer network instead of a client server, which according to Ericsson and Lawrence gives it enormous potential to restore the Internet’s “decentralization.” On blockchain, everything that happens between users — financial transactions, purchases, medical records — is kept accountable through a public ledger.

The ledger is shared between all machines, but users’ personal information is not, meaning that they are safe from “malicious actors” like the government.

For Ericsson and Lawrence, what drives this seemingly esoteric work is not the hope of getting rich quick. In fact, it’s much the opposite: They think that the Valley is headed rapidly in the wrong direction and that it’s on them to save it. Ericsson and Lawrence are rebelling against the politics and conventions of the Digital Age

Photo by RYAN COHEN/The Stanford Daily

at a new level — by taking aim at the Internet itself. Anarcho-capitalism, or the complete absence of government, is the ultimate goal of the blockchain technology movement.

The traditional tech community of Silicon Valley does not support this vision, they say, particularly at Stanford. Instead, machine learning and AI are an easy sell to students because of their “do-gooder” applications.

“You can always frame it in such a way as to be completely apolitical,” Ericsson said. “Oh, we can use this technology to identify cancer or tumors in pictures — no one’s going to tell you, why would you spend time on that?”

But some alums in the very industries that Ericsson frowns on are trying to realize their ideals through their work in a way that he might relate to. Rodriguez of doc.ai, who studied physics as an undergraduate, now works to use machine learning and natural language processing for social good. His main research interest is using machine translation to revitalize indigenous languages in the U.S., and he has genuine hopes that Silicon Valley can lead the world in rethinking urgent social issues.

Yet he too expressed frustration that entrepreneurs like to “put that spin on it, that we’re going to change the world,” and has come to his own conclusions on founders’ intentions.

“A lot of times, for lack of a better word, that’s just bullshit,” he said. “The bottom line is that people want to make money.”

Buying into the Valley Ideating. Design thinking. Leveraging. Sprinting. Pivoting. Buckets. The buzzwords of Silicon Valley make every thought feel like a discovery and every idea feel worthy of pursuit.

At age 12 in Winter Park, Florida, Jungreis sold things he found around the house on a personal eBay account for pocket change. He chose Stanford because of its “entrepreneurship vibe,”

and spent the summer before college devouring startup books and posting company ideas on the Class of 2018 Facebook page. Jungreis believed that Silicon Valley would give him opportunities — that he could make a mark here.

He had imagined SolTat becoming as popular as silly string. People could adorn their arms with the sticky foam shapes and hang out in the sun long enough to get a tan around the shape, creating a “sun tattoo.” The foam shapes would be a staple of Greek life during rush (Jungreis is in Stanford’s Kappa Sigma) and of hipster designs at Coachella. In other words, he saw an opportunity for a fun, throwaway product that people could slap on at the beach.

Jungreis’s venture fits into the Silicon Valley that starry-eyed teens have idealized from the success of Uber, Snapchat and Facebook: He believed wholeheartedly that he had “a good idea,” and that he could “make something that wasn’t there before” — in Valley speak, he was ready for a disruptive sprint.

But when it didn’t turn out perfectly, Jungreis’s vision of the Valley remained largely intact. He believed that the next time could be different. As SolTat stagnated, he founded MarcoPolo with a friend from Kappa Sigma.

The app sought to connect people with similar interests, but it required users’ Bluetooths to be on at all times and kept people’s identities secret. By the time Jungreis and his team made the app more practical, people were over it.

He’ll keep trying.

“It’s not about the idea,” Jungreis said. “The idea can be bad … it’s more about the drive to keep trying it and learning along the way. Just like with anything, it’s like a sport: Practice makes perfect. If you start a couple companies, by the fourth or fifth you’ll probably be pretty good at it.”

This genuine belief in the ideals of Silicon Valley might set Jungreis apart from his anti-

establishment peers, but Halper, Ericsson and Lawrence all expressed much the same zeal for the Valley’s capabilities and the inevitability of their places there. Halper thinks his technology can upend polling, burn down political boundaries and create a network of college campuses.

Ericsson and Lawrence want to reform the internet because they believe in its potential to erase governments and and redefine the way people share, sell, connect and live.

Six years studying and working in the heart of Silicon Valley has taught Rodriguez that the Valley’s two faces of “changing-the-world” and “getting rich” can create murky ground. He hopes that large companies will be more selfreflective about which side they are really prioritizing, particularly when it comes to their effects on local communities and extravagant amenities provided to workers.

“There’s a lot of talented people here — a lot of really smart people — who aren’t bad people,” Rodriguez said. “A difficult component of that [image] is being honest … If we’re going to say we’re helping people, are we actually doing that?”

Honesty and self-examination may be counter-intuitive for more than just the startups who have already made it big. As Halper, Ericsson, Lawrence and Jungreis seek to break the mold — whether that of day-to-day life as a student or the paradigm of Silicon Valley itself — they have relied on privileged beginnings.

Virtuous ideals, Rodriguez says, have to be examined — as does the faith that Silicon Valley’s ideals of social good, risk-taking, creativity and monetary reward come together under a tidy rainbow banner.

For some student founders, the money may not be an issue. But having a “backup plan,” as Rodriguez put it, might just be why they can afford to fail.

Contact Fiona Kelliher at fionak@stanford.edu.

9

Conjuring Dreamscapes a conversation with alexander nemerov, chair of art and art history

By Carlos Valladares

M

ost of Stanford knows the name now — Alexander Nemerov.

He is said not to teach art, but to preach it; he does not deliver lectures, but sermons. Taking on a semi-mythic register for his idiosyncratic lectures, Alexander Nemerov is one of Stanford’s most beloved, confounding and discussed professors.

But this is not his goal. Fame or not fame, the name of his game is art history.

“Teaching is totally humbling,” Professor Nemerov tells me after a long Friday of work.

“At least teaching the way I teach, because you’re just putting yourself out there. I like the challenge of that, and I believe in the passion of it.”

Before landing his current position as Chair of Stanford’s Art and Art History department, Nemerov forged a long and winding path through academia. From 1992 to 2000, he served as an assistant professor (later professor) at Stanford. From 2001 to 2012, he taught and led the art history department at Yale, where, in 2007, he began teaching his now-famous survey class of Western art from the Renaissance

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to the present. It soon became Yale’s most popular class; his final semester there, more than 500 students shopped it, despite a cap of 300 set to accommodate people inside the Yale University Art Gallery where it was held. In 2012, much to the consternation of the Bulldogs, he left Yale to teach again at Stanford.

The first year teaching at Stanford was a tough one.

“It was a really down experience,” Nemerov says. “It was demoralizing, a small class in Annenberg [Auditorium — now torn down]. I remember it being the first day and I couldn’t believe that there were that few people who wanted to take it.

“But overall, my lectures are better here. I work much harder at Stanford. At Yale, I gave lectures twice per week; here, because of the quarter system, I do them three times a week.

“It’s just practice; the more I do them, the better my thought process gets for how to give a lecture.”

Now, his Introduction to Western Visual Art class, Art History 1B — which covers, in a ten-week span, artists as broad and diverse as Giotto, Rembrandt, Goya, Matisse, Salomon,

Pollock and Basquiat — had over 200 students enrolled last fall quarter, not including Palo Alto residents, Continuing Studies members, and random undergraduates curious to hear Nemerov’s freeform, poetic, Agee-like thoughts on art.

It’s been a long time coming to arrive at the Nemerov we see and hear on a weekly basis. Before, he hadn’t the gumption to teach an entire survey course. “The reason I didn’t start teaching the survey course until 2007,” he says, “was cowardice.”

Three crucial experiences changed that line of thinking; the first was his family. “I had kids, and that made life seem much more intense and precious to me.”

The second was reconnecting with his famous relatives: the poet Howard Nemerov (his father) and the photographer Diane Arbus (his aunt).

“As a scholar,” he says, “I began to make contact with the work of my father and my aunt.

For the first time in my life, I looked them in the face in such a way that I was not totally intimidated. I saw clearly and positively that they believed in art religiously, that they were truth-

UDIT GOYAL/The Stanford Daily

tellers, that they weren’t dogmatic. Arbus was trying to see what a human being is, just that, nothing else. And I think my dad was, too.

“That essentially religious conception of being an artist, I suddenly saw, and I thought, ‘Why can’t that be me? Life is short, why not?’”

The third was an affinity for the 40s.

“Writing the Val Lewton book [“Icons of Grief,” a masterful analysis of Lewton’s Bmovie horror films of the 1940s through the films’ supporting actors], I realized that the 40s were incredibly important to me as a time of pathos and loss and permanent destitution in the world. A way of tapping into the deep importance of sadness and melancholy and their connection to history.”

With all of this, Nemerov moved away from traditional art historical work to the kind of offbeat, intuition-based writing for which he is renowned today.

But he is not unaware of the hostility towards his work, which is too frequently impassioned for some.

“A lot of people don’t like what I do,” he says, “because they don’t go to scholarship to have some guy be a good writer. That’s not why they

read it. They’re reading it to find out the facts about what happened, which just seems absurd to me. It seems like a category mistake. It’s almost like I’m an artist and my medium is scholarship.”

Professor Nemerov’s style is quirky, to say the least. His fifty-minute classes straddle the line between lecture and actorly performance. As he struggles for the right words to distinguish Margaret Bourke-White’s eroticism (“the sex appeal of steel”) from Edward Weston’s (“Who knew radishes had so much sex in them?”), he takes lots of generous, natural pauses, looks at the floor with an alternatively meandering and obsessive focus, contorting his body, physically wrestling with a description of a Raphael Jesus stretching His limbs to the heavens. Action helps him find words.

