The Stanford Daily Magazine Vol. III Issue 4 (04.04.19)

MAGAZINE VOLUME III

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ISSUE IV

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APRIL 4, 2019

Where do Stanford students go if they’ve attempted suicide? p. 16

POPULISM p. 8

RELIGION p. 21

DATING p. 31Issue 4 | 1

The Stanford Daily MAGAZINE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Claire Wang EXECUTIVE EDITOR Anna-Sofia Lesiv MAGAZINE EDITORS Katie Keller, Elizabeth Lindqwister MANAGING EDITORS Amir Abou-Jaoude, Chloe Barreau, Ellie Bowen, Michael Espinosa, Claire Francis, Dylan Grosz, Julia Ingram, Jacob Kuppermann, Karen Kurosawa, Miranda Li, Elizabeth Lindqwister, Jackie O’Neil, Evan Peng, Bobby Pragada, Ashwin Ramaswami, Leily Rezvani, Alejandro Salinas, Erin Woo LAYOUT Shirley Cai, Harry Cole, Maya Harris, Yifei He, Sarah Kim, Miranda Li, Anna Manafova, Annie Ng, Cathy Yang

news 8

POPULISM & TRUMP Ellie Bowen explores how Donald Trump’s unique politics fit into the rise of populism around the globe.

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CODE 5150 Gillian Brassil takes an intimate look at the experiences of students hospitalized for suicide attempts.

arts & life 4

RAPPER-WRESTLER “VII” Jacob Kupperman profiles Gabriel Townsell, a varsity wrestler who is making a name for himself in the world of rap.

BUSINESS MANAGER Regan Pecjak AD SALES MANAGER Evan Gonzales DIRECTOR OF ALUMNI DEVELOPMENT Arianna Lombard

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opinions 21 REVEALING RELIGION Melina Walling reflects on Stanford students’ diverse experiences navigating religion and spirituality at a secular university.

Volume III, Issue IV

sports 13

SOCCER STANDOUTS Daniel Martinez-Krams follows two all-star seniors on the women’s soccer team as they enter the world of professional soccer together.

the grind 28

MILLENNIAL DATING

Alanna Flores comments on the commodification of romance that apps like Tinder have brought to millennial dating.

creative 26 LIGHTROOM Discover the wildlife of the Stanford ecosystem through Jules Wyman and Syler PeraltaRamos’s stunning nature photography.

Syler Peralta-Ramos / The Stanford Daily

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CARTOONS Check out Julia Gong’s tongue-incheek takes on national politics and campus life.

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CROSSWORD Solve an all-new crossword by none other than the puzzle master himself, Grant Coalmer.

Issue 4 | 3

VII S E V E N

W

HEN GABRIEL TOWNSELL ’20 ARRIVED at The Stanford Daily building, he was wearing Mac Miller’s face on his shirt. For the 21-year-old, Stanford-via-West-Side-Chicago rapper, wrestler and political science student, Mac’s music has always been a guiding light for his own. And in listening to Townsell, who raps and produces under the name VII (pronounced “seven”), it’s easy to see how he was influenced by the late Pittsburgh rapper.

The similarity is not just in the sound itself. Though VII’s third album Marketable Melancholy, which came out in June, handles as eclectic a span of styles as Mac’s 2018 release, Swimming, the true point of comparison between the two, is in the joy in their music. It’s their joy for music as well as a childlike creativity and enthusiasm for artistic experimentation that shines through, no matter what emotions they’re rapping about.

Over the past few years, VII has built an impressive resume both at Stanford and his native Chicago — one that speaks to an artistic spirit and skill beyond his years, fueled by a dedication to his craft and a relentless pursuit of new creative avenues.

You may have seen him performing at Blackfest in 2018, where he opened for 2 Chainz; he competed in the Stanford Concert Network’s Battle of the Bands in January of this year and he was featured at Kairos’ Wine and Cheese night in November. Maybe you’ve heard the two mixtapes he dropped on SoundCloud this summer in addition to Marketable Melancholy.

But even if you haven’t heard of VII yet, he’s making one hell of a case for himself this year, bringing a blend of hardedged, lyrical rap, amped-up trap-influenced flows and surprisingly tender rhythm and blues hooks and production.

This all establishes him as a sort of rap game polymath, able to deliver consistently over a full album but also wow you in each individual, devastating track.

Courtesy of Thomas Lau

Wonders: Streams of Consciousness

In fact, a single, powerful track is how VII got his breakthrough making music in the first place. But even before he released his debut single in the summer of 2016, which has racked up around 100 thousand plays on SoundCloud since its release, Townsell was ready to rap.

Townsell had always had a connection to music, with everything from rap to gospel to Cuban jazz drifting between the walls of the Chicago home where he grew up. And from a young age, Townsell has had synesthesia: a perceptual condition where you see music as colors. That musical environment led to a few early attempts at writing rap lyrics. Townsell says that by the time he was 10 or 11, he was writing verses that were “structurally sound.” But his route to making music was a circuitous one.

When Townsell started high school, his main focus wasn’t music but instead wrestling, the sport in which he still competes as part of Stanford’s NCAA team. His gateway into the world of professional rap was actually his school’s slam poetry team. Though he casually participated in school-wide poetry slams in his first few years of high school — even winning one in his sophomore year — it took a very direct intervention to get him seriously onto the path that would lead him to the rap game. As he arrived at weight training for wrestling one day, Townsell found himself almost ambushed by the spoken word team’s coach, who had shown up early to his practice

to recruit him personally. That dedication was enough to convince Townsell to join. In his own words, “If you put in that much effort, I might as well.”

That appreciation for effort is key to understanding Townsell’s strengths in everything that he does. He doesn’t think he’s put out a bad verse yet — bad songs, sure (he recounts a particularly uninspired, sitar-heavy beat that he once did a feature on with a grimace) — but it’s never for lack of trying on his part. Yet such a claim doesn’t feel arrogant coming from him; it literally sounds earned — the product of a thorough education in the art of rap.

VII’s education didn’t just come from listening to rap — though he can certainly rattle off a list of his influences, from established legends like André 3000 and Lil Wayne to local heroes like Lupe Fiasco, Saba and Noname. It instead came from actually putting in the work, from joining his high school slam poetry team’s “Hip-Hop Wing” and meticulously developing his own cadences from a rap-oriented style into true flows. He made the switch because of how natural the fit was — he says that Adam Levin, who would be his mentor there, told him that “he was already rapping anyways.”

In Hip-Hop Wing, Townsell spent hours upon hours freestyling and writing under the tutelage of Levin (who raps under the name DefCee), who Townsell describes as “one of the best underground rappers in the city of Chicago.” With Levin, Townsell refined his writing skills and excelled by all measures. He

would deliver 32 bars of rap when an exercise called for 16 — an example of his talent for writing “unnecessarily fast,” as he puts it.

Levin was the first person who seriously encouraged VII to actually get in the booth and record his music after seeing his promise in 2015-or-so. A few features followed — verses that showcase a young performer still developing his confidence in his own lyrics.

But it took the protests in the summer of 2016 over the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minnesota to get VII to release his first solo record: “Stream of Consciousness.”

“Stream of Consciousness” is a three minute showcase for VII, a simple beat — just a piano melody and some hard drums for most of its runtime — that he sprawls hardhitting lyrics over. He made the song in the heat of a passionate, righteous rage, inspired by seeing “Black women in a situation of strength, juxtaposed with people who have on armor, riot shields.” The track’s title reflects his state of mind — he estimates he wrote it in “five, seven minutes.”

Yet he’s poised throughout, stringing together bars that link his personal ambitions and the threat of racist violence with a sophisticated precision that belies his youth: “I love America but feel the need to question cops / I wonder if they gave me 16 shots, would my 16s live / when my limp knees dropped?”

But “Stream of Consciousness” finds its peak when VII chooses to let other voices do the talking. When the song’s outro begins, he lets the voices of the police protests that inspired

Gabriel Townsell

on Rap, Wrestling and Life

by Jacob Kuppermann Issue 4 | 5

his music speak: “I have lost three brothers to this, sir. This is not alright! I’m hurting. You see my eyes? My people out here hurting!”

The creative process underlying “Stream of Consciousness” and its ensuing success ultimately inspired Townsell to take rapping seriously. In the two years following the track’s release, he’s delivered on its promise, releasing hours upon hours of music on SoundCloud and Spotify. He’s developed his technical skills as well, improving as not only a rapper but also an engineer and a producer. While he doesn’t produce all of his tracks alone — he credits a network of producers, including Noah Anderson ’20, for many of his beats — he always makes sure to tweak his songs and bring out the parts of them that correspond best to the verses he’s written: another sign of his critical consciousness about his music.

An eclectic formula Part of what made me interested in talking with Townsell in the first place was the divide between Gabriel Townsell — the Pac-

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12, All-Academic Second Team wrestler — and VII the rapper. But when I ask how he balances the demands of the notoriously, memetically strenuous life of a student-athlete with his rapid rate of music production, Townsell cuts me off.

“It doesn’t take that much effort,” he says breezily.

He doesn’t see rap as an obligation in the same way school or athletics is. Instead, he sees it like how many of us would see playing video games or pleasure reading.

“If I want to relax, I can write,” he explains simply.

And it’s that attitude that allowed VII to amass an impressive catalog of songs in remarkable time. It took him just above two years to release everything from “Stream of Consciousness” to his most recent single, “FALL $LOW.” In total, that’s more than four hours of music across more than 70 songs on a half-dozen projects. Just this summer, he’s released three full projects: the two “CHiCO DeBARS” mixtapes plus Marketable Melancholy.

That project stands as not only VII’s most impressive work but also as a legitimately impressive artistic statement in the world of rap today: a rap album above 12 songs whose length feels earned rather than tacked on.

That was intentional, as he recalls.

