The Stanford Review editor-in-chief Julia Steinberg’s interview with university president Jonathan Levin:

Stanford Review: The first two categories are the buckets of questions that I have. So I’ll move on to my first question about Stanford’s educational and political climate at the present moment. In one of my classes, I was randomly assigned a partner to work on a presentation together. He told me that he had not read a book, cover to cover since the third grade, let alone at Stanford. In June, he will graduate with a degree from Stanford. How is this possible?

President Levin: Have you read a book at Stanford?

Stanford Review: I actually have. I’ve read fifty. I’ve counted. Probably at sixty now.

President Levin: I can’t speak to the particular student you worked with and exactly the way he or she has approached things. I think it’s a missed opportunity if you go through Stanford without doing a lot of reading, because at least in many fields, that’s the way to learn. Now, some fields, it’s true at Stanford, you learn in different ways that aren’t necessarily from books, but you know, I certainly would hope that any student who came to Stanford would spend a lot of time reading and thinking and reflecting. So I think it’s a missed opportunity if that’s not how you choose to spend a good fraction of your time here.

Stanford Review: I agree. Several freshmen I have talked to have bemoaned their mandatory COLLEGE classes that are contract graded, meaning that students will receive an A if their work is turned in on time regardless of quality. One frosh even told me that all of her first quarter classes are contract graded. How does this set students up for success at Stanford and beyond?

President Levin: So the COLLEGE curriculum, that’s part of the design—and of course, it’s a new course. So many aspects of COLLEGE are an experiment. We’re learning. The faculty who teach it are learning about the best design for that class, what the syllabus should look like, what’s the best way to manage discussion, what’s the teaching model, what’s the grading model. And that’s something that the Faculty Senate discussed maybe 18 months ago or last year, the grading model, and at the time, they presented some evidence suggesting that it seemed to have been a positive experience. Sounds like you may have a view that’s different and when that program comes up for review and to be looked at, it’ll be interesting to hear that perspective on it as well. The way I think of the COLLEGE curriculum is it’s in the best tradition of something at Stanford, which is, you put something out, you try it, you see how it works, you iterate, you improve it, you keep improving it, and hopefully, over time, it’s going to become fantastic. And that that may well be one of the aspects of it that should be debated and discussed.

[…]

Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?

President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.

Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.

More proof that the so called Ivy League and ‘exclusive’ schools are a branding exercise - any resemblance of academic rigor has long been dispensed with.

Laura Mannweiler writing for US News:

So far Trump’s billionaire nods include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former professional wrestling mogul Linda McMahon, Wall Street executive Howard Lutnick, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and money manager Scott Bessent. With the exception of Musk and Ramaswamy – who were picked for an advisory body called the Department of Government Efficiency rather than a Cabinet position – the group will need to be confirmed by the Senate before they are official.

The total net worth of the billionaires in the Trump administration, as of the morning of Nov. 25, equals at least $344.4 billion – which is more than the GDP of 169 different countries. Since Musk and Ramaswamy won’t be part of Trump’s Cabinet, excluding them brings the net worth of Trump’s Cabinet to at least $10.7 billion, assuming all nominees are approved in the Senate.

The United States is now clearly a Plutocracy.

Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.

— Thornton Wilder

Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer Jon Meacham reflects on former President Trump’s victory over Vice President Harris, how it impacts President Biden’s legacy, and what the outcome of the 2024 election means for the soul of America.

Hunter S. Thompson, writing a little over one month ahead of Nixon’s landslide reelection in September 1972:

The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states.

Well … maybe so. This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves: finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government”, is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it end?

It never ends.

Whats going on in this relationship between Trump and Putin? And Dan Cotes said uh its almost … its so close, it seems it might be blackmail.

The people who know him tried to warn us. Half of America didn’t listen. Now we all have to pay the price. Good luck America.

Let the ass-kissing begin.

Bill Kristol, at The Bulwark:

The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.

Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything — after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal — the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.

And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong.

[…]

So: We can lament our situation. We can analyze how we got here. We can try to learn lessons from what has happened. We have to do all these things.

But we can’t only do those things. As Churchill put it: “In Defeat: Defiance.” We’ll have to keep our nerve and our principles against all the pressure to abandon them. We’ll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We’ll have to do our best to limit the damage from Trump. And we’ll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.

To do all this, we’ll have to constitute a strong opposition and a loyal opposition, loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to the past achievements and future promise of this nation, loyal to what America has been and should be.

George T. Conway III writing for The Atlantic:

We knew, and have known, for years. Every American knew, or should have known. The man elected president last night is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse. He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much as harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.

[…]

But I daresay I fear we shall see a profound degradation in the ability of this nation to govern itself rationally and fairly, with freedom and political equality under the rule of law. Because that is not actually a prediction. It’s a logical deduction based on the words and deeds of the president-elect, his enablers, and his supporters—and a long and often sorry record of human history. Let us brace ourselves.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responds to Trump’s McDonald’s costume:

We see Elon Musk coming in here. He’s doing these little contests, where he is promising 1 million dollars in some kind of giveaway lottery if they sign up for his list. You have a billionaire just dangling a million bucks to those of us many of us struggling to make ends meet if they dance for him. You’ve got Donald Trump putting on a little McDonald’s costume because he things that what people do.