At his employ is a smorgasbord of dazzling rhetorical moves that make his connections all the more convincing. Part of his worldview is considering the world “diachronically” — that is, tracking artistic sensibilities over massive chunks of time, an Old Master tendency popping up in modern form in unexpected ways.

Rothko was Rembrandt, he argues.

One of his pet phrases, the “strong misreading” (taken from the literary critic Harold Bloom), involves seeing an artist as “working through” a previous artist; “strong misreadings” make a past artist’s sensibilities come alive in the strong misreader’s era. So Cy Twombly, in his childlike scrawls and intimate canvas sizes, “strongly misreads” Jackson Pollock’s painterly pirouettes and uncensored expressions of the tortured mind.

Nemerov often takes what he calls “leaps of faith” — placing two items in dialogue that may seem to have nothing to do with each other on the surface. His “leaps of faith” are exactingly researched hunches (never anything as crude as guesswork), that, say, Thomas Eakins’ 1895 painting “Swimming” (a group of boys skinnydipping in a pool of water where once there was a mill, in before-during-after poses that give the painting a cinematic, stop-motion-animation feel) is a precursor to the eerie, halting time seen in the Abraham Zapruder film that captured President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Nemerov argues that a fruitful connection lies in knowing that Jackie Kennedy, an art history major, slept the night before the assassination underneath Eakins’ painting, capturing the

dual senses of time moving forward (the photo time of the naked boys, the cinematic time of the Zapruder film) and one’s presence slowly fading out (the lost mill, the assassinated President).

In the spirit of jazz, he goes on “riffs.” A prime example is the above Kennedy-Eakins comparison, which was a branch of a larger discussion on how the Abstract Expressionist painter Morris Louis best captured the spirit of the Kennedy/Camelot era of the early 1960s.

His riffs are rambling musings, on derelict bits of detail that have nothing and everything to do with the paintings he’s describing. Talking about the myth of late Jackson Pollock, he detours and describes three melodramas by the film director Douglas Sirk in hilarious detail. The riff is constructively indulgent, oddly touching — for it shows the necessity of melodrama, of the kind of writhing, passion-filled emotion (in Pollock’s “Lucifer” and in Sirk’s “Imitation of Life”) that speaks human truths.

These tools converge to produce lightning bolts of insight, compact like a haiku: “Does life get into art, and if so what does it look like?”

“Learning to see is the longest apprenticeship of all the arts.”

“We need not behold a flower for it to grow.”

They are general enough so that an lecture attendee can connect it to his own life, offering a rich multitude of readings. These statements partially solve the problems that come with addressing more than two hundred listeners, each with their own distinct backgrounds, identities and experiences.

In all of this, Professor Nemerov explains that his goal is to “not worry about the propriety of the connections [he makes]. It’s just to worry if they make sense, if they’re intuitively plausible and exciting to people.”

In his searching delivery, the words seem to come to him in real time; by and large, they do.

On the process of preparing for a lecture, he says, “I’m intuitive, so now I’m learning to trust that more. Before, I felt like I needed the safety net of notes. Now, no notes. Just trust myself.

I’ve always liked that Who song, ‘Pinball Wizard,’ — you know, ‘that deaf, dumb, and blind kid/sure plays a mean pinball.’ That has always made sense to me.”

Though Professor Nemerov won’t explicitly state what he expects from his students (“I have

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UDIT GOYAL/The Stanford Daily

“I suddenly saw, and I thought, ‘Why can’t that be me? Life is short, why not?’”

Alexander Nemerov, chair of the Art and Art History department, is one of the most well-known and respected professors at Stanford. His unique lecture style, which combines the cadence and passion of preaching with the intellectual rumination of art criticism, routinely draws sizeable crowds from across disciplines.

zero learning goals in my syllabus, because how can you?”), he hopes to develop students’ skills to think critically about art beyond thinking “this is good” or “this is gorgeous.” When he says, “It’s never pretty picture time in my class,” you understand what he means. Undergraduates like Eva Hong ’20 see it: “Before, I just looked at paintings and admired the beauty of it. Now, I see there are stakes behind certain depictions of beauties.”

Nemerov also proposes something that is radical and sounds impossible: the merging of art with real life. He aims to instill a critical artistic perspective in his students, encouraging them to integrate this in everyday life, demystifying the “fuzzy” perspective. It’s a tall order, especially at an institute like Stanford, where, as Nemerov observes, “we [art and art history majors] are said not to deal with the real because we deal in art.” Nemerov’s advice is to stop and contemplate nature, people and the self with the same patience Munch and Van Gogh drew upon to create “Starry Nights.” Art makes real-world experiences more legitimate and powerful; walking in the city (Norman Lewis’s and Vincente Minnelli’s New York), 12

swimming in the ocean (Matisse, Miro), or stargazing at night (Munch, Van Gogh) become much more alive and resonant when those raw experiences meet the artist’s vision.

When Nemerov says that art creates our real world, (1) he believes it, (2) you do, too, since (3) to a large degree, it’s true.

To provoke this radical melding, Nemerov ties the art he covers with the world at large — in social, historical and political terms. The slick businessmen whom Mark Rothko wanted to upset with his Four Seasons murals are “Trumpian.” The wandering, sauntering, bohemian spirit of Gustave Courbet’s anti-hierarchy paintings gets picked up by the Ginsbergs and Kerouacs of the Beat Generation. What he wants to develop in his students is “historical consciousness” — a “liberating” idea, to think that who people were in the past were who they are in the present. The fascistic, Nazi circumstances under which Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon’s emotionally devastating “Life?

Or Theater?” gauche paintings are crafted, are not simply forgotten in the modern world; the hate remains. And the commitment to artistic expression, too.

“If you have a strong or active historical consciousness,” Nemerov says, “then you’re never quite always in the present.”

“It has to do with memory. I remember a lot, and so it’s very easy for me to call up a sense of where I was on a given day. The past doesn’t seem that remote or hazy to me.”

The students are transfixed and moved. Holly Dayton ‘17 wanted to take a Nemerov class before graduating; with Art History 1B, she was not disappointed. “Understanding how the world sees art,” she says, “is understanding the world.”

Tracy Roberts ‘18, majoring in International Relations, calls Nemerov’s survey course “the greatest class I’ve ever taken.”

Roberts goes on: “For him to open up his class to people not in art history, I think, is phenomenal. You can tell that this is bigger than him. It speaks to something — maybe the word is insightfulness? — beyond being proficient in your own career.”

Then there are the rhapsodes, the hosannas.

Angela Black ‘20 gushes on the “mindblowing” aspects of Nemerov’s style. “His lectures touch my soul; I’m almost reduced to tears by the

morrislouis.org

The Guardian Lee Gallery

Blooming, Cy Twombly, 2001-2008

Number IV, Morris Louis, 1957

Inside a B-17 Flying Fortress, Margaret Bourke-White, 1942

www.franciscogoya.com

Wikimedia Commons

The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

White Radishes, Edward Weston1933, Silver print

The Dog, Francisco Goya, 1823

Swimming, Thomas Eakins, 1885

things he says.”

Black says, to her, “it’s not just some made-up façade, he’s not presenting anything, it is all so genuine.”

Other students also enjoy the performative aspects of Nemerov’s lectures and their embrace of intellectual openness. Alison Jahansouz ‘18 says, “His lectures are performances, which is very different from other classes I’ve taken. You’re getting a taste of Western art, but you’re also getting Nemerov’s interpretation of it. There are lots of parts where you’re allowed to disagree; he encourages that, and it’s definitely taught me how to look at art.”

Is the Nemerov off the stage same as the one on it? Yes, only quieter, more reserved. Nemerov often gets the question: “Well, what’s the difference between you when you’re lecturing and you when you’re not?” And, as he says, “besides the performative aspects of it, there’s no difference. Absolutely none.”

“One is ecstatic because one is deeply unhappy with the world.”

Nemerov says this in relation to Francisco Goya, whose feverish, Romantic style conveys the anguishes of the inner mind — the seedy noir-ish underbelly of all that Rembrandt privacy. But beyond connecting Goya from Rembrandt (or, later, Rothko), the saying has a spe-

cific political weight to it. For the date of the Goya lecture is Wednesday, November 9, 2016 — the morning after Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States. Perhaps surprisingly, the auditorium is more packed than usual. The room reels with anguish, numbness, panic. Nemerov marches in, trying to ignore the friends embracing each other in hugs and tears of solace, solidarity. Knowing his mission, he delivers the lecture without missing a beat. His tone is more apocalyptic and brooding than usual. He has not pushed the political point, but it has been made, regardless.

The manic-depressiveness of that statement — “one is ecstatic because one is deeply unhappy with the world” — so perfectly captures the temperature of Cubberley that morning, of perhaps all American artists and citizens. In times of desperation and dejection, one marches on, lifted by the ecstasies of anger, of the belief that art (whether Goya or Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi satire “To Be Or Not To Be”) can offer a constructive path towards resistance of injustice.

With that Goya lecture, the point of Nemerov’s class is placed in its starkest relief. His lectures are about maintaining your presence in the world, balancing the sociopolitical, the historical and the artistic, with a special emphasis on developing the latter (so easily dismissed, it

seems).

Nemerov thinks that, today, “being moved is in short supply.” He aims to change that, one lecture at a time.