“I couldn’t afford to make a 25 song project — I’m not Lil Wayne,” he said.

He instead had to make hard choices in narrowing down the track listing for MM — each one of the album’s 17 tracks has a purpose, both on their own and in the context of the record’s broader concept. He makes clear to me that he wanted to make a project that wasn’t just a collection of songs.

“The concept came first,” he said with a certain finality to it.

VII only had the luxury of cutting songs from Marketable Melancholy because of the sheer volume of music he produces, day-in and day-out. He’s almost industrial in his production levels at this point. He says he has the problem of “too many beats,” with 60 or so on his phone alone, which allows him to be selective in the ones he spits over. Even so, he spends a couple hours each day rapping and recording after practice. His process usually starts from the beat, rapping and feeling his verses out until he has a solid lyrical foundation. After recording the tracks themselves, he plays around with plugins and mixes the tracks at least four times, taking hours just to perfect the sound of a given song. It’s a dedication that pays off. Despite his limited resources, VII’s tracks sound as polished as any major label release.

Despite his work ethic and dedication to his craft, VII isn’t a self-serious rapper in the backpacker mold. He’s quick to a joke or drop a hot take as we talk, opining on everything from A$AP Rocky’s disappointing year (“He’s the Carmelo Anthony of rap”) to Drake’s feud with Pusha T (On Drake’s “Duppy Freestyle:” “If you sound disappointed, you can just lie [and get away with it]”) to certain controversial musicians from his hometown of Chicago (no guesses as to who, but you’ve probably heard a lot about his misdeeds from certain documentaries that came out over winter break).

But the topic that VII has the most takes on is himself. He’s an artist at a crossroads, sure enough in his abilities to sample beats from rappers as established and diverse as Lil Wayne and Lil Pump and uniquely incorporate them in his mixtapes; yet, he’s young enough to continue experimenting and tweaking his sound. After improving his sing-

Courtesy of John P. Lozano/isiphotos.com

ing and R&B production on Marketable Melancholy’s first half, he’s interested in bringing more influences from rock and punk into his music. He shouts out the late Lil Peep, who bridged the divide between third-wave emo and SoundCloud rap for making “inspiring” music that didn’t force the connection to rock but instead came to it naturally as well as Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, whom he has listened to since childhood.

To VII, it’s not enough to just look like a rock star: “Any rapper can do that if they just want to be edgy for some reason.” As with all things, Townsell’s dedication to sonic experimentation is all about putting the effort in.

As for his own future, Townsell has a lot to look forward to.

While he plans to slow his VII releases as the wrestling season ramps up through the winter (he dropped “FALL $LOW” — a single — on New Year’s Day to tide people over), he’s got big plans come spring: a three-part project, seven songs each, simply entitled VII as a shout out to the 773 area code of his hometown in Chicago. He thinks it will be his most cohesive and polished project yet. Half or more of the songs are already near-finished, giving him ample time to perfect them before release.

After VII drops, the future is wide open for Townsell. He plans to keep rapping for years to come, through Olympic training cycles and a few years wrestling post-college — and maybe even into his plans for law school. Despite all these non-musical ambitions, he’s not entirely opposed to the idea of eventually pursuing a full-time, professional rap career. He notes, with a laugh, that he’s already come further in rap than he ever thought he would. And with his potential and dedication, there’s no doubt Townsell will end up successful — whether in rap, wrestling or whatever he puts his mind to.

He’s sure of himself, with a confidence that’s contagious: “There’s no version of me that isn’t doing what I’m doing now.”

Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm@stanford.edu.

Courtesy of Thomas Lau

Issue 4 | 7

Stanford scholars Francis Fukuyama, Russell Berman, Jack Rakove, and Ivรกn Jaksic unpack parallels between Trumpism and populism

By Ellie Bowen 8 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255 SHEALAH CRAIGHEAD / The White House

A

MIDST THE FRENZY AND politicking that has come to define much of Donald Trump’s presidency, whether it be the buzz surrounding the 35 day government shutdown or the latest Twitter fight, there exists the resurgence of a political “tendency” that has existed throughout history: that of populism. Populism generally refers to a political sentiment wherein ordinary people feel ignored by the establishment and the elite, but it is a difficult term to precisely define, even for experts. The Daily interviewed a few such experts, including political scientists and historians Francis Fukuyama, Russell Berman, Iván Jaksic and Jack Rakove, to unpack the ambiguities surrounding populism. The professors took a step back from the tumult of today’s politics to situate this trend in its broader historical context.

From Brexit in the U.K. to the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil, the rising Trumpian breed of nationalistic populism fits within an international trend. Browse the oped pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post and you are bound to encounter a plethora of articles comparing Trump to various historical figures notorious for their demagoguery, be they Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, or even Hitler.

The implications of these comparisons are manifold, but equally telling are their divergences. The lack of consensus on exactly who Trump’s closest historical analogue is reveals the difficulty in drawing such parallels and the uncertainty Trump’s actions have elicited from political commentators across the spectrum.

Regardless of which comparison is most apt, if Trump were indeed a figure whose legislative decisions aligned with any historical precedent, predicting the outcomes and lasting impact of his presidency would be far easier.

However, the Stanford historians and political scientists with whom The Daily spoke nearly unanimously contend that Trump really cannot be compared to anyone. They also question both the longevity and solidity of the populist political tendencies we see today, even hesitating to label them as proper political “movements.”

Trump defies historical parallels “There’s never been a successful figure

in American politics who you can compare to Trump,” said Jack Rakove, professor of history, political science and, by courtesy, law.

Russell Berman, professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and senior fellow at the Hoover institution, agreed, saying that Trump “doesn’t map neatly onto any one person.”

Berman did point out that Trump’s relatively isolationist approach to foreign policy in an age of globalization parallels that of Obama. Comparatively, both the Clinton and Bush administrations were more willing to enter into violent conflict overseas (in Yugoslavia for the former and Iraq for the latter), whereas Obama was not — Trump, too, has worked thus far to pull troops out of overseas engagements.

Berman added that historical analogies often lack contextual completeness. A scholar of German studies, he pointed to the common comparison of Trump to Hitler as one such unsound parallel, saying that it reflects a “lack of recognition of the vitality of American institutions.”

“I can’t think of any case … where the Hitler government wanted to do something and it was stopped by courts, or where the Reichstag was able to block it,” Berman noted.

After the economic disaster of the Weimar Republic in Germany, which marked a period of unprecedented inflation, anti-democratic parties within the Reichstag were able to halt parliamentary work and invoke emergency powers in order to further their agenda. Many have argued that this ability to obstruct Parliament is part of what enabled fascism to gain a stronghold in what would soon become Nazi Germany.

Trump, contrastingly, is often stopped from capitalizing on some of his more dangerous ideas by America’s institutionalized system of checks and balances, be they the courts or Congress or the Senate.

Iván Jaksic, professor of history and director of Bing Overseas Studies in Chile, likewise emphasized the strength of America’s institutions, with the many checks and balances of government, in withstanding drastic swings in one particular political direction. The vitality of America’s political institutions, Jaksic believes, allows it to accommodate turns to the right and left without losing its liberal democratic center.

Courtesy of Iván Jaksic Stanford professor Iván Jaksic

Courtesy of Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Stanford professor Jack Rakove

Jaksic, an expert in Latin America history, drew comparisons between the rhetoric in populist-driven, nationalistic movements in countries like Nicaragua and Chile — led by the Somozas in the late 1960s and Pinochet during the 1970s, respectively — and the rhetoric in America today. However, he again underscored that the parallels often drawn are not wholly apt due to America’s unique institutional factors and history of liberalism.

Still, Jaksic contended that the populist rhetoric and the “politics of fear” that we see in America are a little too similar to those of many nationalistic and dictatorial leaders in Latin America for comfort.

Referring to such figures as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, whose authoritarian hand has wreaked havoc on the Venezuelan economy and people, he said this particular and eerily familiar brand of leadership should not be underestimated.

In dealing with the economy and other Issue 4 | 9

issues in Venezuela, Maduro caters to the whims of the people as opposed to guiding principles, something Jaksic calls the “politics of pandering” and argues is present in all populist movements.

One example of the “politics of pandering” in the Trump administration has been the debacle with the wall on the southern border, a policy push by Trump which many believe reflected a desire to appease a portion of his base that felt threatened by immigration. This led to an unprecedented government shutdown that cost the U.S economy $3 billion.

Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, discussed the political underpinnings of the government shutdown, arguing that while it played to Trump’s base, it may have ultimately made him look bad. “I think if he were a more clever politician … he wouldn’t have wasted all that political capital doing something like that,” Fukuyama said.

Commentators also have drawn comparisons between the two leaders’ contempt for formal and informal norms of constitutional government — though Maduro’s efforts to pack the Venezuelan Supreme Court with his political supporters and rewrite the Constitution entirely exceed Trump’s threat of invoking emergency powers to build the wall via executive order. “[Political pandering] is the failure of populist movements,” Jaksic told The Daily.

“Like Venezuela — that’s a road to disaster.

I mean, you do need some self-discipline.”

After concluding rather decisively that Trump could not be accurately compared, the scholars were each asked to explore concepts in 21st century populism, in an

Courtesy of Francis Fukuyama Stanford professor Francis Fukuyama .

10 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255

attempt to unpack the term’s ambiguity and to shed light on the current political moment.

‘Politics of anger’ Populism is an intrinsically nebulous term, one that Rakove believes is an example of the problem of the “inflation of political language,” wherein a political term comes to mean almost anything, and as a result, substantively nothing at all. Other professors agree that it’s not only a hard term to define, but also a difficult one to apply.

“It’s an ambiguous term about movements that are themselves ideologically ambiguous,” Berman said.

