Jasmine Liu

Writing about writing and telling stories about stories — these kinds of narratives can feel circularly post-modern. But, as it turns out, they are actually quite conventional and ancient. Homer’s The Odyssey, the vaunted paterfamilias of storytelling in the West, is an epic whose hero’s primary genius is not as a warrior or leader, but as a storyteller.

When she was thirteen, Laura Peniche made the arduous journey with her family from Mexico across the southern border into the United States. Together they navigated the desert, endured cold nights and risked getting mugged. But as Peniche shared in a live performance in 2019, she and her family were not alone. “We were being helped by God’s hand into this country,” she said in her monologue. “When I see the beautiful, happy faces of my children, I know that I was meant to be here.”

To the dissonant announcement of a train whistling twice, a lithe, naked woman takes center-stage, soaring over a swarming crowd with arms outstretched. Her supple bronze figure endows Tokyo’s Ueno Station with simple grace, her gesture an unmistakable expression of humanity’s aspiration for freedom. Her surroundings are bleak — mistakable for a factory farm, its mobile throng kept on course by a gabled fluorescent glow — but her eternal state of longing transcends the myopia of the crowd. The opening scene of Masahiro Shinoda’s 1964 film Pale Flower asks: can a statue of a woman in a train station grow wings? Can a human being, in this world and in this life, feel free?

“Et tu, Brute? Then fall Caesar!” Such were the famed last words of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s telling. As early as the Renaissance, reanimating the story of Caesar’s untimely demise was an exercise in eclecticism, requiring the juxtaposition of formal Latin and English vernacular, antiquity and contemporaneity. Milo Reice’s series of mixed media paintings at the Craig Krull Gallery, is also a pastiche, as if taking a cue from the absurdism of Shakespeare’s macaronic Latin line. His painting

Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s latest exhibition, 4 from 3 dancers, magnifies the scale of a contemporary infant’s very first canvas—the dreaded, flimsy 8.5-by-11 sheet of paper. By working on sheets of corrugated plastic formally known as fluted propylene and that support paint scribbles three times longer than an infant’s height, the L.A.-based artist makes use of the material that is often used for lawn signs, lending his paintings a bargain-basement, weather-resistant chic. In this case, comparin

Few scenes are more familiar to a student of art history than the Madonna and Child, making it no small feat when a new rendition of that imagery manages to, well, astonish. In Black Madonna, Mark Steven Greenfield’s exhibition of new and recent works at William Turner Gallery, there’s little chance of confusing his works with those of, say, Da Vinci or Bellini. For one, Greenfield’s subjects are Black. For another, the innocuous, pastoral landscapes that serve as conventional backgrounds for Ma

Lists pervade Roberto Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives.” Upon finishing the 648th and final page of the tripartite saga, I found myself flipping through the novel from beginning to end, drawing up a list of the locations visited by the expansive cast of narrators of the novel. I could have just as easily catalogued the names of the visceral realists (the literary group that forms the center of gravity of “Savage Detectives”), their favorite writers and enemies or their various lovers. Lists — whi

“How’s Stanford? Do you like it?” As a freshman, I fielded this question over and over again for friends and family when I returned home for Thanksgiving and winter break. I was no good at these conversations. I was too attached to being honest; or, less heroically and more precisely, I was bad at reviewing my experiences tactfully in a few brief sentences. On one panicked visit home, I burst out crying while telling my parents how much I hated the neglect of the humanities at Stanford. By the

If oppression is felt most acutely in the habits of embodied, everyday life, is it possible to resist its violent creep into normalcy? This is a question that has occupied Adania Shibli’s work for some time. In an interview published in 2017, Shibli enigmatically suggested that it is the commonplace — “a walk, a pavement, a tree, a stone, endless minor objects” — which can become a site for the assertion of human dignity against the numbness that constant dehumanization inflicts. Oppression cann

Skimming the superlatives Esa-Pekka Salonen has earned from critics and collaborators, it would be easy to mistake the San Francisco Symphony music director designate for a Silicon Valley tech visionary. “Disrupter,” The New York Times declared when he landed his post. “Technological innovator,” the SF Symphony’s own press release boasts. When I first read his New Yorker profile and participated in the buzz around his appointment, I was reminded of the long-since-gone wonderment I felt in middle

If you’re a typical Stanford senior heading into your last year of college, things might look a little bit like this. You’re already getting nostalgic reminiscing about your Stanford experience, and thinking about the future gives you anxiety. It’s not that you don’t have options — you have wonderful and abundant ones, as friends and family have framed them to you in waves of congratulatory messages. You’re just not sure if any of them are quite right.

“STANFORD THREATENS LIMITS ON NUMBER OF CS MAJORS,” the sensationalist all-campus email newsletter The Fountain Hopper (better known as The FoHo) alerted readers in fall 2016, during my freshman year. There wasn’t a lot of substantiating evidence beyond the fear mongering title, and the information was later revealed to be false. Nevertheless, a panic ensued in my freshman dorm, although most of my friends were a ways away from even thinking about declaring.

Two weeks ago, the newly appointed faculty advisors of Cardinal Conversations sent a campus-wide email inviting students to provide feedback on a proposal to “reboot” last year’s inaugural speaker series. Cardinal Conversations generated considerable backlash last year, inciting protests against the invitation of Charles Murray and more general critiques of the stupefying lack of diversity among its speakers. This year, its shortfalls have receded from immediate memory, and surprisingly few have