Alexander Nemerov’s future classes include AMSTUD 124A, “The American West,” an interdisciplinary American Studies course, taught this spring; ARTHIST 1B, “Introduction to the Visual Arts: History of Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present,” taught in Fall 2017; and two in Winter 2018, an undergraduate lecture course on American photography since 1960, and a freshman Introductory Seminar called “The Sisters: Poetry and Painting.”

He will also lead a Sophomore College seminar on the American painter Edward Hopper, putting his works in dialogue with films, paintings, and novels; applications are due by 8 a.m. on April 11.

This spring, he will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to deliver the Andrew W. Mellon lectures on “The Forest: America in the 1830s.” Topics of discussion include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, the Hudson River Painters, Edgar Allen Poe, and the forest as a metaphor for the unruliness of life and how this gets into art.

Contact Carlos Valladeres at cvall96@stanford.edu.

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Illustration by SUNNY LI/The Stanford Daily

How Asian-American actors are gaining ground via streaming

By Olivia Popp 14

A

few years ago, I stumbled upon a season two episode of “Friends” in which Ross comes back from China and gets together with a former friend, Julie, who is Chinese-American. She doesn’t have an accent and, outside of being envied by Rachel, she’s an average human being on a show that is very, very white. I waved my hands excitedly at the screen — she reminded me of the entertainment industry’s favorite Asian female, Lucy Liu, mostly because she looked like me. She was Asian.

I never watched television when I was little.

Our family had a small TV set that we never used because we didn’t have cable, so it sat decomposing in our basement. When I was a sophomore in high school, my family finally got cable, so every day after school I’d sit, flip on the TV and watch whatever was on, which was usually “Friends.” After that fateful season two episode, I quickly and covertly blasted through every single episode of “Friends” — now lovingly called binge-watching. I sat silently after I watched all the hundreds of episodes, eyes numb but mind forever opened to this magical new world of television.

Comic book fan that I was, I proceeded to watch, first, all the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, then the short-lived Marvel series “Agent Carter” starring Hayley Atwell. I was then told about the series “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” which featured not one, but two Asian leads and eventually later in the series, more and more roles given to people of color of African-American, Middle Eastern and Hispanic descent.

I frowned. How odd. One of the main characters, Agent Melinda May, consistently applauded as “the most badass female on television” by essentially every entertainment source, is played by Ming-Na Wen, an American actress born in Macau, whom most may recognize as the speaking voice of Mulan and one of the leads in “The Joy Luck Club.” She’s fierce, clever, and smart — the best agent and fighter on the show. But even though May is an immensely talented fighter, she does not evoke the

stereotypical kung-fu Asian character with the accent at all. She’s subdued, quietly powerful and humble.

The other character of Asian descent is Skye, now known as Agent Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet). Bennet is an American actress with a Caucasian mother and Chinese-American father. (Side note: Bennet’s birth name is Chloe Wang and she pursued a singing career in China under that name before moving to Los Angeles to act. Unable to secure any acting jobs, she changed her last name to Bennet — a nod to her father, Bennet Wang. She secured a role after her very first audition with her new name and soon after joined Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ) At first glance, Bennet does not look particularly Asian. But a Google search reveals her Asian heritage and her outspokenness in discussing it. Plenty of Asian-American female actresses of both fully Asian and halfAsian descent — Olivia Munn, Maggie Q and Lucy Liu among many — have been told that they are simply “too Asian” for the entertainment industry. Similarly, Bennet constantly talks about how she was teased when she was little because she “looked too Asian” and had “Asian eyes.” But now, she’s reclaiming her Asian heritage on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” with the character’s backstory being retconned and rewritten to include an Asian mother, played by the Australian actress Dichen Lachman of German and Tibetan descent. Another thing to note about “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” is the thirdbilled showrunner, producer and screenwriter Maurissa Tancharoen. Tancharoen herself is of Asian descent, and although there have been few direct mentions of her involvement in promoting diversity on the show, it’s worth simply recognizing how her presence in the show’s production along with the two Asian-American actresses go together.

A feeling of elation swept over me. As a half-Asian individual myself, I felt so proud.

Someone like me for the whole world to see.

Fast-forward from then to my current self — someone who has grown to surround herself in media in every single form, desperate to find some inkling of myself in it all. There’s a whole hidden world out there of immensely talented Asian-Americans just waiting to be discovered.

Now, if you haven’t been hiding in a hole, you obviously know the whitewashing scandals involving countless films, particularly the arguments surrounding marketability of AsianAmerican actors. Philip Wang, co-founder of Wong Fu Productions (an LA-based production company that focuses on putting Asians on screen) released a revealing YouTube video on whitewashing called “Don’t just TALK about Whitewashing.” The key to his argument was the creation of content — that Asians and other people of color cannot wait for their turn to be at the forefront of arts and entertainment.

Wang explains that while people may be mad at a predominantly white industry for not giving them roles, it is, in a way, kind of understandable why there are fewer roles for individuals of color. White writers do not write roles for people of color because they simply don’t know how to write them, since people tend to write what they know. With so many racist portrayals of individuals of color in the past, they don’t want to create an inaccurate portrayal, either.

Wang says that the best way to get more individuals of color on screen is to get more behind the camera, writing and creating and directing and producing. That way, the creation of roles is natural.

I’d like to highlight a distinct difference between telling an Asian or Asian-American story and just putting Asian actors in roles that are designated as “color-blind.” These two fields have also been slowly blending as more content is created by Asian-Americans who have grown up in the U.S. but still identify with their Asian heritage. Wong Fu creates content that fuses both, typically using stories that will be extremely relatable to any audience but including elements that many Asian-American young adults will immediately recognize and smile about from a mile away. This is what makes Wong Fu Productions stand out — their stories are often universal, but having audiences see individuals of color, people just like everyone else, onscreen silently pushes them forward as the norm. When we think about a doctor, or a lawyer, or an actor, we probably think of a white man. By placing an Indian man or a Hispanic woman or an Asian teenager on screen, Wong Fu Productions tells us that people of color can be what we think of when we imagine anyone in our minds.

As Alan Yang said when he and Aziz Ansari accepted their Emmy for best writing in a comedy series for Ansari’s popular Netflix series “Master of None”: “Asian parents out there, if you could do me a favor — if just a couple of you get your kids cameras instead of violins, we’ll be all good.” Ansari previously commented that Netflix was a great platform for his show because they ordered his show immediately to series, with Netflix equipped with a solid group of subscribers. Since most pilots never get ordered to series, the Netflix model allowed the “Master of None” story to be greenlit without so much riding on its pilot success. Netflix also encourages binge-watching, which, from my experience, forces the viewer to become very, very emotionally attached to a show and its characters — vital for shows with diverse casts that would never have made it on network or cable television.

Mindy Kaling’s “The Mindy Project” began airing new episodes on Hulu, another streaming service. Wong Fu’s newest venture, a YouTube Red series called “Single by 30,” features the Costa Rican-American actor Harry Shum, 15

Jr. of Chinese descent and singer-songwriter Kina Grannis of half-Japanese descent, amongst a very diverse cast. Netflix’s new Marvel venture “Luke Cage” utilizes the talents of Mike Colter, Simone Missick and Mahershala Ali to tell the raw, relevant story of a haunted, heroic civilian who is also a black man. “Orange is the New Black,” another immensely popular show, consists of so many incredibly talented actors of different ethnicities. Some of these shows simply use actors of color in the work and avoid discussing his or her ethnicity, and that’s fine. Some of these shows dive deep into their characters’ backstories that involve fanciful tales about their family and their history of their culture, and that’s fine too. Some shows do both. At this point, we need anything we can get. But at the same time, because society needs to come to acknowledge, however grudgingly, that there is no singular American story, stories that involve individuals of color, whether they discuss their ethnicity or not, are important.

Stanford alums and comedy writers Amy Aniobi and Tracy Oliver, who are both AfricanAmerican, visited Stanford halfway through fall quarter. One thing from their talk stuck with me: With the advent of YouTube, creating something, anything — is easier than ever, because all you need is your phone. The amount of content on YouTube is overwhelming, and everybody already knows that people have made careers from YouTubing. So many YouTubers of color are incredibly popular, like the Asian-American ones I know and love — Anna Akana, Ryan Higa and Timothy DeLaGhetto.

Creators of color have such rich stories to tell, and every culture and community has its own relatable themes and experiences, so it’s perfectly understandable why these YouTubers are popular. It’s obvious why shows that are diverse are so popular — people like to see themselves on screen. It’s healthy. It’s natural. People like seeing their own stories told, and art is meant to evoke emotional experiences and empathy — the easiest way to get a viewer to relate is if something that’s like them is on screen. If you can’t find something to relate to, the creator has done something seriously wrong.

It’s not that other platforms don’t provide individuals of color to showcase their work, but it’s that streaming and online services provide a much more open platform. Stories that are told because they’re deemed “unmarketable” or “unpopular” before they even air can now be told via different places that can properly showcase the unique stories and perspectives of those involved in the creation of the show. Now, when I watch streaming shows, I see individuals on screen who look like me, and for people everywhere, that’s more important than I can state. As a society, we once focused so heavily on erasing color, creed and culture rather than embracing it and treating it as another charac-

“Asian parents out there, if you could do me a favor — if just a couple of you get your kids cameras instead of violins, we’ll be all good.”

— Alan Yang Co-creator of Master of None teristic that simply must be respected in its own right. That’s the one thing about color-blind casting that gets me — it is so hard to be strictly ignorant of ethnicity and rely on this method to get more people of color on screen. Then again, the catch-22 is that strictly limiting a role to non-white people is dangerous. Color-blind casting may work in general for creating a diverse cast, and has notably been successful in casting shows such as Shonda Rhimes’ “Grey’s Anatomy,” but in this day and age, writing onscreen roles explicitly for certain ethnicities will certainly help. Understandably, this is restrictive in nature, but having a mix of the two will hopefully result in what can be deemed as progress.