Despite the vagueness of the term, Berman did not deem it accurate to describe the era of Trump as a historical movement in line with the populist movements of the past. Instead, he characterized Trump’s rise as evidence of a “neo-populist potential” within America today, which he does not think will come to full fruition, as he thinks it will be unable to gain a stronghold due to America’s two-party system.

In Europe, this is not the case. The pluriparty capacity of the European system has allowed for populist movements to blossom in many countries there, as evidenced

by Italy’s “Five Star Movement,” France’s “Rassemblement National,” Greece’s “Syriza,” or Spain’s “Podemos,” for example. This phenomenon, which Berman ties to antiglobalization sentiment, encompasses all sides of the political spectrum.

“We’ve only been saved from that kind of European outcome by our two-party system,” Berman said. “[It’s] so hard for a third party to get traction here.”

According to Berman, another significant feature of this phenomenon is a harsh anti-elite and anti-establishment mentality, which aligns ideologically with prior populist movements. While we definitely see these attitudes in America, these alone do not make for a definitive movement, which is why Berman characterizes today as harboring a “neo-populist potential,” as opposed to the much stronger breed of populism we see in some European countries.

Jaksic thinks this anti-elite sentiment is a large part of what allowed Trump to mobilize previously disengaged voters, such as blue collar workers, and win the election in 2016. However, he predicts that as a result of how Trump’s

Courtesy of Russell Berman Stanford professor Russell Berman

policies have unfolded, the very populace Trump mobilized in 2016 may be the mass that kicks him out of office in 2020.

In particular, Jaksic thinks that the economic effects of the trade war with China and the Trump administration’s extreme hardlining on immigration policy will harm the coalition that voted for him in the first place. Both policies, Jaksic believes, will lead to general economic hardship in the U.S., hardship which will inevitably weigh heaviest on the middle-class bluecollar workers who constituted a plurality of Trump’s base in 2016. Additionally, voters from rural areas who rely on export industries for their incomes are particularly hard hit by the president’s actions on trade.

“It’s like a backlash,” Jaksic said. “[The 2020 winner] will — broadly — probably be somebody young. Probably a woman. And probably either Latino or African American.”

Berman thinks we will see the effects of this sooner than 2020.

“In the second half of Trump’s term, with a democratic Congress, it would not surprise me if he were to pivot to the left,” Berman said. “Because in that he could still speak to his base.”

Although not explicitly, Berman’s hypothesis connects to Jaksic’s idea of Trump’s “politics of pandering.” However, Berman emphasized that this is more so based upon the “political ambiguity inherent in populism,” which allows a populist-type leader to promote whichever policies his constituency asks him to promote. In this way, Berman sees the “populist potential” in the U.S. as capable of transcending left and right party lines.

In a broader sense, Berman sees this draw towards populist-esque policies and toxic political polemic in America as a symptom

of broader concerns with inequality and skepticism toward globalization.

While globalization and free trade have certainly generated lots of wealth for the U.S., they have done so in a disparate fashion, and many scholars agree that inequality has grown as a result.

The risks of a globalized economy were starkly revealed in the aftermath of the housing crisis of 2008, whose disastrous effects bled to virtually every corner of the globe and revealed the not-so-rosy side of globalized economics. Berman argued that these economic forces likely contributed to the desire for a more nationally-focused economy that we see today.

To Berman, the effects of both the pullback from globalization and the cultural appeal of populism were also very clear in the results of the 2016 election. “There was a populist revolt against the party establishment [in both parties],” Berman said. “And in one party, that populist revolt won, and in one party that populist revolt was crushed, and the party in which the populist revolt won is the one that won the election.”

Fukuyama echoed Berman’s sentiments, adding that there’s a cultural identity element to the discourse as well, largely in response to immigration increases in recent years. “In many countries there has been a similar [populist tendency],” Fukuyama said. “Especially on the part of people that didn’t benefit from globalization, who feel that they’re being displaced by immigrants and foreigners.”

Fukuyama, who wrote about this topic in his book “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment,” went on to say that the populist tendency we are seeing extends beyond economic causes and seeps into identity politics. Questions of identity used to be predominantly addressed and championed by populist movements on the left, Fukuyama argued, but today we are seeing more and more right-wing populists take up these issues.

“That whole framing and rhetoric has now moved over to the right,” Fukuyama argued.

“You get white nationalists now who say, ‘We are being pushed aside by minorities, our rights as Americans are not being respected, and the elites are looking down on us.’”

Fukuyama questioned why, even in light of the economic motivations behind

this phenomenon, the left-wing populist movement did not end up dominating the government with people like Bernie Sanders and movements like “Occupy Wall Street.”

To Fukuyama, the answer is obvious: cultural divisions among the American populace were an equal, if not more powerful motive for political action, and help to explain the Trump vote in 2016. He also asserted that in the period since the financial crisis, right wing populism has been much better organized and more forceful than left wing populism.

“The right wing populists speak to these cultural and identity issues in a way that the left wing populists don’t really do,” Fukuyama said.

Berman agreed with Fukuyama’s assessment, adding that oftentimes coinciding with populism’s social agenda is a xenophobic, anti-other mentality.

“This is sad to say, but one feature of populism also historically has been some kind of hostility toward others — toward minorities — and sometimes nativism,” Berman added. “And if intolerance toward minorities is a feature of populism, it’s well distributed across the spectrum.”

To Fukuyama, this nativist sentiment, combined with the extreme polarization of issues, is malignant.

“I work a lot on immigration reform issues, and because of this stupid wall of his, that issue has become so toxic for people,” Fukuyama lamented. “I think it’s going to be years before we can get back to a kind of reasonable discussion of how we can reform

our immigration system.”

Jaksic asserted that this shift in rhetoric is motivated by what he describes as “white rage.” He characterized the populism we see in America today as one without principles, and as such also questioned whether or not it could be labeled as a movement. “‘Make America Great Again’ is not a principle,” Jaksic said. “It’s a politics of anger, and it’s a politics of pandering.”

‘This is what it sounds like’ The internet has lead to the increased democratization of voices in public discourse, a fact which many scholars agree has fueled the “populist tendencies” of many modern political candidates.

It also has academics considering the long term effects of this shift in dialogue.

“There’s nothing wrong with people’s voices being heard in this unfiltered way,” Fukuyama said. “The problem is that the internet can be easily weaponized by people that don’t necessarily share democratic values.”

Fukuyama asserted that this problem extends beyond the question of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to everyday people in the U.S who are able to propagate conspiracy theories and misinformation that “20 years ago would have been relegated to the complete fringes of the political discourse.”

Berman pointed out that the traditional “gatekeepers of allowable opinion,” such as The New York Times or The Washington Post, have lost the power to control the scope of political discourse, just one effect of the populistic, anti-elite sentiment we see in America today. “[The internet] was going to give everybody a voice,” Berman said. “And you know what? It did that. And this is what it sounds like.”

Of course, many worry about false news being propagated through internet channels.

Criticism of both journalism institutions and regular people spreading misinformation abounds. In these debates over fake news, Berman says he is much more concerned with the potential risks of censorship, and the subliminal or overt values embedded in censored material, than he is with deciphering fact from fiction online for himself.

“Censorship is not value free,” Berman said. “So instead of being able to hear every Issue 4 | 11

nut, I’m only going to be able to hear the nuts that Mark Zuckerberg approves of.”

To make ethical decisions on what kind of content they allow on their platforms, many tech companies create regulatory frameworks to help them decipher what falls within the bounds of acceptable content. These regulatory frameworks — from Facebook’s controversial comment moderator to WhatsApp’s viral message forwarding mechanisms — are now ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, but their presence is not going unnoticed, as it is often a damaging one.

In recent months, these companies have faced heavy criticism about the burgeoning negative effects of their regulatory frameworks. The regulatory policies of these companies go awry sometimes as a result of biased algorithms, sometimes as a result of negligence, and almost always as a result of attempting to occupy a role they were never meant to occupy: as the arbiters of free speech.

Facebook’s comment moderation framework, for example, mistakenly shut down a fundraising appeal for volcano victims in Indonesia, but allowed a prominent extremist group in Myanmar to maintain their page, despite being accused of instigating genocide. In addition to Whatsapp’s viral forwarding mechanism, which makes it easy to rapidly send information to vast amounts of people, the application’s encryption also makes it difficult to track where misinformation is stemming from. This became a huge issue during Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil, when targeted messages about his opponent were blasted to who knows how many people — perhaps hundreds of thousands, or even millions. Many speculate they came from Bolsonaro himself, but due to the aforementioned encryption it’s virtually impossible to trace the origin of

the messages.

As serious as these problems of election interference and Facebook page moderation are, regulatory frameworks have led to even worse issues, such as mob violence in India, where a number of murders have been linked to the spreading of fake news on WhatsApp by Hindu nationalists amidst growing anti-Muslim sentiment.

To Berman, the solution boils down to educating the next generation to be critical readers, whose digital literacy will help them cut through all of the false information.

And despite the concerns about information dissemination, many of which are stirred by Trump’s nearconstant denunciations of the “fake news media,” the professors with whom the

Daily spoke do not think, by any means, that the internet is going to indelibly change the political landscape to be a populist-centered one.

“My suspicion, and I would say certainly my hope, is that it is a temporary glitch,” Fukuyama said. “You’re already seeing some pushback against this populist tendency … in the midterm election here in November.”

Jaksic says it all comes down to critical evaluation and mobilizing people to vote, especially young people. “I’m confident — not complacent — but confident that the U.S. has the traditions and the institutions to get back to what has been … a very consistent trend towards the middle, towards the center,” Jaksic said.

Under the microscopic vision of the present, it can feel like we will never escape the battleground that is our current political landscape. But taking a historical lens on the political issues that we are facing today is at once reassuring and humbling: reassuring because the more alarming parallels to historical figures and populist movements that people are drawing to the Trump administration seem not to hold; and humbling because it draws our attention to the systemic problems that got us here, such as prejudice and inequality, and reveal how much further America still has to go.

