Features
Editor’s Choice
Features
As the population ages, robots are poised to offer a helping hand, a leg up, and a pep for your step.
Love at First Byte
Smitten with his first look at IBM s blinking box almost 50 years ago, Donald Knuth has devoted his career to elevating the art of programming. Can the man who helped shape computer science finish what he started?
by Kara Platoni
Soul Support
How does religious faith inform the lives of individual students, and what is its role in campus discourse? Efforts by the Office for Religious Life and a growing interfaith community are giving new meaning to the notion of spirited exchange.
by Diane Rogers
One Useful Thing In My Life
The winner of the Stanford fiction contest features a protagonist as world-weary as the Alzheimer s patient she cares for.
by Kathleen Founds
'All, All Is Destruction'
Hours after the 1906 earthquake shattered Stanford, a student from Arkansas wrote home to describe the scene. Her letters offer a vivid portrait of a university in shambles, but ready to rally.
Economy of Scales
Experts agree that farmed fish help feed the world. Stanford researcher Rosamond Naylor wants to make sure they don t ruin the environment.
by Paul Rogers
Top Gun
NRA president Sandra Froman, 71, combines legal brilliance and personal conviction to lobby for the nation s gun owners. Whether analyzing the Second Amendment or trading shots with gun control advocates, her aim is the same: to win the debate about firearms in America.
by Kevin Cool
Home Movies
Reed Hastings founded Netflix as a response to irritation over video store late fees, and now his company is the one rental chains want to emulate. Having prospered with direct-mail movies, can he lead the way toward on-demand entertainment?
by Joan O’C. Hamilton
It's Their Call
As democracy in China struggles for a foothold, communication professor Jim Fishkin s deliberative polling experiment is pushing a governing principle that is both revolutionary and old-fashioned: ask the people what they want.
by Joel McCormick
Front and Center
On the eve of her departure from the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor talks about her early anxiety as a Stanford student, the struggle to find a job as a lawyer and the challenges of a pathbreaking journey.
by Kevin Cool