In the simplest terms possible, it ultimately comes down to creating opportunities for oneself. We’ve always been told that if we can’t find a way to carry out a project, then we do it ourselves. If actors can’t find roles, they write them for themselves. In the same vein, if individuals of color can’t score on-screen roles, then we’ll be creating them ourselves.

For Asian-Americans, we can’t solely rely on the few like Lucy Liu, Ming-Na Wen, John Cho or Maggie Q to hold us up, however much we love and admire them. Liu found her own success as the token Asian female in white-dominated film and television like “Ally McBeal,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Kill Bill.” Wen and Cho have successfully navigated and straddled the border between film and TV in both parts that are strictly Asian and parts that are strictly color-blind American. Q has already established herself within narratives that were always strictly considered “all-American” or rather, white, such as simply taking a generically-written character and placing an Asian-American in the role. It’s still important to note that despite their incredibly extensive filmographies,

none of them have achieved the success that experienced or even young, rising white actors have — but the future of people of color in the industry depends on the efforts of the younger generation of collaboration by creators and performers in any capacity. Breaking out of this “token person of color” role is the first step that new and up-and-coming artists spearhead.

No matter who you are, no matter your background, no matter your ethnicity, if you can fund a project, fund it. If you can watch a piece, watch it. If you can promote work, promote it.

So as I began my journey from television noob to TV-obsessed nerd, I didn’t expect that I’d find myself become increasingly more curious and eager to push for Asian-American presence and representation along the way. For me, it’s interesting to think about how I ultimately never considered a lack of non-white representation in television until I saw a person of color on screen. There have been plenty of incidences involving whitewashing or stereotyped roles in film, but beyond correcting this, we must change this default by breaking out and actively working to create roles for Asian-Americans and people of color alike. With limited resources, it looks like the easiest way is to approach it from a low-budget, accessible angle online, via social media or picked up by streaming services that allow for subscribers to watch at any time. People of color have been fighting with film and television executives who claim people of color and Asian-Americans aren’t profitable, so in fact, it’s practically favorable to be releasing content on non-traditional sources if it’s going to take too much time for film to start giving out more roles to people of color. If one tactic doesn’t work, it’s time to go another route. Because it’s about time for change. It’s about time.

Contact Olivia Popp at opopp@stanford.edu.

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TRIPLE THREAT

Erica McCall, Karlie Samuelson and Briana Roberson together form the senior core of the Pac-12 title-winning Stanford women’s basketball team

By Alex Bucquet

“I think of myself like a Draymond Green — [he] just goes out, does the dirty work, gets rebounds, blocks. I admire his passion.”

“I am a huge fan of Damian Lillard because he is a scoring point guard.”

“I’m number 44 because I like Jerry West”

Imagine a franchise composed of a three-player core of scoring point guard Damian Lillard, combo guard Jerry West and dominant power forward Draymond Green.

17

“I think of myself like a Draymond Green — [he] just goes out, does the dirty work, gets rebounds, blocks.”

McCall says, smiling. “I admire his passion.”

“I’m number 44 because I like Jerry West,” says Samuelson.

“I am a huge fan of Damian Lillard because he is a scoring point guard,” says Roberson.

Imagine a franchise composed of a three-player core of scoring point guard Damian Lillard, combo guard Jerry West, and dominant power forward Draymond Green. The three seem wildly different in terms of personality and style, yet as it turns out, it’s the perfect symbiosis — at least for the Stanford women’s basketball team.

Despite starting their college career in the shadow of Chiney Ogwumike — an All-American forward from 2010 to 2014 and No. 1 pick in the 2014 WNBA Draft — Stanford’s current seniors emerged as team leaders by their junior year. In March, they carried Stanford to a Pac-12 conference title, as McCall and Samuelson averaged over 10 points per game while Roberson had a two-toone turnover ratio.

All three of them grew up in basketball families and started to play in elementary school, with older siblings and fathers as their basketball mentors.

Both Samuelson and McCall started playing under their fathers, who coached them individually and pushed them to become better.

Samuelson also used to shoot around with her sisters Bonnie and Katie Lou. Bonnie played for the Cardinal between 2011 and 2015 and Katie Lou is playing her second year at UConn.

“My dad would take me and my sisters to shoot all the time when we were younger and throughout high school,” Samuelson recalls.

“We had to shoot every single day, and we hated it. But that’s why we are all good shooters, so I thank him for that.”

Just like Samuelson, McCall’s style of play — a dominant power forward on both ends of the floor — can be traced to her father’s coaching.

Her older sister DeWanna Bonner, power forward for the Phoenix Mercury, developed alongside her.

“I started when I was four. My dad was one of my coaches [for a season],” McCall says. “Then I played for a club team. I was never the best one, always the last one to get off the bench. My dad told me to be the hardest worker and get rebounds, and that he’ll teach me the rest.”

Roberson’s inspiration was her older brother Kenni, who used to teach her ball-handling 18

moves when she was little. Roberson still trains with him in the summer.

“My brother and I, we talk after every single game,” she says. “He has really been a strong influence in my basketball career.”

Basketball is a family affair for all three Stanford seniors. In committing to Stanford, they stepped from one basketball family into another. From their first moments together, the three women knew that they had found a new family in their classmates.

“We were here our freshman summer, and I already knew they were going to be my best friends,” Samuelson says. “We were staying in Governor’s Corner, and we had no idea where anything was. That’s how we got to know each other, by biking around and finding our way on campus.”

“My freshman year, there were a lot of different cliques. As my four years progressed, we all grew closer,” recalls McCall. “This is

classmates were here for me and encouraged me,” says McCall. “Seeing us grow and go through the ups and the downs really just showed me how great friends we were.”

Indeed, with Chiney gone, the Cardinal were relying on McCall and other bigs to step up and lead the team. In spite of beginning the season as a starter, McCall lost her spot midway through the season that she finished coming off the bench for the Cardinal. This was the first time in eight years that Stanford had won less than 33 games, and McCall’s confidence was at a low.

“After my sophomore I just kept thinking, ‘How am I gonna do this?’ I was so discouraged,” she says.

After being named captain of the USA Basketball team and leading the country to a first place in the World University Games during her sophomore summer, McCall’s confidence was boosted and she was ready to start a new season.

probably the closest team I have ever been on, a big sisterhood.”

Although the Cardinal were able to reach the Final Four of the NCAA tournament during their freshman season, the three seniors, along with the rest of the team, had to adapt to the new group dynamic as Stanford was left without an All-American player.

“Sophomore year, the team underwent some big changes,” Samuelson says. “We didn’t have an All-American, so you had to step yourself up.”

In the 2014-2015 season, the Cardinal worked hard to earn a 26-10 record. Their bid for another trip to the Final Four was halted when they fell to top-seeded Notre Dame in the Sweet 16. In Stanford’s last game, McCall notched 12 points, a promising ending to her tough year.

“Sophomore year, I struggled a lot, and my

“Knowing I could score down low against teams from all over the world was really helpful,” she says. “Suddenly I had this tremendous confidence.”

The seniors’ sophomore year also marked the final collegiate season of Bonnie Samuelson, Karlie’s sister, who left the team. Heading into their junior year, the three current seniors were poised to take over as team leaders. All three were named captains.

“This was the change for us,” Samuelson says.

“This became our team.”

Their junior year, Stanford earned a 27-8 record and a 1,000th program win. After a heartbreaking loss to Washington in the Pac-12 quarterfinals, the Cardinal met Notre Dame again in the Sweet 16 of The Big Dance. McCall’s career-high 27 points led the way for the Cardinal, bolstered

by an additional 20 points from Samuelson.

As the junior class was beginning to truly catch fire, Stanford stunned Notre Dame but fell to Washington in the Elite Eight.

At the beginning of the 2016-17 season, the trio looked ahead toward a potentially rocky senior year. Would-be senior Lili Thompson had transferred to Notre Dame and Samuelson started the season injured. However, the bar remained high after the 2016 Elite Eight finish.

The seniors in particular had their sights set on VanDerveer’s 1,000th career win. Maybe even another trip to the Final Four, which they hadn’t experienced since their freshman year.

The season did not disappoint, as the seniors led the team to a 28-5 record with only two conference losses. The Cardinal were able to overcome injuries and managed to stay healthy during most of the season.

On Feb. 3 against USC, the Cardinal completed

proved to be the Cardinal backbone, combing for almost half of the Cardinal’s points.

“Winning that Pac-12 tournament was great for all three of us. We have been through so much adversity in our four years here,” McCall says.

The Cardinal have participated in The Big Dance for three straight decades, and this year was no exception. The seniors had one last chance to play with their sisters and enjoy their final moments in the program they had changed over those four years.

“It’s kind of bittersweet,” Roberson added.

McCall finished the season with 288 rebounds and 54 blocks while she averaged 14.6 points per game. Her teammates, who affectionately call her “Bird” (because her last name resembles a bird call), admire her enthusiasm on and off the court.

“Bird is the most caring person you could ever meet,” Samuelson says. “She never has a bad day, Photos by RYAN JAE/The Stanford Daily

one of their season goals as they were able to make VanDerveer the second NCAA women’s coach with more than 1,000 career wins.

“I am so happy that I was able to be on the team that got her the 1,000th win,” Roberson says. “It’s crazy to think how many dubs that is.”

“Being able to do that as a senior was crazy.