President Trump casts himself as a nontraditional, unprecedented figure.

Perhaps, then, there is something to please both the president himself and his opposition in the conclusion of some of Stanford’s deepest political thinkers: Trump is the first president of his kind, and may well be the last — until the cycles of history turn again.

Contact Ellie Bowen at ebowen@stanford. edu.

Courtesy of Pexels

12 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255

From Cagan Stadium to the Washington Spirit: A tale of two teammates

by Daniel Martinez-Krams

F

ROM THE podium at the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) draft, two Stanford teammates had something very similar to say.

“It’s always been my dream to play professional soccer,” said Jordan DiBiasi ’19.

“It has been a childhood dream of mine to be playing professional soccer,” echoed Tegan McGrady ’19.

DiBiasi and McGrady are two of the five members of the Mob: Stanford women’s soccer’s class of 2019. Joined by fellow seniors Averie Collins, Alana Cook and Michelle Xiao, the five have led the Cardinal to a dominant 82-6-5 record over the past four seasons.

After four years together, DiBiasi, the third overall pick in the draft, and McGrady, the seventh overall pick, walked the stage of the National Women’s Soccer League collegiate draft in Chicago as new members of the Washington Spirit. In a crowning moment, they walked away from the draft the same way they came in: as teammates.

But before they were luminaries, champions and leaders, the two were young children with dreams.

DiBiasi: Early success A native of Highlands Ranch, Colorado, DiBiasi played club soccer for the Colorado Rush, a member organization of the prestigious United States Soccer Development Academy (USDA) league. As a member of the USDA, DiBiasi could not play for her high school team. She names this as one of many sacrifices she made during her childhood in

her pursuit of excellence on the field.

“If you ask anyone on the Stanford team, they’ll say they sacrificed a lot growing up,” she said. “You sacrifice a lot of social events for soccer and that’s something that I will never regret.”

With the support of her parents, Wendy DiBiasi and Joe DiBiasi, her stepmother Kath Keen and older brother, Joseph, DiBiasi excelled while playing for youth national teams. She was a two-time National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) Youth All-American and captained her club team to the 2011 Elite Clubs National League title.

“I’m just really thankful that with every sacrifice I’ve had to make, I’ve had the support of my family,” she said.

In high school, as she approached the decision about her next four years, DiBiasi had a simple philosophy.

“My approach was, ‘I want to go the the best program possible and work my hardest to get the opportunity to play,’” she said.

DiBiasi: Stanford journey Stanford’s storied history of women’s soccer excellence made joining the team an easy choice for DiBiasi. As a freshman, DiBiasi was joining a Stanford side that went 20-2-3 while advancing to the College Cup for their sixth time in seven years, and finishing with the No. 3 ranking.

DiBiasi’s four-year record is nothing short of remarkable. She started 91 of 93 possible games during her four years. As a freshman, she was on the Pac-12 All-Freshman Team.

As a sophomore, she was named All-Pac-12 honorable mention. As a junior, she was AllPac-12 second team while making the College

Cup All-Tournament team as Stanford won the national championship.

And as a captain her senior year, DiBiasi was All-America first team, a finalist for the MAC Hermann Trophy, United Soccer Coaches Scholar Player of the Year, Pac-12 Midfielder of the Year and for the first time, All-Pac-12 first team.

“You come into this tradition of excellence and from day one I wanted to work my hardest and leave my legacy on the program,” DiBiasi said. “As a soccer player, you’re around the best players in the world, training with them every single day. I don’t know how you don’t grow.”

And there was a lot of growing. DiBiasi started all 23 games in the midfield her freshman season, scoring five times after registering an assist for her first point. Her 0.186 shot on goal percentage was by far the lowest of her career, but she already showed flashes of the “clutch” player she would become, tallying her first four game winning goals.

Stanford’s assistant coaches, Hideki Nakada, Margueritte Aozasa and Kayley Sullivan were instrumental in helping DiBiasi realize that growth. “[The coaches] are so supportive of us as players and also as people,” said DiBiasi. “You don’t really have your parents here at college, obviously, so they’re kind of like your family.

To know that people care about you, that relationship is really special.”

This past season marked the completion of DiBiasi’s journey from standout freshman to fearless leader.

“I was really excited to be a captain this past year and I think in general my class has had Issue 4 | 13

a really big impact on this Stanford women’s soccer team, which is really exciting for us,” she reflected.

DiBiasi captained by example. “My mentality is a strength,” she said. “I always get asked, ‘Why do you score the clutch goals or what not?’ and I don’t know, I have no idea, but I guess I would attribute that success to just wanting my team to be so successful and to win.”

For DiBiasi, mental and emotional inputs are just as important as the outcome on the scoreboard. Despite a national championship title and myriad personal achievement awards to her name, DiBiasi says that the biggest win of her collegiate career came in the third round of the 2017 championship, when she rallied the team around their injured teammate, Michelle Xiao ’19, and scored the winning goal.

McGrady: Local excellence Hailing from the local city of San Jose, McGrady grew up playing for the Mountain View-Los Altos soccer club and her high school team, Santa Teresa. Like DiBiasi, McGrady says that she has also made significant sacrifices for the sport — but it was always clear to her that pursuing soccer at this level was the right decision.

Despite McGrady’s resolve, the sacrifices were often difficult to swallow.

“Missing high school dances, missing just those little things that at the time felt like the biggest thing in your life,” she said. “It’s decisions along the way and sacrifices you make, but in the end they all pay off if you really put the time and effort into them.”

Playing for the U-17 US Women’s National Team (USWNT) along with her high school team, sometimes even McGrady’s soccer career made it difficult for her to play soccer.

During her sophomore year, McGrady had played with the national team in matches that had not been properly cleared with her high school league. Her principal signed off, but the national team had not submitted the paperwork 30 days in advance, causing McGrady to be suspended from her high school team.

“That one was definitely one of the hardest things I’ve been through just because that was my sister’s last year of playing soccer in high school,” said McGrady. “My freshman and sophomore years were truly the only two years that I ever got to play soccer with her in an organized game.”

All of this meant McGrady and the rest of her team were punished for the mistakes of adults.

McGrady’s Santa Teresa team would have won the league title with a 14-2-2 record. However, the suspension also carried forfeits for the games she played in while ineligible and the team was 14 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255

dropped to 10-6-2.

Six years later, McGrady has come to see the episode in a new light.

“It’s something that we look back at now and laugh at because the team did still end up winning and it was something that showed that I wasn’t needed,” McGrady joked. “I think it allowed my team to grow as a whole too and for them to step up on their own.”

McGrady eventually found her way to Stanford. She only had to drive 30 minutes from her childhood home in San Jose, the home where a poster of the 2008 Stanford women’s soccer team decorates her room.

“Because we lived so close, [my parents] had season tickets along with many other family members and even family friends,” said McGrady. “I had the most amazing support during my time here at Stanford. My parents just about traveled to every single away game too.”

Across the 93 games she played, McGrady estimates her parents missed five.

“

It is a team that is out there every day putting in more work than you can imagine.

‘Ruthless’ -Tegan McGrady

”

A leader from the outset, McGrady’s commitment to her team often made it difficult to balance her academics with her demanding soccer schedule. “[The time commitment] makes you dial in on the things that you never thought you’d have to,” said McGrady. “I’ve caught myself turning in assignments right before practice is about to start.”

Of course, the extreme demands put on student-athletes are that much more intense in a program where winning the national championship has become an annual expectation of the fans, the media and the team itself.

She hates to be cliché, and she admits she’s borrowing from the documentary made about the 2017 National Champion team, but there was only one word that McGrady could use to describe the Stanford women’s soccer program: ruthless.

“Absolutely ruthless,” said McGrady. “It is a

team that is out there every day putting in more work than you can imagine into everything they do.”

That ruthlessness was on full display when Colorado — and its perfect record — came into Cagan for the team’s senior day this year.

Stanford scored seven goals. Colorado scored none.

“It’s amazing to have a team that can do that,” said McGrady. “Our team is big on leaving a legacy.”

Before the game, as the seniors were announced in front of their home crowd, families joined players on the field holding massive cardboard cutouts.

“It was all just another surreal moment that I will never forget,” said McGrady. “But it was a bittersweet moment knowing that it was one of the last times I would play with that class all together.”

Through all of their accomplishments on the field over the past four years, the Mob became a tight-knit support network who McGrady calls her best friends and her family.

According to McGrady, the Mob’s goal of creating a tradition of excellence informed their work on the field day in and day out.

“We were going to give 110 percent every day we went to practice — we were going to stand behind one another to make sure that this team did not fall,” McGrady reflected.

The draft DiBiasi set the stage for the day that she, McGrady and their other teammate, Tierna Davidson ’20, headed to the professional soccer draft. The three were filled with uncertainty, nerves and excitement as the event approached.

“The night before we kept getting notifications on our phones about these trades happening — potential trades — and so personally I had no idea where I was going to go, which was really exciting but also a little nerve-wracking,” remembered DiBiasi.

“Honestly, it’s kind of all a blur at this point,” added McGrady. “It was just a surreal feeling.”

“The next morning we showed up pretty early and it was this huge space and really professional,” DiBiasi said. “Everyone [was] pretty silent and every 10 minutes two coaches would go to the back room, kind of talk and come back and like 20 minutes later you’d find out there was a potential trade on the table.”

Luckily, but not surprisingly, DiBiasi had the support of her teammate.

“Tegan and I got to sit right next to each other during the draft, which was really helpful,” she remembered.

