The lullaby tells a lie by eliding the world’s darker corners. For the sake of the cared-for, one thing is expressed, another held back. Too clear-eyed a look at the world would be unbearable, so we keep it from our children.

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At the beginning of spring quarter, The Daily's opinions section welcomed a new group of writers into our fold. In discussing with our new members the process of writing and revising opinions articles, we were forced as editors to confront more explicitly the question, “What is an opinions article?”

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Given the uncertainty of the current environment, it is important to ensure that all students who want to take CR/NC classes are able to switch to that grading scheme throughout the quarter, for major, non-major and WAYS courses. However, it would be unwise to make the CR/NC grading scheme mandatory by eliminating the option of taking courses for a letter grade.

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Ruei-Hung Alex Lee argues in The Stanford Review that Stanford is a vocational school and that there is nothing wrong with that. But if we think of the concept of a vocation in this more robust way, Stanford is not properly a vocational school. What’s more, in this sense of vocation, we would be better off if Stanford were a vocational school.

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Recently I’ve found myself in settings where earnest, serious-minded people discussed topics that I had difficulty not finding pointless, and the story of the Emperor’s new clothes returned to my mind rather suddenly.

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Adrian Liu critiques Facebook's privacy practices, reflecting on whether or not the general thesis held by privacy scholars that often informs consent — the idea that privacy involves transparency and choice — is a viable privacy model for internet platforms.

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A three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit recently dismissed a case in which 21 young people asked the courts to demand federal government action on global warming. The panel did not deny the importance and urgency of taking measures to curb global warming, but rather concluded, with reluctance, that the claims were not redressable by the courts.

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What if we instead considered: how should we think about privacy standards, and by such standards, how did Facebook fare? What we find, I will argue, is that Facebook used a notion of privacy tailored to its own practices, and one out of line with our considered intuitions on what it should mean to protect privacy.

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“Complexity Theory” is a series on ethics and technology, a collaboration between Stanford students with a range of backgrounds but a shared worry. We aim to shine more light on the apparent intractabilities, the technical subtleties, and the real difficulties of technology ethics.

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Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen how classical music interacts with the real world to represent the intricacies of a presidential visit or the struggles of a suppressed nation. Adversity is often adjacent to the process of composing great classical music, and composers have found the source of musical gold out of disunity. But…

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That music and revolution go hand in hand shouldn’t surprise us. The rousing spirit of protest songs like “?El Pueblo Unido” in Chile, or “Go down Moses” of the American Underground Railroad can be among the most powerful vehicles for expressing the pathos and impetus behind an uprising of the people. In today’s installment of Music + X: classical music’s perspectives on revolution.

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Not all students hate Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), but they generally agree that other students hate it. There’s a rhetoric around PWR: a word-of-mouth opinion spread around campus about the two-quarter sequence that nearly all Stanford students take in their first and second years.

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From the earliest symphonies to operas made in the past decade, politics has been present in classical music — not only as a subject of composer’s interest, but as a force that shapes the music deemed worthy. Today, we consider two works of music: one by a Russian composer under the microscope of the 1920s Soviet Union, the other by an American composer given considerably more leeway to comment on American international politics of the 1970s.

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This is the fourth and final piece in a miniseries called “On flakiness.” Read the other parts at this link. Shortly before Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, he told Senator Susan Collins that Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision disallowing many state bans on abortion, was “settled law.” As…

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This is the third piece in a miniseries called “On flakiness.” Read the other parts at this link. The essential sociality of flakiness Talk of flakiness may appear trifling, but it is talk in which we engage nonetheless, and it is telling that we have a word for it. We evidently find some value in…

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Late Tuesday (May 14th), The Daily retracted an article, published on the same morning, about a Graduate School of Business Ph.D. student who claimed to have to forage for food. The piece was the second in a series of five (now four) stories about graduate students’ experiences with affordability at Stanford. The paper explained that the story “did not meet The Daily’s requirements for independent verification of facts and source attribution.”

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This is the second piece in a miniseries called “On flakiness.” Read the other parts at this link. What is flakiness? Last week, I surveyed what’s been written about flakiness in this paper, and found that the majority relied on this intuitive notion: Flaking is canceling plans (perhaps at the last minute) without a legitimate…

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What is flakiness? We all have certain intuitions about flakiness, but they are surely imprecise. What are the facts required for someone to have flaked — is it lateness, canceling, or skipping with no notice? How about the normative facts? Is flaking simply “bad,” or do we have more complicated attitudes toward it? Over the last few volumes of this paper, Daily writers have fleshed out their own intuitions on flaking in different ways. To understand flakiness better, let’s start with their thoughts.

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What you have most in common with your fellow admitted students you also share with most of this year’s forty-two thousand applicants: you are generally competent and ambitious, and you filled out the application. That’s probably it.

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If Democrats responded as Republicans did when members of their own party were accused of sexual assault, they would look worse than Republicans. Democrats would be hypocrites, exactly because it’s been Democrats who have largely championed the movement to support victims of sexual assault.

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Ethical questions also suffer from vagueness, and in particular the question “when is it okay to kill an organism?” suffers from a vagueness with far higher stakes than the definition of a pile of sand.

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Effective altruism has many enemies, and while there are certainly philosophical arguments against it, much of the opposition is not intellectual but visceral.

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Meredith Monk’s “Cellular Songs,” which the composer performed with members of her ensemble at Bing Concert Hall this Saturday, is an prolonged meditation on the way we live, from the level of our cells to the level of our social fabric. Monk, a fixture of American classical music for over half a century, has given…

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