That’s a goal that we kind of set for each other, to get that for her, so it was nice being able to do that,” McCall says.

After hitting the 1,000-win milestone, the Cardinal shifted focus to a Pac-12 championship during conference play. The Stanford squad ultimately fell short twice against Oregon State, both times by a mere three points.

Stanford was able to rebound and to take its 12th conference championship during the Pac-12 tournament. Once again, the seniors

always positive. She lights up the whole room.”

“Bird is determined, spirited and entertaining,” adds Roberson.

Samuelson ended the year with a teamhigh 80 makes from the three, converting 47.6 percent of her attempts from downtown, supplementing her 12.7 points per game.

“Karlie loves the game. She’s the best shooter I have ever been the teammate of,” says McCall.

“I mean, Bonnie is pretty good, but Karlie is my favorite,” she adds with a smile.

“Karlie is bubbly, bright and loyal,” added Roberson.

Roberson ended her season with 37 steals and 81 assists, averaging 6.7 points per game.

“Outside of the court she loves listening to music and vibing with her teammates,” adds McCall.

“Bri is probs one of the best listeners and best friends I have ever met,” says Samuelson. “She will listen to you and wants to be there for you. She is hilarious too. An awesome person to be around.”

One of the aspects of the trio’s dynamic the stat sheet cannot measure is their leadership of the team. Throughout the season, the senior core motivated the team and pushed their teammates.

“Those three never get down,” junior Kaylee Johnson says. “Always first in the gym, last out.”

Looking ahead to next year, all three women intend to keep playing basketball. Roberson wishes to play a couple of years overseas before applying to law school. Samuelson is still hesitating between her many options: playing overseas or potentially coaching or physical therapy work. Likewise, McCall has no intention of giving up hoops. She will prepare for the WNBA Draft after graduating at the end of winter quarter.

“I’d love to play on my sister’s team,” McCall says. “My dad would be super excited for me to play with the Phoenix Mercury. Other than that, I’d love to play with Chiney again. She has always been a mentor to me. That’s in Connecticut. A little far, and a lot colder than I am used to.”

In their four years at Stanford, the three seniors have changed the basketball program, but they have also emerged as changed themselves, having “matured as young women,” according to VanDerveer. They have also established themselves as leaders of a basketball family both on and off the court.

“Their leadership skills have been the best,” VanDerveer says. “They’ve been really special seniors.”

With these three women gone next season, the Cardinal will need to rely on current juniors Kaylee Johnson and Brittany McPhee to fill the leadership vacuum. Both Johnson and McPhee intend to continue the positive influence McCall, Roberson and Samuelson had on the team.

“During senior night, it finally hit me: These three girls are not going to be on the team next year. I just realized how different it’s going to be,” says Johnson. “It made me really grateful for all the memories we shared and eager to work hard.”

“There is no one else that I wanted to work so hard for,” she adds.

Cardinal players agree that they need to follow the example of the three graduating seniors if the team’s legacy of success is to continue. Johnson and McPhee look to follow the core’s footstep as they embark on their final season on the team.

In Bird’s departing message to the incoming freshmen, she emphasizes passion — her inner Draymond Green.

“Play with passion,” she says. “There are a lot of days when basketball is tough. Always remember the little girl you were when you fell in love with the game of basketball.”

Contact Alexandre Bucquet at bucqueta@ stanford.edu 19

me, an intellectual: On "Academese" and accessibility

By Vivian Lam

Graphic by CATHY YANG/ The Stanford Daily

If there’s anything that captures the zeitgeist of modernity, it’s definitely the memes. Browsing on Tumblr, an incredibly credible source of contemporary sardonic and graphics-laden critique, two memes created in 2016 proffered a rather apt take on academia.

T

he first, “Me, An Intellectual,” according to the de facto meme repository of the internet, Know Your Memes, is a dialogue snowclone (aka, the linguistic term for Mad-Libs) that features the use of “needlessly formal language to correct well-known colloquial phrases.” The first documented iteration comes from Tumblr user wrecknian: 20

me, an intellectual: *passing my buddy a slim jim* would you care for this Slender James?

A few other choice examples include Them: motherfucker Me, an intellectual: Oedipus

and you: hey boo me, an intellectual: Greetings, Mr. Radley

Do these sound vaguely familiar?

Another meme, known as Increasingly Verbose Memes, or Deconstruction Memes, juxtaposes an increasingly simplified image with an increasingly complicated caption. One such example, courtesy of Know Your Memes:

Or, to put it in numerical terms, what’s usually experienced when they don’t tell you how many sig figs to include in your answer:

3.14159265358979323846 26433832795028841971 69399375105820974944 59230781640628620899 86280348253421170679 82148086513282306647 09384460955058223172 5359408128

3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196 4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091 4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273 7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436 7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094 3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548 0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912 9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798 6094370277 0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132 0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872 1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 6892589235 4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960 5187072113 4999999837 2978049951 0597317328 1609631859 5024459455 3469083026 4252230825 3344685035 2619311881 7101000313 7838752886 5875332083 8142061717 7669147303

You get the point. (Or, I should say, reader of this article that I, the author, am addressing, comprehend the meaning and/or purpose of these serially presented illustrations of a certain concept).

From these two memes emerges an incontrovertibly true (because memes are an absolute source of empirical truth) observation about higher education and intellectualism. Namely, once you step inside the black box of academia, there are two consequences you might face if and/or when you decide to step back outside: Firstly, you may or may not find yourself cursed to speak in an arcane, symbolist and/ or multisyllabic language whenever you are primed to give a quasi-lecture on something meta, are engaged with some authority figure, or feel threatened and/or expressively hangry.

Some things are certainly difficult to put in more concise and simpler terms; sometimes oversimplification is as much an obfuscation of meaning as a wall of text or a question that takes eight full minutes to set up in lectures and class discussion. And sometimes talking and writing in abstractions and intricate metaphors can be a means of revealing the nuances of the topic at hand. It’s the difference between saying “I require a glass of dihydrogen monoxide” versus “Like cold water to a weary soul is good news from a distant land” versus “I’m thirsty” — two

of the three are slightly more telling about the speaker and the funny icebreakers they’re most fond of using on first dates and class reunions.

I admit that I tend to find myself falling into abstruse language (this article being no exception) as a kind of defense mechanism when I don’t know what I’m saying, I don’t understand it enough to say it more concisely or I’m trying my hardest to not look stupid under the heated gaze of my equally verbally and conceptually abstruse peers and professors. Either I coin fifteen new terms in a poetic monologue that some people will nod to in vague acknowledgement of the plausible-sounding sentences tumbling out of my mouth, or I start screaming. Screaming might be more effective, though I have yet to try.

This might just be a symptom of Cripplingly Low Self-Confidence, or the result of the mimetic imbibing of dense works and highly technical papers. Sometimes intellectual vitality is dictated more by how you deliver a statement than by the merits of the statement itself. But the ramifications of academese extend beyond the classroom. Academia and research gives us the ability to change our focal point — to fly higher and higher and expand the scope of our metabird’s-eye view, or to dig deeper and deeper into processes and mechanisms through the lens of a microscope. Unless our aim is to escape from society altogether in a bubble of scholarship for our own personal gratification, we must learn how to communicate for ourselves.

And for the privilege we have to see and learn so much, it is our responsibility to return. As in Bruce Robbin’s essay “The Sweatshop Sublime,” we must not be the critic flying in an airplane, paralyzed by the massive problem we see, unable to act other than by remarking on its existence.

Study and research is useless if it doesn’t reach anyone else. Insight can only be powerful when it is shared — and shared in a way that your audience can understand. Academics speaking to other academics who are equally entrenched in academese might be completely fine in academia. But once you try to step out of that ivory tower, bearing your groundbreaking complex ideas for the world at large, you will not be able to reach anyone but those who have at least two to six letters appended to their name.

It’s possible to have both a lazy audience and a lazy speaker. Your listener and your readers, whoever they may be, should pull a little bit of weight. But they should never feel distanced, alienated or incompetent from you or your ideas because of your language.

This dovetails nicely into the second and more problematic consequence: You might feel that you can no longer talk at eye level with anyone outside of your sophisticated, highly educated, well-cultivated clique.

It’s not so much that you don’t want to engage.

It just that it seems as if you can no longer deign to engage.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about his idea to use “Romeo and Juliet” as a perfect example for high school students on what not to do when your parents disapprove of your choices in friends and lovers (i.e., don’t drink the poison the creepy stranger gave you, and try your best to talk it out at the dinner table with hugs and ice cream afterwards). I, being the well-versed, erudite literary scholar that I am, felt almost affronted at this literalist simplification of a classic staple in the annals of the almighty Western canon. It was like reading T.S. Elliot’s “Prufrock” as just the musings of a sad old man that needs to get laid, or Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” series as just a story about vampires and werewolves. (Rather, as one critic famously suggested, it’s the “story about a girl’s choice between bestiality and necrophilia”). There was far too much left unexamined, and it seemed wrong to essentialize a complex work of leeterahture (in the most “Would you like a cuppa, old chap?” sense) to a case study or just bare plot. I scoffed and suggested that “Spring Awakening” would give him more ground to cover.

Then I realized I had turned into a highbrow “intellectual” snob.

In the black box of academia, we are taught to approach everything with a critical and analytical eye (or what certain scholars call a “hermeneutics of suspicion”), ready to tear it apart and reveal its flaws and its borrowed parts, figure out how it works and devise ways to squeeze every last ounce of utility or meaning from it.

