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RSS feedsAuthor: Andrea Runyan
Opinions Columnist
Articles by this author:
Perspectives: Antibiotics and Depression
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Perspectives: Chronic Lyme Disease
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Perspectives: Ecstatic Contra Dancing and Ego Death
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Perspectives: Car-Free Roads and Reterritorialization
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Status attracts
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Five a Day of Creativity
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Creativity breeds happiness.
Summer at Stanford
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Family Inheritance
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My friend told me how he’d learned this work ethic from his parents and even grandparents.
Food is the Thing
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Do what you *really* want
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At a networking party I went to last weekend, people brought up the increasingly widespread conviction that people should choose jobs that contribute to their life goals and that they enjoy work more than whatever they do when they’re not at work.
What's luck got to do with it?
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It can be frustrating for spectators when a soccer game – much less a World Cup title like last Sunday’s between Italy and France – is decided by penalty shootouts.
Anti-anti-anti-antidepressants
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A column opposed to the antagonizing of people who would prefer not to take antidepressants for their whole lives.
From the way people talk about it, you’d think the decision to stop taking antidepressants or to refuse to start taking them was like shunning power steering out of mere stubbornness.
Sex is more than socialization
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Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a series of columns about men and women.
Last weekend, I had the privilege of spending an evening with, among others, a three-year-old girl and her one-year-old brother.
Imagine that
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The nursing home where I volunteered last year had an interesting sign in the foyer. Like a poster from kindergarten, it displayed the day of the week, the date and the weather.
It’s not a race
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There’s a difference between being untalented at something and being chronologically behind. If you’re worse than your peers at something, you might not have less of a capability for it — you might have had a late start.
Stanford Double-think
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We’re involved in a collective delusion. We chronically deny the extent of our privilege, underestimate our ability to change things in the world and rationalize using our resources selfishly.
Co-op college for me
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College strikes me as a hybrid of a finishing school and a training ground for the workplace. The true purposes of attending seem to be to pick up sufficient cultural knowledge and to seem “educated,” obtaining the stamp of a member of the educated class — demonstrating to potential employers not only your ability to work but also your willingness to cater to authority and sacrifice sleep, friendships and other interests for delayed and arbitrary rewards.
No more work — more play!
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“No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work.
You knew it was coming: no more civilization
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If necessity is the mother of invention, then why do civilized cultures call their inventions great accomplishments?
Deep ecology: No more 'people'
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What do I mean by “no more ‘people’ “?
Loving your courses
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I love my classes, and I’ll bet many of you reading this do (or did), too. I love classes in general, but especially those statistics and math, my major.
Humanities: the killing, er, dying fields
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My dad has a saying: “The fact that people ask whether you believe in something is a good indication it doesn’t exist.” A Google search for “Does God exist” pulled up 103,000 Web sites, but a search for “Does Clinton exist” “did not match any documents.
Technology taking over human functions?
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You might think your job is safe from the onslaught of technology as long as you're not a checkout clerk, farmer or call center worker.
The Bazaar of Higher Education
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The objective of Stanford University, Jane and Leland Stanford wrote in their Founding Grant in 1885, is “to qualify its students for personal success, and direct usefulness in life .
Don't shoot the columnist
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I complained last week that rare ideas get labeled as “crazy,” even if they’re decently rational.
Stanford takes care to promote diversity of backgrounds and lifestyles.
Who's the crazy one here?
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Last Sunday, I talked to the most important man in the world — at least according to him.
He boarded the free bus at Wal-Mart, lugging two backpacks and bike wheels.
Getting people to eat
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Five years ago today, I began my odyssey in the anorexia treatment system, when I was admitted to the Children’s Medical Center psychiatric ward.
Not enough women in science? Good for them!
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With all the fuss about the low percentage of women faculty in science and engineering, people have started asking, "Why aren't more women going into these fields?
No more majors
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Ever notice that some people have an easy time choosing a major, but others agonize about the choice for years?
To spend or not to spend
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My dad sent me this e-mail for Valentine’s Day (reprinted with his permission):
Hi Andrea,
I read a sarcastic article by some woman about how we have over-commercialized a day that was originally intended to be a day for lovers to be especially attentive to each other.
Bread is the new milk
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I cringed when I heard about the campaign that began last week to convince people that bread is healthy. Enough of the milk mustaches; now we’ll have the bread beard.