2 JIM SHORIN/isiphotos.com

1 JEREMY REPER/isiphotos.com

4 ERIN CHANG/isiphotos.com

3 David Bernal/isiphotos.com

5 JEREMY REPER/isiphotos.com

1. Tegan McGrady started and played all 90 minutes while tallying two shots on goal in Stanford’s 3-2 victory over Pac-12 rival UCLA in the 2017 national championship. 2. Tegan McGrady and Jordan DiBiasi celebrate McGrady’s assist during a freshman year matchup against Oregon State. 3. Jordan DiBiasi celebrates her game winning goal that lifted Stanford over Florida State in the third round of the 2017 NCAA tournament. 4. The Mob finished with an 82-6-5 record over the past four seasons, including a 7-0 win over Colorado on Senior Day. 5. Jordan DiBiasi, Averie Collins, and Tegan McGrady walk out of the tunnel ahead of their 2017 Semi-Final match against South Carolina in Orlando.

‘It was crazy’ Having been named U.S. Soccer’s 2018 Young Player of the Year, Davidson went to the Chicago Red Stars as the first pick in the draft, which DiBiasi said was highly anticipated.

Hailie Mace of UCLA heard her name next when she was drafted to the New Jersey-based Sky Blue FC. Then the Washington Spirit were on the clock to select a player.

“I didn’t know what to expect and all of a sudden I heard my name,” DiBiasi said. “There’s this video and my mouth just drops open, my dad’s mouth is dropped open and Tegan’s is dropped open.”

As the first person drafted who was in attendance, DiBiasi headed to the stage.

“I kind of knew what I wanted to say, like I knew there was a speech, but not really, so I went up and kind of blacked out,” recalled DiBiasi.

The Spirit had traded up to select DiBiasi, worried she would be unavailable by the time of their next pick. DiBiasi said seeing the team’s clear interest in her gave her that much more confidence.

“She definitely deserved that for the body of work she had at Stanford, there’s no doubt in my mind,” said Paul Ratcliffe, Stanford’s head coach.

“She’s a great soccer player and even better off the field and in the locker room, she’s a fantastic person.”

Of course, the Spirit also came away with McGrady.

“Hearing my name finally be called and getting to walk up on the stage and just meet everyone from the organization that I’ll be playing for was a surreal moment,” described McGrady. “Like I said in my speech, it was just something that I had dreamed of since I was a little girl.”

Like DiBiasi, McGrady said that her speech was quite “spur of the moment.”

One of the people she thanked in her speech was Ratcliffe. The feeling was certainly mutual.

“There are not many left backs that you’ll find that are dominant left-footed players with her kind of pace and her kind of ability,” said Ratcliffe. “I think she has a really strong future in the league and hopefully the national team in the future.”

For now, Ratcliffe can look on, proud and beaming.

With the knowledge that they will be reunited in the professional ranks, DiBiasi and McGrady can rest assured that their graduation from Stanford this year will not pull apart their fast

friendship.

“That girl, she’s one of my best friends by far,” said McGrady of DiBiasi. “We’ve shared so many moments here at Stanford. To be able to say we’re traveling to the same place with each other next is amazing.”

“I’m really excited about the Spirit, I have been doing my research since being drafted and [Washington Spirit head coach] Richie [Burke] seems like he’s going to push us,” DiBiasi said.

DiBiasi said she is greatly looking forward to playing with Spirit midfielder Andi Sullivan ‘17 again, who provided great leadership and mentorship during their time together at Stanford.

“It’s really helpful that Andi Sullivan, ‘Sunny,’ is there and so to be able to reach out to her and kind of understand what to expect, the style of play,” she said. “I’ve been able to learn a lot from her during the three years I got to play with her here.”

While Stanford continues to watch McGrady and DiBiasi as they begin their professional careers, McGrady and DiBiasi will surely be keeping an eye on Stanford as well.

Contact Daniel Martinez-Krams at danielmk@ stanford.edu.

Issue 4 | 15

where do stanford students go if they’ve attempted suicide? between one and three students are admitted to stanford hospital’s high security inpatient psychiatric ward each week gillian brassil

This story contains references to students with thoughts of suicide and self-harm that may be troubling to some readers.

T

HIS IS BASED ON ONE Stanford student’s account of a hospitalization mandated by California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 5150: a voluntary or involuntary 72-hour psychiatric hold on an individual identified as a threat to themselves or others. The identities of the student and his roommate have been withheld out of respect for the student’s patient privacy.

At 3 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 1, a Stanford student closed his laptop in his dorm room on a half-finished philosophy paper.

He scribbled notes like “don’t come in; I don’t want you to see this” in his philosophy notebook and ripped out the pages. Quietly, he opened his door and taped the notes to the outside before locking himself in.

His roommate was

16 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255

hanging out with a friend into the early hours of the morning, unlikely to return that evening.

The student sat down in front of his closed laptop and considered opening it again.

But he was tired of trying — not only with the paper, but also with battling depression, hiding his sexuality from his parents and working to pay for school as a first-generation, low-income student.

He pulled out his tool kit and took a deep breath, hoping it would be one of his last.

Suicide is on the rise in America. Almost 45,000 Americans died from suicide in 2016, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in July 2018, and suicide among people age 10 and older increased more than 30 percent in half of the U.S. between 1999 and 2016. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for 15to 34-year-olds and is the 10th-leading cause of death in the United States. According to the report, most people who have attempted

or committed suicide are never identified as having mental health disorders.

The student developed a plan. He had tried this before, but this time, he was determined.

Picking up a screwdriver, he tried to dig into his wrist veins. It wasn’t sharp enough. The razor would work, he thought. Small cuts relieved some of his tiredness, but the razor was too dull to do the job — he was barely bleeding.

An hour passed. His plan wasn’t working.

“So by that point it must’ve been 4 or 4:30 a.m. and I was out of options,” he said.

“I made another plan. I was just going to go buy a hose and gas myself in the car. But this was of course 4:30 to 5 a.m. Nothing’s open, so I couldn’t go buy a hose. I knew I needed to wait; I didn’t want to wait.”

Asking for help

At 5 a.m., the student called the 24-hour campus hotline through Stanford’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS). The operator asked for his location: She could send Stanford Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) officers but

not a counselor; it is not customary to send counselors to dorms in an emergency at this hour of the night. The student did not want to deal with law enforcement and refused to disclose his location. Finally, the operator told him to seek counselor assistance when Vaden Health Center — where CAPS is located — opened.

When he arrived at CAPS at 9:00 a.m., tired from fewer than three hours of sleep, the receptionist told him to sit in the waiting room. He saw the first available counselor.

She asked him to describe his thought process and how he was feeling, the student recalled.

When he finished recounting the events of the previous night, the counselor smiled and left.

When she returned, she brought two SUDPS officers. “Sorry,” is all the student remembered she said.

The student was taken in under the California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 5150: a voluntary or involuntary 72hour psychiatric hold placed on an individual who is identified as an imminent threat to themselves or others. He was not informed of this until he was taken to the Inpatient Psychiatric Service ward at Stanford Hospital six hours later, he said.

Section 5150 is part of the LantermanPetris-Short Act of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code, which went into full effect on July 1, 1972, according to the California Hospital Association. It was the first bill of its kind for modern mental health institutions in the United States, giving more power to psychiatrists in the decision to commit an individual to a hold.

CAPS, law enforcement and community providers such as Residence Deans (RDs) can recommend students for 5150 evaluations, according to Student Affairs Communications Director Pat Lopes Harris. Evaluations and 72hour holds are recommended at the hospital by trained psychiatric staff in the emergency department at a designated hospital to decide whether or not the student should be held for the 72-hour 5150 hold. Students can elect to go to the hospital for an evaluation voluntarily, Harris wrote in an email to The Daily.

“CAPS will only write a 5150 when we believe that a student is at acute risk of being a danger to self, danger to others or so gravely disabled that they cannot meet their basic needs outside of a care facility,” Harris wrote, adding that less than 0.2 percent of CAPS visits end in 5150 recommendations.

The University does not keep a running record of the number of students who are transported to a 5150 hold each year, Harris said.

“We feel it is important for students to know that CAPS providers work every day with students who experience thoughts of suicide, self-harm or feelings of anger and aggression,” she wrote. “For the vast majority of these students, treatment plans can be developed that do not require inpatient admission.”

Once an individual is recommended for a psychiatric hold on campus, SUDPS officers transport the individual to a hospital for further evaluation and treatment, according to SUDPS spokesperson Bill Larson.

SUDPS officers undergo “Peace Officer Standards and Training,” a required crisis intervention training that teaches law enforcement how to respond to individuals with mental illness, intellectual disability and substance use disorder, Larson said.

Wrists scraped from last night, the student was handcuffed and put into the back of a police car.

“As a general practice, deputies handcuff individuals for safety — to prevent self harm or harm to others — when transporting a person,” Larson wrote in an email to The Daily, explaining that the transport is not an arrest.

“A person who has been placed on a hold and transported by ambulance may be placed in restraints by Emergency Medical Technicians for the same safety reasons.”

The identity of the individual in this article was not disclosed to Larson or Harris.

“The police officers were really nice,” the student said. “[One of them] told me this happens a lot, it’s not like I’m under arrest and I don’t need to fret like that — even though I was in handcuffs in the back of a squad car.”

The hospital

First, the student was admitted to the Stanford Hospital Emergency Room, where he spent five hours sitting in a hospital bed with occasional visits from nurses and doctors. A law enforcement officer removed his handcuffs when they arrived, he recalled.

After SUDPS brings individuals under a Section 5150 to a hospital, supervision is transferred from SUDPS officers to medical professionals on site, Larson said, adding that SUDPS does this at no cost to the individual as opposed to an ambulance transport fee.

Once there, hospital staff allowed the student to text a few of his loved ones — including his roommate, a friend and his then-boyfriend — about his location.

“Please don’t fret, I am doing well,” he wrote. “I was taken to the hospital from CAPS. I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but wanted to let you know.”

At 3 p.m., the student was brought in a wheelchair to the securely-locked psychiatric ward, Unit H2. From there, he was stripped of his shoes, phone and wallet and provided a set of blue-striped pajamas.