Which is great and requires a lot of hard work to achieve. But the distinction between “lowbrow jejeune” appreciation and “highbrow intellectual” understanding is so sharp that I can cut diamonds and the layers of sexual tension between your RA and your roommate with it.

It’s one thing to be able to look at something (be it a work of art, social behavior or organic matter) and to be able to uncover layers of complexity that lead to novel or profound insights.

And it’s another thing to act as if anyone who cannot close-read or apply critical theory cannot appreciate “literature” (which typically excludes anything not on a college syllabus, or published within the past century). And it’s a whole other unsettling thing to assume that certain people are just inherently unable to philosophize or think beyond the scope of their mundane lives.

You return home one day and realize that there are certain ideas and discoveries you cannot talk about with your family and your community, because you don’t think they will be able to understand. But is it because they cannot, or because you haven’t tried to translate, or explain why it means so much to you? There may be a seemingly insurmountable gap — but if these ideas are as universally worthwhile as they purport themselves to be, then a bridge must and can be built.

And this includes those who disagree with you.

It doesn’t do anyone good to just snicker

amongst your high-minded clique of elites out of earshot when a professor, peer, or some other public or private entity says something objectionable or “ignorant” — call them out with your voice and not just your finger. Or better yet, call them in: Utilize whatever dialect engages them the most and meet them halfway, even if they don’t take the first step. Condemnatory rhetoric, or a barrage of jargon labelling their actions as prime examples of insidious, systemic ideological apparatuses only alienates. As we know, to the point of cliché, dialogue and understanding, when possible, is typically more self-sustaining than the tyrannical silence or reactionary retaliation. Certain voices are amplified so loudly that we get not just an echo chamber, but a megaphone inside that echo chamber that participates in that crime of interpellation it simultaneously condemns and appropriates for its own arsenal. This is not to say that “dialogue” should become apolitical and passive, or rising movements should Shut Up and

if these ideas are as universally worthwhile as they purport themselves to be, then a bridge must and can be built. be trampled on. That’s impossible and irresponsible. There will be inevitable disagreements and ulterior agendas — but perhaps that just means that a different narrative or argument needs to be presented. Perhaps we need more of a collective awakening than a bonfire of caricatures.

It’s true that you can’t fight every battle (I’m sorry, “engage in every conversation”) without getting burnt out at some point. And it’s true that, again, all parties in a conversation have to both listen and do own research. But no one should feel out of depth or be afraid to engage lest they be attacked, laughed at or marked a lost cause. Historically, contemporaneously, theoretically, intuitively — we know how that goes. I don’t need to pull out Hegel (Old Dead White Guy with Horrendously Abstruse Writing extraordinaire) to explain. But I did anyway — and that’s telling.

Talking about something complex in a way that others can understand is difficult. But scientists and humanists and researchers and creators and thinkers all need to learn how to step out of the black box and effectively share the gift of their discoveries. It is our responsibility and obligation to try.

We listen to what we can understand. And if you want to be heard at all, you have to be accessible.

Contact Vivian Lam at vivlam25@stanford.edu.

21

AGAINST INTER

An interview wit

W

e have messy lives that we try to construct around our complicated interests, and for many of us, college is where we lay the foundations. The Big Question, of course, is where we want those foundations to lead.

I always figured that interdisciplinary majors were the way to go. They look so much like an opportunity to incorporate two or more disparate fields into a single glorious degree.

As a pathologically indecisive person, they seemed like an easy, clean-cut answer to the very hard question of “What interests you?”

PICK ONE GRAPHIC BY: HARRY COLE

But according to Priya Satia, that’s exactly the wrong way to look at interdisciplinary majors. She suggests that, although interdisciplinary majors are designed to allow students to tailor their studies and pursue their specific interests, they may not offer the clarity and self-knowledge we expect.

Professor Satia is a professor in Stanford’s History Department and specializes in British Empire history – particularly in the Middle East and South Asia. She has more degrees than most college students have average hours of sleep, and her studies span chemistry, international relations, economics, and history.

And yet, with a veritable menagerie of academic perspectives, Priya Satia knows where she stands – with both feet firmly planted in history. And she emphasizes that lens, that consistent method of thought, is both an intellectual priority and an incredible asset.

The merits of classical disciplines, as Satia describes them, lie primarily in shaping the method of a student’s thoughts. “They give you a set of tools,” Satia commented, which you can cross-apply and take with you no matter where your interests wander. “I think it really helps you, just kind of psychologically, to have that core, and it gives you an intellectual identity.” This mental toolbox can be hard to develop in interdisciplinary majors without already knowing exactly how you think best.

Satia juxtaposes history and the STS major

22

by Maximiliana Bogan

RDISCIPLINARY MAJORS

th history professor Priya Satia as an example. “Say, you know, right now between the ages of 18 and 22, ‘I’m really interested in the relationship between society and technology… I’m going to study that as a historian, and supplement it with x, y, z.’ Now, zoom forward 10 years, and now the question I’m most preoccupied with is inequality. As a historian, I learned that you can read texts from the past, you can think about them critically and put them in conversation with each other. Those are the tools I’m going to use to now answer these questions.”

The way that we think about problems is incredibly important in efficiently working toward solutions, and interdisciplinary majors

“You’ve got to be really clear what you are first, and what you are second.”

– while designed to explore the cross-sections of student interests – may be too specific to be widely applicable. “It doesn’t arm you with tools that will enable you to answer any number of questions,” Satia concludes.

Satia argues that the more you pursue an interdisciplinary major simply because it has the right name or the right description that includes the words you’re looking for, “without a really good understanding of what the disciplines are that make up that program, the more that could backfire intellectually.”

“You could come out with less of a sense of who you are as a thinker; you may come out unable to complete the sentence ‘I am a ___.

I am a historian, I am a sociologist, these are the set of tools I have acquired to answer this question about society, or science, or what have you.’”

This interview wasn’t the brutal critique of interdisciplinary majors that it might sound

like. Satia herself completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in international relations, and she makes it clear that the mix of methodology offered by interdisciplinary courses can work for some people. “If you come to it having a really clear sense of what [an interdisciplinary major’s] component disciplines are and you want that sum of all parts, that’s great. But if you go to it because the name lines up with subjects that you’re interested in, you may end up with no clarity and a lot of confusion.” The difference for Satia is whether a student is “going into it wellinformed versus going into it lost.”

Satia draws on her own experience to further illustrate her point. While talking about her chemistry and IR double major, she explained, “I had two interests; I was interested in inequality, and I was interested in how the universe worked. That’s what I wanted to explore philosophically as a science major, but I had this other interest too, this real world interest – why are some places poor and some places rich – and those two big questions are separate to me.”

“Most students come in here with one or two big questions like that, and you need some guidance as to what is a discipline that works

“All those things stay a part of what you do, it’s not like anything is wasted.

It’s just what you prioritize.” best for you, what’s most compelling to you and what you buy. I tried economics, I did a master’s in economics, and I could see the power of that, but I didn’t buy it in the end. I didn’t think it was arriving at the right answers to that question of inequality; I thought history made more sense to me.”

Going further in that vein, Satia touches on a foundational element of college in the U.S. “I think that, so far as college is about figuring out your identity as a thinker, and having some confidence in your ability to think that way, you really need a discipline. And the word is literal, right? Mental discipline.”

Finding your discipline, understanding and exploring varying (and sometimes opposing) schools of thought, is a huge part of The College Experience™. And while interdisciplinary majors are neatly packaged to encompass two or three disciplines, Satia suggests that exploring each discipline in depth may be of greater benefit to students.

“I think sometimes students come with a kind of preconceived sense of what they’re interested in and they don’t realize — let’s say you’re interested in international relations, you could major in the interdisciplinary major by that name, but you could also study IR as a political scientist or as a historian. I think the only kind of intellectual case for doing it as international relations is if you’re conscious that you want to have exposure to all those different disciplines.

You shouldn’t think that that is the only way to approach the subject.”

In the end, Satia recommends studying under a major that will send you into the future with an understanding of your own mind – how it works best, what skills you use best and most enjoy using. “You’ve got to be really clear what you are first, and what you are second. You want to know what step to take first when you’re thinking about how to solve a problem.”

When it comes down to it, of course, people work well with different approaches, and diversity of thought is imperative. On the broad set of influences in her life, Satia says, “Everything stays with you. My interest in flying has been a huge influence on the work I’ve done as a historian. All those things stay a part of what you do, it’s not like anything is wasted. It’s just what you prioritize. How much you want to devote your life to one thing over another. So is something an influence? Or is it your profession – is it what you do?”

Contact Maximiliana Bogan at ebogan@ stanford.edu.

23

LIGHTROOM Sunsets + Silhouettes Photo Journeys

An exploration of color and shape. Photos taken in the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge.

Photos by Angela Luo

Sunset reflection

Squad of ducks

24

Follow the leader

Storm of birds

Portrait of a photographer

25

“Most introverts grew up he

By Emily Schmidt

I

watched my professor’s hand grip the thin Sharpie and produce tally after tally, a simple black stroke next to the names of my fellow classmates. In the Socratic-style seminar, the spoken topic bounced from mouth to mouth, morphing from twentieth-century Palestinian maps to medieval French cartography. Each new insight brought a wielding of pen in the corner of my eye. Even from across the makeshift table, I could identify my name on the list

26

of more than a dozen. There were no tallies.

I looked at the clock; only fifteen more minutes left, and I still had nothing to contribute.

Without an audible comment, it’s as though I didn’t do the hundred pages of dense reading.

I didn’t struggle with the content, think about its argument or synthesize the important facts.