They’re not trying to empathize with us. They are making fun of us. Donald Trump thinks that people who work at McDonald’s are a joke. Elon Musk thinks that dangling money in front of a working person is a cute thing to do. They have absolutely no idea what our lives are like. And so they think this way of callousness is a way of connecting. It’s not a way of connecting, because you and I both know that when that camera turns off and they turn around and go into their car, they are laughing at us. They think we are the suckers. And they said that publicly.

That’s why Elon Musk thinks that your vote can be bought with a dollar. That’s why he thinks if you put a bunch of money on a mailer and shove it in your mailbox, you’ll just do whatever he says. But Pennsylvania we are smarter than that, aren’t we.

Not to mention Donald Trump wouldn’t make it past McDonald’s back ground check due to his 34 felony counts.

The trailer for season two of Silo, which starts on Apple TV+ on November 15. So excited to watch the new season!

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry writing for Ars Technica:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). A game of creativity and imagination, D&D lets players weave their own narrative, blending combat and roleplaying in an immersive gaming experience. And now, psychologists and therapists are working to turn it into a tool by exploring its potential benefits as a group therapy technique.

Research is still in progress to determine if there are links between playing D&D and enhanced empathy and social skills, but the real-life impact of D&D therapy is slowly gaining traction as staff of counseling practices that have embraced D&D group therapy say they are witnessing these benefits firsthand.

As an avid D&D player in my youth in the 80s all I can say is, damn it took everyone 50 years to get with the program. For those who don’t know what we are going on about -

This was Stephen Colbert’s opening monologue of his interview with VP Kamala Harris.

Good evening. It has been a tradition at the late show since yesterday to that the major party candidates sit down with me for an interview in October. We invited Kamala Harris to be our guest this evening, and she accepted. That interview in a moment. In the interest of fairness, we also also invited former President Donal Trump to go fuck himself. He declined our offer.

You just know this is what Scott Pelley really wanted to say…

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. — Montesquieu

Montesquieu knew that comparison is the thief of joy well over three hundred years ago. So get off social media, stop worrying about what everyone else has and appreciate the wonderful life you are living today.

Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness is a choice.

Hamilton Nolan writing for How Things Work:

The culprit is the car. More specifically, the culprit is America’s decision to design our cities around the car. Predicting the future is almost impossible, but one of the few predictions that I feel very confident in is that, a century or so down the road, people will look at modern car-centric America with the same disgust that we feel when we hear about old timey cities without modern sewage systems, where everyone just dumped their chamber pots in the street. “Whoa, that’s fucked up!” people will marvel from their quiet, pedestrianized cities of the future. “They couldn’t walk anywhere.”

[…]

Americans unlucky enough to grow up in more recently built towns and exurbs are stuck having their entire lives defined by the spatial needs of cars. Their neighborhood density is low, their mobility options are limited, and the most urban-esque experience they ever get growing up might be playing with friends on the pavement of a suburban cul-de-sac. Never will they “walk” to a “corner store.” Always will they drive to a Target. If there were ever any beautiful nature along the way, now there is only highway and billboards and shredded semi truck tires on the side of the road. Sad.

All it takes is a trip to cities like Copenhagen, Antwerp, and Seville to realize how the American obsession with cars and gas powered toys is out of control.

Annie Karni, reporting for The New York Times:

During an event at Duke University, Ms. Cheney told students that it was not enough for her to simply oppose the former president, if she intended to do whatever was necessary to prevent Mr. Trump from winning the White House again, as she has long said she would.

“I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Ms. Cheney said, speaking to students in the hotly contested state of North Carolina. “As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”

The room erupted in cheers after she made her unexpected announcement.

I have so much respect for Cheney. Liz Cheney took this principled stand while she was one of the most influential Republicans in the nation. I get being a conservative, politically. I get being opposed to the Democratic Party, politically. Liz Cheney is a conservative and — like her father — endorses very different policies than Kamala Harris. But (lowercase ‘d’) democratic politics ought to be viewed very much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are in psychology. Some things matter more than others. And nothing — not climate change or the environment, not reproductive rights, and certainly not fucking tax rates — nothing matters more than support for democracy itself and the rule of law. The only way we’re going to get those other things right — which are really, really important — is through democratic governance and the rule of law.

I don’t support or endorse a Reagan/Bush/Cheney political viewpoint, but that viewpoint is coherent. Trump espouses no coherent views at all. He literally tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. He’s a criminal. He’s mentally deranged, decrepitly old, and failing before our eyes. With Trump as a candidate and still in contention - not liking the Democrats is not high enough on the political hierarchy of needs to cast one’s vote for anyone but Kamala Harris

Nancy Friedman’s word of the week:

Tim Walz has tonic masculinity. Confident. Decent. The kind of man who…would start his job at the White House ‘being asked about national security and the tax code and end with him wearing a headlamp up in the attic fixing some old wiring.

When Bill Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention this week, he shared an economic claim that seemed implausible:

You’re going to have a hard time believing this, but so help me, I triple-checked it. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times. Even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans one.

Is that true? Actually, yes.

According to the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 51.5 million jobs have been added since January 1989 and roughly 1.3 million of them were created while a Republican president sat in the White House.

Democrats 50, Republicans one.

Tim Walz’s acceptance speech at at the DNC:

And we made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch everyday. So while other states were banning books from their schools we were banishing hunger from ours.

Perfectly sums up the priorities of the two parties. This November vote for the ticket that prioritizes democracy and the american people - vote for the Harris / Waltz ticket.