“I remember the nurses telling me that they get a lot of Stanford students [in H2] — they were telling me that in a reassuring way,” he said. “That there’s clearly something at Stanford and it’s not me.”

This student’s situation was not unique.

According to an estimate by the former director of the ward, Dr. Rona Hu, H2 admits between one and three students every week, meaning at least one out of the 15 beds is constantly in use by a Stanford undergraduate, graduate or postdoctoral student.

“The unlocked unit, G2, has less publicity, but students can also check in there when they are feeling more depressed than suicidal,” Hu said, meaning that the total number of students admitted to Stanford Hospital each week could be higher than the one-to-three estimate. She added that there are four other psychiatric wards in the area that students could go to, meaning that the rough estimate

Issue 4 | 17

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

After seeking counselor assistance at CAPS, the student was involuntarily hancuffed and transported

by SUDPS officers from behind Vaden to the Stanford Hospital.

of students admitted to psychiatric wards per week could be higher.

Other beds in H2, like the other psychiatric wards available in the area, are dedicated to patients suffering from various mental illnesses and diseases, ranging from mood disorders to schizophrenia, she added.

The identity of the student in this article was not disclosed to Hu. When asked about the nature of H2, Stanford Health Care declined to comment, on patient privacy grounds.

While in the ward, the student was allowed to read, engage in group and cognitive therapy, play board games and have visitors. There were two phones in the ward which patients could call friends and family on.

The student recalled a plastic mirror and private bathroom with a padded door in the sleeping room. The room looked like a typical hospital room with a thin curtain separating the student from his hospital roommate.

“It wasn’t a good place, but it wasn’t a bad place either,” the student said. “It’s like purgatory.”

Friends find out

All photos by GILLIAN BRASSIL/The Stanford Daily

18 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255

On Feb. 1, the student’s Stanford roommate woke up to the text that he had been hospitalized.

The roommate had returned to his room around 7 a.m. when the student was sleeping.

The roommate recalled a conversation he had with the student a few weeks prior in which the student mentioned ending his life.

“I told him that if I got the call that he had slit his wrists I would be furious with him,” his roommate said. “I didn’t want him to end up in the hospital because he had attempted to take his own life.”

The roommate didn’t realize that the student had been serious at the time. Now, the roommate found himself rushing to the ward with an extra set of clothes and a book titled “Good Omens.”

When the roommate arrived at the ward, he had to call for a nurse to unlock the outer door to H2 which opens to a small waiting room. After the first door shut, the nurse buzzed in for the second door to open. From there, visitors had to check in at the nurses’ desk and hand in any items that were prohibited by the ward, including sharp objects or objects that could be used for strangulation. Visiting hours are limited to 6:308:30 p.m. during the week and 12:30-8:30 p.m. on weekends with minimal exceptions, according to Hu. RDs and CAPS keep in contact with hospital staff during a student’s stay, according to Harris, and can schedule visits with students. RDs can send emails to teachers and bring allowed items from the student’s dorm room.

The student’s friends, RD and Academic Advising Director (AAD) visited him during

his stay. On the first evening, the student asked his roommate to sneak him a wristwatch. The student said it wouldn’t be hard.

Time passed slowly in the ward, the student said. There were two clocks: one behind the nurses desk and one in the entertainment and meeting room, according to the student. Alone in his room, the student had no concept of time apart from when he was called for meals and group therapy sessions.

The next day, the roommate brought the student his watch.

“I think my experience would have been very different if I didn’t have my wristwatch,” he said, adding that not knowing the time would have driven him crazy.

Students who are identified as an imminent threat to themselves or others are hospitalized under the California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 5150: a voluntary or involuntary 72-hour psychiatric hold.

Release and now

The student’s 5150 commitment was extended into a Section 5250 commitment, a psychiatric hold that can last up to 14 days. Many 5150 holds get extended into 5250 holds to offer patients more time to heal, Hu said. The patient has to be cleared by a hearing officer and can leave at any time that the hearing officer proclaims that the patient can leave.

The student stayed in the ward for five days before being released by the hearing officer on Monday.

The student his stay was extended because he saw three different doctors during his stay — the doctor who gave him his initial check-up, an interim doctor and the doctor who let him go on Monday — making it impossible for them to coordinate for him to leave.

The release process is like a hearing, according to Hu. A doctor unaffiliated with the ward serves as a hearing officer and determines if the patient is healthy enough to leave. The patient is represented by an outside advocate who must present evidence that the hospital is overreacting by extending the hold.

After a student is discharged, CAPS reaches out to students to offer supplementary support, according to Harris. CAPS support includes consultation on care, transitioning back into campus and following a hospital-recommended treatment plan. Depending on the level of need, RDs will work with students for anywhere from a few days to a few quarters on their self-care and schoolwork.

After being released from the hospital, the student said he was required to attend La Selva, a “partial hospitalization” program, which mandated the student attend therapy and group classes for five hours a day, three days a week.

The student, already overwhelmed from having missed five days of schoolwork, decided to take a leave of absence for winter and spring quarter.

“If a student chooses to take time away from their studies, an RD will support this decision

Issue 4 | 19

The student voluntarily took a leave of absence from Stanford in the fall while continuing therapy sessions.

20 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255

and can help facilitate logistics for the student such as working with families and/ or packing belongings,” Harris wrote.

Last spring, a group of students joined Disability Rights Advocates (DRA) in filing a lawsuit against Stanford, claiming that the University discriminated against students with mental health disabilities by encouraging them to take a leave of absence after being hospitalized for an actual suicide attempt, act of self-harm or vocalization of suicidal ideation. The case seeks modifications to Stanford’s leaves of absence policy. The lawsuit also asserts that Stanford does not consider whether its actions would put the student at an even greater risk.

The University contests these allegations, saying that the University’s leave of absence decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

The case was started as part of DRA national investigation into the mental health policies of universities and colleges.

The first case was targeted at Stanford, as the study found the University’s policies the “most egregious.”

Litigation has since been paused as the DRA continues to work on settlement with Stanford. The letter of agreement is scheduled for Apr. 3, 2019.

The student in this article is not part of the lawsuit.

The student had his hospital fees waived from the 5150 commitment due to his income status, but he recalled that the bill was over $500. He currently pays $125 per week for therapy, which he has attended five days per week, every week since the hospitalization — over a year — amounting to over $6,750 thus far, he said.

Still, he came back to Stanford in the fall with an improved outlook on life — even though he never finished that philosophy paper from the year before.

“That paper almost killed me,” he joked wryly.

The student has since taken another leave of absence, citing the pressures of Stanford for putting him in this position.

Author’s note: If you or someone you know is contemplating self harm or suicide, there are available resources both on and beyond campus that are reachable 24 hours a day, seven days a week: National Suicide Prevention Hotline: +1 (800) 273-8255 Stanford Counseling and Psychological Services: +1 (650) 723-3785 Stanford Confidential Support Team: +1 (650) 725-9955 Contact Gillian Brassil at gbrassil@stanford.edu.

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It’s my first day at Stanford: a whirlwind of unpacked suitcases, reshuffled notebooks and crumpled bedding. My roommate and I meet each other for the first time and choose our beds. Our parents all shake hands. Then, in the blink of an eye, we’re alone for the first time.

I take a deep breath and ask my roommate the question I’ve been waiting to ask: Are you comfortable if I pray?

I come from a unique mix of religious traditions. My father was raised Catholic, my mother is Hindu and I have always practiced Hinduism. However, I attended an Episcopalian high school, and so for many years felt mostly separated from my family’s organized religion. Entering college, I speculated about what my religious life would look like and whether it would include a component of structure or routine outside my usual nightly prayer. I also hoped more generally for the chance to meet people

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of varying faiths, people with whom I could discuss my beliefs.

As time went on, I did meet people of many faiths, and also many people who are not religious at all. Most of the time, the differences barely registered; as I became closer to my fellow students, deep conversations more frequently moved toward topics of politics, race or social class than toward religion. Sometimes, though, the differences did emerge. A distraught Jewish friend sought solace after the repeated appearance of swastika symbols across campus. A non-religious friend told me about her experiences attending church with her boyfriend. I continued to quietly kneel in front of a small statuette of Ganesha in my dorm room every night.

And I began to wonder: is religion at Stanford actually an unspoken, deep-rooted part of student life? It may feel difficult to get a sense of faith’s role on campus, but I decided to see if demystifying campus resources, exploring diverse practices and unpacking

student discourses could help me find out more.

Formal frameworks

While Stanford is, by definition, a secular organization, Leland and Jane Stanford specifically and intentionally built the institution with Memorial Church at the very center of campus. In a draft of a speech she ultimately never delivered, Jane Stanford addressed incoming students with her thoughts on religion: An impression has gone forth that we were indifferent to religious influences and instructions being taught here…[but] every stone that has been laid in the buildings of this University but numbers the prayers that have been offered up to our Heavenly Father for strength, guidance and help.

Today, Stanford continues its legacy as an elite, secular, academic institution, but also supports a vast array of faith traditions. The Office of Religious Life oversees 40 official religious organizations known as Stanford Associated Religions (SARs). The SARs include the largest religious traditions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, as well as many smaller groups, including the Baha’i and Sikh faiths. As part of its mission statement, the Office strives to be “collectively committed and devoted to ensuring lively, thoughtful and supportive contexts for Stanford students, faculty and staff who wish to pursue spiritual interests.”

Those “spiritual interests” often involve following traditional forms of worship, such as attending church, observing Shabbat on weekends or participating in holiday services. Stanford provides an array of formal frameworks to support students who are looking for such experiences. And early in my freshman year, as I had hoped to do upon entering college, I sought out these rituals.

One of the first events I attended as a new student was a celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. It was an all-day affair, including a service in Memorial Church, a parade around campus and performances at night.