Even with multiple scrawl-covered pages of notes in front of me, I still couldn’t interject myself into the verbal battlefield. No tally. No participation points.

Just from a small sampling of Stanford syllabi, I’ve seen class participation account for 5% to 50% of a student’s final grade. This per-

centage can include attendance, clicker questions, online posts, or in-class discussion. Over the past two quarters, the forced engagement in many of my classes, in addition to other aspects of Stanford’s high-intensity atmosphere, has left me wondering if it's possible for an introvert to stay introverted.

For many people, to be introverted and to be an introvert are two distinct concepts, one an innocent adjective and the other a concrete noun, an identification, a label.

Susan Steele, owner of blog "Quietly Fabulous," used to believe “what most dictionaries still say about introverts: shy, anti-social, loner. All terms with negative connotations.”

We use labels to define others and assign them assumed attributes. It’s easier to organize people like library books in the Dewey Decimal System: extroverts and introverts in separate wings. Even then, there are a multitude of genres lining the crowded shelves in each wing. There are sections of shy introverts, go-getter introverts, calm extroverts and gregarious extroverts, just to name a few. Personality is a sliding scale of call numbers. However, many introverts have taken to embracing their label upon discovering it.

“I realized that all those little things that I saw as deficiencies were actually traits that all introverts share. All of a sudden, I wasn’t a freak or a bad person,” says Michaela Chung, author of "The Irresistible Introvert" and founder of

Illustrations by HEIDI CHEN/The Stanford Daily and starline/Freepik

earing the message that to be successful, likable and accepted, you must conform to the extrovert ideal.”

website "Introvert Spring."

My reaction to finding out I was an introvert — a Myers-Briggs’ INFJ — was no different.

More recently, I sat with several friends from my dorm in the dining hall discussing this very article. When I disclosed my personality type, the two girls next to me burst out with laughter. They, too, were fellow introverts and INFJs (the rarest type comprising of 1-2% of the world’s population). The instant connection the three of us felt is representative of the introvert community as a whole, but I wondered why we didn’t realize the similarities sooner. Had I hidden my introverted traits to better adapt to college life?

Chung agrees: “Most introverts grew up hearing the message that to be successful, likable and accepted, you must conform to the extrovert ideal.”

To what extent is this true for students at Stanford? Besides Admit Weekend, a prospective freshman’s first taste of life on the farm is NSO (New Student Orientation), the week before fall quarter classes commence. For any student, getting acquainted with a new living situation is already stressful enough, but factor in two dozen social events over a five-day period and it’s an introvert’s nightmare.

I came to Stanford ready to be the most extroverted version of myself. I channeled my mom’s “talk to the stranger in the grocery store line” attitude the minute I stepped onto campus, because that’s the only way I’d be able to make friends.

“If we get to the bottom line, society values people who are comfortable with others and who can make others feel comfortable. We deem them trustworthy and safe,” says Beth Buelow, author, coach, speaker, and founder of "The Introvert Entrepreneur."

Although I love being around people, my social batteries drain after a certain amount of time, and drain even faster when I’m around a large group of strangers. After the first day of NSO, I was homesick, uncomfortable and ready for the world’s longest nap in my new bed. The upcoming events and forced interactions loomed over my head like finals week. I desperately wanted to make friends but not in this setting.

By the end of a very long week, I concluded that NSO was built for extroverts. It resembled my days in elementary school: wearing nametags, sharing fun facts and participating in group activities. With barely any downtime the first few days, I ended up skipping both optional and required events later on. Because I chose to organize my closet or FaceTime my family, I missed out on forming an initial friend group.

These consequences ultimately motivated me to change my strategy. I adopted a new persona, one that didn’t match my childhood nickname, “Miss Melancholy,” at all. I hung out in the lounge every night, went to several frat parties and even signed up to be my dorm’s “Birthday Fairy.” Several of my friends even mistook me for an actual extrovert. I didn’t recognize myself, although my time as an extremely extroverted introvert was fruitful. I learned the names of my roommates, found some really great friends (even one from my hometown), and grew comfortable with Stanford’s expansive campus.

Now with two quarters at The Farm under my belt, I’ve settled back into some of my introverted ways. I spend less time in the lounge to concentrate on my schoolwork but reward myself with social interaction after I’ve finished.

I also periodically accompany my friends to smaller dorm parties but skip the rowdy frat

parties. I discovered a happy medium without touching either extreme end of the personality scale.

As founder of the popular introvert blog "Introvert, Dear" Jenn Granneman states, “Introversion and extroversion aren’t all-or-nothing traits. At times, even the most introverted person can act outgoing.”

Over this past quarter, I’ve also learned to take advantage of graded class participation. Even though none of my professors keep tallies this quarter, I promised myself I wouldn’t focus on that. No matter how few times I contribute in class, I choose to share thoughts of which I am proud. I no longer worry about the quantity, but the quality of my contributions. Because of this decision, I have found class discussions about Thomas Jefferson, eighteenth-century women’s medicine and peers’ short stories to be much more enjoyable.

New York Times best-selling author of "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking" and renowned Ted Talk speaker Susan Cain quietly told me over the phone, “If you speak with conviction, people will feel that. It doesn’t matter if you're speaking softly or loudly or with an accent or not. None of those things matter. It’s the conviction that comes through. People that are quietly assertive can be incredibly effective and influential.”

Stanford’s highly collaborative, spirited atmosphere does make it difficult for more introverted people to thrive, but this doesn’t mean it’s impossible. All it takes is a conscious choice to balance the extroverted culture and embrace your inner quiet being.

Contact Emily Schmidt at egs1997@stanford. edu.

27

Untitled

A script by Katie Adams INT. HOSPITAL - AUDITORIUM - DAY Fluorescent lighting and folding chairs.

A SPEAKER at the front of the auditorium speaks to a scattered audience of people in scrubs and white coats.

SPEAKER ...St. Damian’s is instituting the... (checks notes) ...”We Care” policy, which requires all hospital personnel...

AMBER Oh I see.

SCARLET Do you? It’s very compli-

SPEAKER ... patients who perceive their health care providers as “friendly” and “approachable” rate the quality of their care higher, regards of the actual quality of care...

SIMON (31), a doctor in a white lab coat, collapses into the space between Amber and Scarlet. He looks like shit.

SCARLET Hey.

Scarlet sits in one of the chairs with her arms and legs crossed. There’s blood drying on one of her sneakers.

He sounds like he’s about to cry.

SPEAKER ... to smile whenever they come within ten feet of any patient or fellow health care professional here in the halls of St. Damian’s...

AMBER Hello, Simon.

AMBER (29), a psychiatrist in a skirt and heels, sits next to her, and Scarlet immediately moves over a seat. She leaves a bloody footprint in the process.

AMBER So you’ve already killed someone today.

SCARLET They died on the table.

AMBER Explain the difference to me. Scarlet holds out both of her hands to imitate a scale.

28

SCARLET (re: left hand) Saving people. (re: right hand) Killing people.

SIMON Hey.

SCARLET You look like shit.

AMBER How are you feeling, Simon?

SIMON Like shit. cated.

FLETCHER (29), a doctor in scrubs carrying a cake box, walks past Amber, deliberately bumping into her, as he goes to sit on the far side of Scarlet.

He pops open the cake box, pulls on a pair of latex gloves, and starts eating it with his hands. Scarlet uncrosses her arms to swipe some frosting. Amber watches them--there’s a obvious air of exclusion.

AMBER And why’s that?

SIMON (to Scarlet) Can I get a consult later?

SCARLET Yeah, sure. Cake? (he shakes his head) What do you have?

Simon takes a deep breath.

SIMON An adolescent in the trial has--

AMBER Shouldn’t you be asking a doctor about this?

roneous notion that there is a “right thing to do” in any given medical situation...

Simon looks at Amber blankly. Scarlet glares.

Simon frowns as he watches Amber eat a bite.

AMBER Like Fletcher?

SIMON I thought that was for the Grant-A-Dream thing later.

FLETCHER (eating cake) I’m busy.

SCARLET Amber, I am a doctor.

AMBER I just mean a medical--

Amber freezes. She notices that the cake has a large frosted image of Superman on it.

SIMON Oh my god, we’re eating a four-year-old’s birthday cake.

SCARLET You want to talk about who’s a real doc-Simon puts his head in his hands, and Scarlet stops herself.

AMBER I see, you went out and bought a sheet cake for yourself this morning?

Fletcher rolls his eyes and shoves the cake into Scarlet’s lap. Simon passes the cake to Amber.

SPEAKER ...the protocols, while useful, gave some patients and legal entities the er-

SCARLET (re: speaker) Are you listening to this?

SIMON No, I’m listening to how we stole from a dying child-SCARLET (excitedly) They’re getting rid of protocol. You can do whatever you want.

SCARLET He stole it from Grant-ADream, not the kid.

SPEAKER ... St Damian’s had previously published protocols for the various procedures and situations encountered by its employees, but we will be discontinuing this practice...

FLETCHER What? Fuck no, it’s mine.

SPEAKER ...but we at St. Damian’s know that is best left to the professional judgment of our health care professionals...

SIMON Like steal from children?

She turns toward Fletcher and swipes more frosting.

AMBER (re: cake) Are you going to pass that?

cake off ‘dickishness,’ you definitely don’t get any, Fletcher.

SIMON So just the organization for terminally ill children and not a terminally ill child. Great.

FLETCHER So? My dad always ate my birthday cake.

SIMON Were you dying of lupus?

FLETCHER What’s the big deal about lupus kids? It’s not like because they have lupus they automatically deserve cake. This kid could be a dick for all we know.

