The author of Tom Sawyer is avuncular, unthreatening, genial—cuddly almost. The Mark Twain that comes later has sharper edges, and may not be cuddly at all. What does it mean to embrace the tame Twain ...

On a Tuesday afternoon in November 1900, Edward Alsworth Ross gathered several student reporters in his campus office. Ross, 33 years old and a Stanford economics professor of seven years, had joined ...

More than 8,500 alumni and their guests reconnected at Reunion Homecoming this month. Alumni from classes ending in 1 and 6 attended class parties, learned from Stanford faculty, fountain hopped for ...

Four years ago, on a serene campus in Menlo Park, a group of longtime editors for Sunset Publishing Corporation, whose magazine touted such halcyon coverlines as “Can’t-Miss Pies” and “Other Things to ...

Perhaps nobody knows better than Michelle Wilde Anderson how quietly an American town can disappear, at least on paper. As a professor at Stanford Law School, Anderson studies local government and ...

It’s a common reaction. When the university announces a budget cut, the internet commentariat erupts: Stanford has $27 BILLION in endowment. Why can’t it just dip into it? (The BILLION is invariably ...

Recruited by the Faith Center Church in the early ’70s, preacher Gene Scott asked for complete control, got it, then kicked out the existing church leaders, including Jim Bakker. He found himself with ...

Dean Hovey was hungry. His young industrial design firm, Hovey-Kelley Design, had been working on projects for Apple Computer for a couple of years but wanted to develop entire products, not just ...

Under a full moon, the translucent structure that covers the east mound at Çatalhöyük glows like the damp shell of an immense horseshoe crab. During the day, the soft conversation of a hundred or more ...

The stories Teresa Nguyen’s parents told her as a little girl growing up in Vietnam planted a seed. They were memories of the day, in 1975, that Saigon fell to North Vietnamese troops, marking the end ...

In 2010, John Platz got a seat on a “rocket ship” about to launch. The longtime radio voice of Stanford basketball, Platz, ’83, JD/MBA ’89, was hired to help broadcast Stanford football just in time ...

“If I shoot this gun today and I don’t vomit, I can do this job,” Erica Escalante told the firing range instructor during preparatory training for police academy. That was 1998, in Oxnard, an ...