While it was exciting to see so many people observing the holiday, it still wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I felt a bit strange going to a Hindu service in

a church, even though the ceremony was beautiful. I also didn’t quite find the type of religious community I wanted, since it was a large event. The question of my formal practice — what it looks like and whom I share it with — is something I have had to continuously navigate. But my uncertainty during my freshman year about where I fit in (which, admittedly, I judged based on a limited number of events) ultimately led me to stick with my personal routine in order to experience the formal elements of my religious practice.

Jana Kholy ’20 also has a daily routine of prayer. Kholy practices Islam and works at the Markaz, a Muslim student resource center on campus. Five times a day, she prays in her dorm room, or, if she can’t make it back to her dorm, prays “sometimes just in the basement of the library or a stairwell.” While Jana expressed that she mostly does this out of convenience and not because campus resources are lacking, I was curious about where else faith takes place on campus outside of either Memorial Church or students’ personal, day-to-day practice.

As an important extension of the Office of Religious Life, there are various student centers on campus reserved specifically for faith and spiritual practices. Behind the striking facade of Memorial Church is the Round Room, where students are welcomed to speak with religious leaders of diverse backgrounds. Windhover Contemplative Center provides a beautiful meditative space not affiliated with any religious tradition.

And then there is the CIRCLE, or Center for Inter-Religious Community, Learning and Experiences. Located on the third floor of Old Union, the CIRCLE is intended to be a meeting space for any and all religious groups on campus to use.

While all of these spaces have open doors for students, they aren’t necessarily easy to find.

“If you walked around, you would never know there was a religious center on campus,” explained Connor Ghirardo ’19, a member of Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship. “You would never know it existed. And if you are actively seeking it out, it would take somebody who already knew where it was to find it.”

I had no idea the CIRCLE or the Round Room were accessible to me until I began

research for this article. When I did talk with people about religion, the physical spaces of individual practice were rarely part of the discussion. What’s more, I rarely thought about how those spaces could potentially be used to navigate uncertainties or curiosities about religion. So after almost two years of an inward-focused, deeply personal expression of my religion, I approached the Stanford religious community in a new way — not as something static or fixed, but as a place to make faith our own.

Navigating spirituality

Spirituality or faith can sometimes be as simple as finding personal ways of caring for mental health or allowing space for contemplation.

“Our generation often conceptualizes religion as an institution devoid of spirituality, but I find a lot of meaning in the spirituality of Judaism,” Lizzie Frankel ‘20 told me. “I hadn’t factored in my personal spirituality as much as the more obvious, conventional ways of practicing [my religion].”

Beyond a traditional Jewish morning prayer, Frankel’s practice also includes spending time in nature, having meaningful conversations with friends and yoga.

But not everyone at Stanford is deeply invested in a faith tradition. “I feel like coming to Stanford I was very much agnostic, I was ambivalent,” Aparna Verma ’20 said. “I would sometimes go to Hindu ceremonies, not because I feel religious but because it reminds me of home.”

Still others have no cultural or spiritual connection to any religious practice. So spirituality, while in some cases deeply linked to a religious tradition, can also factor into people’s lives through cultural connections.

It could also be characterized even as a completely secular routine of mindfulness; there are frequently “de-stress” events hosted on campus, from craft nights to meditation workshops.

Along those lines, the Office of Religious Life wants students to know that they can also provide a scaffolding for individual religious exploration.

“I’ve had seniors come to me and say they had no idea there was a Religious Life office,” said Reverend Joanne Sanders, one of the Associate Deans for Religious Life. “But it is truly a place that as much as we can make it

is welcoming and inclusive and curious, and at the core of our work we are trying to break down the stereotypes and assumptions that some will make about religion.”

So this year, on a rainy Sunday morning, I decided to explore a different side of organized religion at Stanford by attending University Public Worship (UPW) at Memorial Church. UPW is a weekly service open to the public; though based in a Protestant Christian format, it features a rotation of speakers from a variety of faith traditions.

Though I felt somewhat out of place at the Christian service, I found an inclusive environment, complete with peaceful hymns and a poetic sermon from a visiting reverend.

The service especially stood out to me as different from the Diwali celebration my freshman year — it was not a big event, but rather a relatively small gathering that exists every week for anyone who wants to try it out.

I wasn’t sure I’d go again, but I appreciated how UPW could provide either a one-time outlet for exploration, or a more consistent routine for students.

After the service, I spoke to Mira Gillet, a community member who regularly attends the public worship. Gillet is a Christian teacher in a public school, and while she keeps with the secular environment at work, she enjoys having a space to talk about religion.

“Not talking about religion causes problems,” she told me “In the past, there wasn’t as much communication about religion — people stayed in their spaces. But I have friends with a variety of backgrounds. We need to be talking to each other instead of about each other.”

I have personally always felt that Stanford

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is a very open community for people who wanted to discuss their religious beliefs.

Naomi Shak ’20, a member of Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship, described how those discussions could foster close relationships.

“One of my best friends is a member of the Jewish community,” she explained. “He’s probably the person who’s pushed back at me the most when we have heated conversations, because we’re both very passionate about our faith.”

Even those students who don’t actively practice or identify with a particular faith tradition may seek out campus spaces to share their perspectives on religion and engage in discussion.

“I’ve been in this role for 19 years, and I would say that the number of students who don’t have any strong religious background, and yet want to have conversations about the nature of religion or spirituality, is increasing,” said Reverend Sanders. She described students who had reached out to her over email, or found programming through Religious Studies classes.

Part of that curiosity stems from the role of religion in social life on campus. Reverend Sanders told me about two students, one Christian and one Jewish, who were dating and seeking an outlet to learn more about each other. As a result, the Office of Religious Life started a program in 2011 called the Rathbun Fellowship for Religious Encounter, which places 16 spiritually curious students from different faiths in conversation over the course of an academic year.

While the fellowship does fill the formal role of creating interfaith dialogue, it is also an extremely small program. For the rest of the campus population, religious exchange often happens more informally. For some students who do feel strong ties to religion, finding groups of like-minded peers can result in unique and powerful connections. Brickelle Bro ’19 explained that meeting other Mormon students led to close and lasting bonds.

“It was really fast to become friends with them,” she said,

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referring to other members of the Church of Latter Day Saints. “You know that they have the same standards — they’re not going to judge you for saying ‘No, thank you’ to a drink because they’re going to say ‘No, thank you’ for the same reasons.”

Shak affirmed this sentiment, pointing out her deep connection to religion that her nonChristian friends sometimes don’t understand: “A lot of people don’t realize what a big part of my life it is,” she said.

Limitations and tensions

It would be impossible to discuss religion in 2019 without also highlighting its role in current debates over many polarizing political and social issues. While religion can bring people together, it can also be divisive.

Religion intersects with discussions around LGBTQ+ rights and abortion rights, as well as topics of cultural identity, xenophobia and privilege.

“When I think about some of the life changing qualities that one might encounter, religion is certainly one of them, and it does begin to impact one’s political ideology,” said Reverend Sanders. “As an openly gay person, religion both impacted me in a painful way and then liberated me in an incredible way.”

National policy debates also have strong emotional impacts within our campus. Even before some of the more explicit controversies that arose with Donald Trump’s Muslim ban in 2016, Kholy described some challenges of practicing Islam on campus, especially during Ramadan.

Kholy explained how, as a freshman, she had to work around observing religious fasting during the holiday while also navigating her classes and schedule. Her dorm on West Campus was also far from Arrillaga Family Dining Commons, the only dining hall open late enough to accommodate her needs.

“It was really difficult, logistically,” Kholy said.

“I’d bike across campus by myself to break my fast.”

Stanford has addressed some of these challenges since Kholy’s freshman year in 2016 — now dining halls provide special takeout boxes and more flexible hours during Ramadan — but given the current political climate, students still occasionally seek additional support from the University.

“In times of hardship for the community, [for example] when there’s instances of Islamophobia, a lot of times the administration leans on places like the Markaz — which isn’t a religious space, but for people who are interested in or associated with Islam in some way,” said Jana Kholy ’20.

“They expect them to do a lot of the labor and emotional work that comes with supporting students.”

In this way, religiously-affiliated student groups are often faced with the challenge of supporting students’ individual religious needs while also respecting a range of political views.

Controversies can also spring to the surface when political speakers are invited to campus, such as with the Stanford College Republicans’ proposed event featuring far-right author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who has made anti-Semitic remarks in the past. Students created a petition calling for the ASSU to deny funding for the event, and Daily staffer Jackie O’Neil ‘21 described the event as “an egregious display of disrespect for the Jewish community on Stanford’s campus.” Even so, much of the debate was centered on questions about freedom of speech, with the concept of anti-Semitism sometimes used as a political talking point rather than a real threat facing a religious group.

Whether or not Stanford community members choose to be politically involved, religion often plays a role in the way people from different perspectives tend to characterize each other. Our sometimes limited ability to directly address religion in the broader discourse on campus can prevent us from fully understanding each other. If we think that we know someone’s views based on their religious tradition alone, we are preemptively preventing ourselves from understanding the full story of a person’s beliefs.

“We have a spectrum of orthodox and progressive religious groups on campus,” said Reverend Sanders. “We can misunderstand each other very easily, or make assumptions or presumptions [based on religion]. We need to make sure that we break that down a bit and create a platform where things can be discussed.

In preparing students to be global leaders and citizens, the importance of religion in that conversation is critical.”

Thinking of the global community as being reflected in the Stanford community, it is clear that religion is a distinct and important facet of identity, just like race, nationality, gender or sexual orientation. As with any other element of identity, certain separations may occur naturally between students of different faiths, as well as between religious and non-religious people.

However, those separations are not necessarily a firm line, especially when students are willing to engage in open dialogue.