SIMON (almost yelling) He’s four!

AMBER If we’re basing who gets

SCARLET It’s a terrible organization. Simon stares at her.

AMBER What do you mean, Scarlet?

SCARLET It’s a really bad use of resources. They’re dying no matter what anyone does or how many cakes and balloon dogs they get.

FLETCHER I thought they got race car drivers or something too.

SCARLET Maybe if they’re dying somewhere else.

Simon is slowly sinking 29

into a pit of misery.

AMBER And what about the mental health? Of the parents?

SCARLET They’re never going to recover from that. It’s the definition of a lost cause. But what about-this kid in Simon’s trial? They have a chance.

We should be giving the cake money to that.

SIMON (emotional) I have to go.

He leaves.

FLETCHER Isn’t this mandatory?

the room. She checks it and SMILES. AMBER (CONT’D) What is it?

SCARLET Car accident.

She bolts for the doors.

A couple of other surgeons in scrubs, WILLIAMS and CARTER, follow at a much more leisurely pace.

Fletcher stretches out his gloved hands for the cake box, but Amber ignores him. She puts the lid on the cake box as she stands.

DOCTOR TWO I don’t know.

AMBER Do you know what’s going on with him?

NURSE You could check.

SCARLET (irritated) There’s nothing going on with him.

Scarlet takes a hard left at the intersection, sneakers squeaking as she slips on the linoleum.

She goes through double doors and emerges in--

AMBER So you’re saying he doesn’t seem--

AMBER When was the last time you talked to him?

FLETCHER Seriously? You just saw-AMBER Scarlet? The last time?

SCARLET All the time. We talk all the time.

AMBER But the last time-Scarlet’s pager goes off.

So do a couple others in 30

INT. HOSPITAL HALLWAY DAY Scarlet runs flat-out through the empty hallway. A door opens on her left, and she dodges it. A door opens on her right, and she dodges it.

Doors open on either side of her, and she squeezes through them without breaking pace. At an intersection up ahead--The path forward is blocked

by TWO DOCTORS and a NURSE standing around an OLD MAN in a wheelchair.

DOCTOR ONE Do you think he’s dead?

Amber leans toward Scarlet confidentially.

SCARLET He’s Simon. Leave him alone, Amber.

should not, but it is important to be mindful of economical needle usage...

INT. LARGE GREENHOUSE DAY FLETCHER Where are you going with that?

AMBER I have an appointment.

She leaves, and Fletcher sullenly watches the speaker, licking some frosting off his gloves.

SPEAKER ... St. Damian’s reminds its health care professionals to only use as many needles as needed.

This is not to say that needles should be reused, as they most certainly

A fogged-up glass dome stretches over the room full of tangles trees and plants. Shadowy skyscrapers are barely visible through the condensation.

Scarlet runs through the room, sweat appearing on her forehead.

She bursts through the double doors on the other side and into-Illustrations by MINH NGUYEN/The Stanford Daily

To see the rest of the script, please visit our website.

COMMITTING PATRICIDE, or A Letter to a Young Sprout

By Sam Weyen

S

COLUMNIST

am Weyen, former Stanford Tree and monthly Daily columnist, lies dead at my feet, if only metaphorically. Sam is the final victim of the bloodiest Tree Week on record, won this year by yours truly. The twoweek selection process for the most highbrow and downright fearsome mascot in the world is more than a simple audition. It’s a fight to the death.

Picture a gladiatorial royal rumble where the only weapons are your personality, own hands and however many teeth you happen to have left. Your competitor, an expert magician, is hard enough to keep locked down in his own right, let alone when your GPA and provisional registration status hop into the ring with steel chairs, accompanied by an academic advisor close behind wondering why you still haven’t declared by your winter quarter of junior year. Just when you think you’ve handled those three, the magician’s back and goddamnit he took YOUR idea and is using it against you.

Sure, it does involve his father but you thought of it first, you think. Just the first setback of many.

Those two weeks take everything you have, physically and metaphysically.

The only goal? Not to provide simple entertainment for the masses, but instead to prove yourself to the One. Above all the mayhem sits the Tree, this year named Sam. You may think he’s an easy man to impress. A little thirst for your own urine here, a funny little skit and dance there, maybe a cold, non-alcoholic brewski of the root variety and you’re in, right? Not the case.

You see, the Tree is more than a mascot. The Tree is the core of one’s identity, the thing that gives us meaning and purpose. To remove the Tree from the man is to remove his very soul. Without the Tree, Sam Weyen is no more than a worthless, colorblind sack of bad jokes and Hamilton lyrics. Much like the Stadium Grille in Tresidder, nobody wants him. He’s sailing out on a boat for like four months just to avoid the shame of showing his ugly mug here ever again. How on earth did I convince him to give it all up?

In order to have a successful Tree Week, you must outlast not only your opponents but the Tree themselves. You’ve got to convince them to gift their most valued treasure to you, of all people. You’ve got to commit patricide, and not only that but your victim has to like it. Think

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

praying mantises mating. The male knows he’s going to get eaten by the partner, but he goes for it anyway. This is essentially what you’ve got to talk the current Tree into doing. Why on earth should I let you cut off my head in a year’s time?

I’m probably going to have to take a fifth year anyway, so why the hell should I let you be Tree instead of keeping it for myself? I can’t even imagine a world in which I agree to any of these terms, but by the end of Tree Week 2018 I better.

You better make for me the kind of movie I’d give a 10/10 and beg to pay movie popcorn prices for to see again, or else.

Let me tell you what I did, just to give you an idea of where to start. I flew to Tijuana, snuck back into the U.S. and hitchhiked back to campus in less than 24 hours. I didn’t even have the thought until two hours before the flight, and I wanted to start in Mexico City, but unfortunately I had other stunts to do and so little time. I ate two-week-old spaghetti covered in PineSol and MiracleGro that I had scraped off the concrete the day after another stunt. I spent 30 hours a week all quarter watching everything from baseball to water polo and gymnastics. I went through every torture in the CIA handbook and more, just to prove I couldn’t be cracked. I built a full 18-hole miniature golf course in the library, complete with a windmill and waterfall, and

kept building until Sam told me to stop. I went straight for his heart and got him a basketball signed by the whole men’s team with the message “We miss you.” I made him smile and beg for me to cut his head off and drink the blood that spewed forth out of hope that it would make me stronger. I made him like it.

I’m here, sitting on a Kurosawan throne of blood of my own creation, crafted from the soulless bodies of Sam Weyen, the magician and my mediocre transcript. Their spines support mine and their arms are my armrests. I’m here, reveling in my still-fresh victory and accompanying Treedom, looking forward to the year I still have ahead of me. And who am I? I’m Chef, but you can call me King Tree. When you see me dancing on the field or on the court, know that I own it, and look on me with envy. When you first think to yourself that you dare to want to be Tree next year, know that I am it and that you’ve got to take it. Know that I earned it. Know that you’ll have to, too. Hop into the arena and make it yours, and own those two weeks. Show us what you’ve got. You’ve got a year to prepare, so shape up young sprout, and I might just be swayed yet.

Make me smile when I hand you that axe.

Contact Sam Weyen — er, well… Tyler Clark at clarkta@stanford.edu.

31

PARTY PLATFORM

By DAVID STEINBERG CONTRIBUTOR

Across 1. White House staffer 5. Hinged fastener 9. App developers’ starting points 11. Set of beliefs 12. Shortcut in Excel 13. Shrek and Fiona, e.g.

14. “NOW I get it!”

15. Bathroom, to a Brit 17. Have late night, say 18. Small privates?

21. When some frat parties end 22. ‘70s feminist Bella 25. “Jump into Santa’s lap!”

29. With 30-Across, Friday night activity suggested by this puzzle 30. See 29-Across 31. Phenomenon such as hearing colors 35. Scheduled to arrive 36. ___ Ketchum (Pokemon kid) 39. 2016 Big Game losers 40. Key that indents 43. Sarcastic meme about our 44th president 46. Wander around 47. Hawaiian instruments, for short 48. Cool factor

52. Falcons’ home city 53. Chem class component 55. Not very lit 56. The Beatles’ ___ Pepper 59. “Go figure!”

62. Super Smash Bros. ___ 63. Like a dirty chimney 64. Wheel holders 65. Monopoly purchase

Down 1. Target, as a target 2. Montana neighbor 3. Tooth problem 4. Place for an AirPod 5. Big pig 6. Survey option 7. ___ campaign 8. Some are checkered 10. “Farewell” 11. Syllables after “Zip a Dee” 16. World Cup cheer 19. Got gross, as milk 20. “Over here, over here!”

22. Crunch targets 23. Queen ___ (“Lemonade” artist, lovingly) 24. Kind of Buddhism 26. Opposite of neg.

27. Prefix with brow or corn 28. Tiger Woods’s org.

32. What vacuums do 33. Earl Grey and others 34. Hawaiian city whose name contains Hawaii’s postal code 36. Gillette razor 37. SImps performance 38. Enjoy playing 29-/30-Across?

40. Try one’s hand at 29-/30-Across?

41. Iowa college city 42. Low voice 44. Mama bird’s home 45. Soft kick in kickball 49. Songs in your parents’ playlist, probably 50. Primary CS method 51. Catch in a net 53. Capital of Peru 54. Green credit card, for short

57. Golden ___ Bridge 58. Letters after g2g 60. “Go figure!”

61. “___ Good” (2016 Drake hit)

Solution on page 2.

Contact David Steinberg at davids19@stanford.edu.