“I think a lot of times people think that the Mormon religion is, like, crazy,” said Bro, laughing. “I get that a lot, but we’re normal human beings, we’re regular people. If you have questions, we’re happy to answer them. If you’re confused, if you’re curious, just ask.”

An intentional conversation

Thinking back to the day I anxiously awaited meeting my roommate for the first time, I now realize that she was probably wondering some of the same things I was regarding the sharing and understanding of religious experience. But my anxieties were soon proven to be groundless. We fell into a mutual understanding; throughout my freshman year, she would attend Catholic mass on Sundays, and I would pray in my room each night. Perhaps more importantly, we shared a number of insightful conversations comparing our two faiths. My experience certainly aligned with Reverend Sanders’ description of our campus: “many people in the Stanford community are thoughtful and more prone to be curious about one another.”

Entering college often marks what we consider a first step toward independence, and the decisions we make

as students around religion are no exception.

This is a place where we explore and live out faith and spiritual practices of all kinds — or of no kind — on our own terms.

“Going to college was the first clear step for me where this is my faith, not my family’s faith, something I was raised with,” said Connor Ghirardo ’19. “I have directly chosen this, and I understand why, and I want it.”

That being said, I still wonder why there doesn’t seem to be an intentional environment to foster religious exploration, particularly as we enter life away from home for the first time. During freshman year, we participate in many events meant to explore identity and communication, with programs ranging from FACES to Crossing the Line to Beyond Sex Ed. While the topics covered in these programs are indeed crucial to improving our interactions with others, the discussion of religion seems to be missing.

The seemingly unspoken diversity of religious and spiritual thought

often does spring to the surface in our dayto-day interactions and relationships with others, and learning about that diversity should be prioritized. Finding out why an acquaintance chooses to attend a yoga class or a religious service — or even why they choose not to engage with such events — can be a seemingly trivial part of learning more about the people around us. But this component of identity deserves a space, whether physical or emotional.

As Naomi Shak ’20 described: “When people ask those questions, it means they really care, and want to understand what you believe.” Asking questions about religion can become a bridge to a deeper awareness of the inner lives of our peers. And it is through this awareness that we may bring meaningful and impactful interactions to light.

Contact Melina Walling at mwalling@stanford.edu.

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26 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255

Jules Wyman / The Stanford Daily

Jules Wyman / The Stanford Daily

Within the Stanford bubble, nature still thrives. Photographers Jules Wyman and Syler Peralta-Ramos team up to bring you the beautiful and wondrous nature on campus.

Syler Peralta-Ramos / The Stanford Daily

Jules Wyman / The Stanford Daily

Issue 4 | 27 Syler Peralta-Ramos / The Stanford Daily

AF Alanna Flores

is modern romance dead or are my tinder pictures just poorly angled? dating apps in college do not have to be synonymous with thoughtless hook-up culture Read 3:04 AM

L

et’s say I am laying in my bed in unlaundered

sweatpants as I watch “Titanic” or “To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before,” an updated version of the forbidden love story archetype. As I inattentively watch these idealized romances play out on my laptop, I rapidly drag my finger right on my phone screen, affirming my attraction to a promising mirror selfie of a decent-looking Stanford student without a creepy or arrogant bio. In this *hypothetical* scene, something feels a bit wrong about my desire for instant gratification and my yearning for a scenario similar to that of the people slowly falling in love on the dusty laptop screen in front of me.

If you have dabbled, just by chance of course, in the search for companionship via Tinder and other dating apps or you are like a Stanford frosh who admitted, “I sometimes swipe myself to sleep,” you are familiar with 28 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255

the vast array of potential suitors through which you can peruse. This creates an experience comparable to, but slightly less exhilarating than, scrolling through Amazon.

(Sadly, though, there are no customer reviews for my Tinder matches.)

Similar to Amazon, Tinder acts as a retail giant in that it essentially commodifies human beings. You set your preferences for your desired purchases — or partners — and then you begin your prideful scour. When something tickles your fancy, you indicate your interest. And importantly, you make note of how quickly the item will appear at your doorstep, which in the Tinder-sphere is normally revealed after a wee bit of verbiage is exchanged.

Amazon users’ demand for Prime services reveals just how much they value this last criterion. On Tinder, though, assessing the

“shipping speed” can be a bit more nebulous.

For your convenience, I have subdivided this critical information into four categories of Tinder matches, outlined below.

prime free one-day This label applies to those matches who message something with a similar nature to a singular GIF: a poorly-worded pun or a “‘Heyyy”’ — specifically with three y’s within five minutes of matching. They are eager and available within a minute’s notice. But hey, maybe that’s harmonious with your present desires.

prime Tinder matches who resemble the typical Amazon Prime product are relatively easy to

engage with in thought-provoking discourse and, luckily, have a bit more flair than the Free One-day folks. They have a pulse, a face and some other general characteristics we look for in a life partner or one-night stand.

Being Prime is ideal.

two-week shipping Then there are those who look incredibly promising but will take weeks to come into your life, sometimes even charging you grotesque shipping fees — that is if they are located farther than three miles away. You question if they are worth all the effort. They are usually not. Their appeal can vary from that of a piece of white bread to Michelinstar chocolate mousse, and there simply is no time to sift through such a varied menu.

currently unavailable Like the worst kind of Amazon product that seduces you with an attractive photo but quickly dashes your hopes with the devastating red letters “currently unavailable,” these Tinder matches look especially promising but fail to even respond to your initial message. These flakers should swiftly exit from the feigned titillation of Tinder.

Now, it may seem slightly appalling to compare human interaction to methods of shipping, but in all honesty, we sometimes treat people with the same care as an Amazon Primed pack of condoms. I think back to the childish wonder and excitement I had when my crush would sit at the other end of the lunch table, in comparison to how I merely bat an eyelash at the queue of people in my Tinder shopping cart. The seemingly endless universe of potential mates often trivializes the exclusivity and enthusiasm users may feel for any particular individual. App junkies are increasingly starving for interaction yet approach such interactions with laziness and indifference, creating the toxic relationship culture on college campuses that so many have come to criticize.

Stanford students’ experiences on Tinder vary greatly, from confidence-boosting procrastination to regular sexual encounters.

“I’m still not super comfortable with participating in a culture based on a splitsecond attraction, but I have to admit that it’s a bit of an ego boost to match with someone I find attractive,” said one student.

Another claimed, “I have seen a lot of Stanford boys’ butts. They love mooning people. It’s like Full Moon on the Quad but ‘Full Moon on my Screen.’”

With the variety of mentalities college

students have while on Tinder and other dating apps, they often do not know what they will find. Some of us are using it to search for a potentially fruitful endeavor, while others simply use it as a search engine for one-night engagements. Motivations for using Tinder can get pretty esoteric — when asked about her experience on Tinder, one Stanford student boasted that she has gotten “a lot of food” from interactions on the app. “I go to the frat house and just raid their kitchen,” she said. “I came home one morning with an entire sleeve of Oreos.”

“That’s how I stock up here,” she continued, gesturing to a shelf full of snacks.

Fortunately, Tinder can help grease the wheels of simply asking strangers in person for their Oreos. Approaching strangers directly for anything, really, has shifted from being perceived as spontaneous and romantic to generally uncomfortable and desperate in our modern dating climate.

Real life is certainly not “The Notebook,” so we rarely engage in spontaneous witty banter when we have the equally entertaining alternative of flipping through acquaintances’ photoshopped images on Instagram. Laying in our twin-size beds watching rom-coms, we long for similar thoughtful gestures, but in practice, these tropes feel tacky and disingenuous.

That said, a dating app can be a helpful launchpad to bridge this disconnect and provides a semblance of hope for those searching for companionship or maybe a touch of Tinder tenderness.

“I’m dating this guy that dropped out of Stanford to work on a start-up,” noted a firstyear Stanford student. “He has an algorithm named after him.” This expanded virtual world opens people up to new connections that they could have never formed otherwise — like the extreme rarity of finding a tech-savvy Stanford student.

We often dream of a particularly sappy and romantic relationship but fail to live out these ideas in real life. We struggle to balance our desire for human connection and our insatiable thirst for the next best Primeable product that lies a swipe away. The swipe-life culture is enticing and addictive, but it feeds our latent disconnectedness in ways that only leave us more dissatisfied.

Maybe a bit of mindfulness can help halt this hunger. As you open your Tinder next time, remember that there are people behind the pictures with whom you have an opportunity for more than instant gratification or a sleeve of Oreos — or perhaps a Full Moon, if your interests lie in the planetary sector. Dating apps can be a vehicle to forge meaningful connections with others, rather than to treat them like items to be shipped, used and potentially discarded.

As one Stanford student admitted, “I still have the dream of meeting a potential suitor as I sip on a latte in my favorite small town coffee shop.” However, she resolved, “I have realized [that] since dating apps are now so commonplace in our culture, it is a lot more likely to have the first interaction on an app.

We’ll just have to reserve the coffee shop romance for our first real-world date.”

Even as our expectations of romance have shifted in the age of Tinder, there is still room for some cheeky chitchat. Be selective, make your intentions clear and maybe even take some time to attempt meaningful conversations. You might just find a Prime candidate worth keeping.

Contact Alanna Flores at alanna13@stanford.edu.

Issue 4 | 29

Once a Pun a Time Contact Julia Gong at jxgong@stanford.edu

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Issue 4 | 31

Crossword

by Grant Coalmer

Need help?

Solutions online at stanforddaily.com

Across: 1. Show pre-arrangement dislike 2. Examine the mind briefly without a vowel 3. Inflammable match to Kindling 4. Protect, Canadian ______ 5. Does the orchestra shift to play it?

6. Conversations at the pew 7. Compel, browbeat 32 | The Stanford Daily Magazine, Vol. 255

Down: 1. Rhythmic singer, covers a lot 8. Collapsing from combustion 9. Haunted, distilled drink.

10. Grapple with 11. Separate altos i.e.