John Edwards’ Plan for America

On Wednesday April 26th, John Edwards spoke before a Stanford audience on his views on how America should change. During his speech, the former senator and vice-presidential candidate claimed that “poverty is the great moral issue of our day.” Edwards currently directs an anti-poverty organization that seeks to create a government system with more mechanisms to assist 37 million poor Americans.

Book Review: Inside CentCom

General DeLong served as the deputy commander of Central Command, directly under General Tommy Franks, for the first several years of the Global War on Terrorism.

Cartoon: The Day Stanford Stood Still

Review Cartoonist Paul Craft depicts the recent student protest during Bush's visit.

Learning that Opposes Opportunity

For many Americans, the idea of memorization as the basis of education brings up queasy recollections of elementary school geography competitions and the anxiety of mumbling over the verses of ancient poems moments prior to graded recitations. From Talib hafizes in Afghani madrasahs, who commit themselves to learn the Qu’ran by heart to more familiar examples like the “automatons” of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the images we associate with rote learning are, while not outright negative, at the very least uneasy ones.

Rosencranz Strikes in Nepal

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world today. The tiny country, landlocked between China and India, suffers from a 42% unemployment rate and struggles to feed its own citizens, 31% of who live beneath the poverty line. 76% of the labor force is employed in an underdeveloped and inefficient agricultural sector. Nepal, like any state harboring 28 million souls on the verge of starvation, is a country ripe for internal conflict and strife.

This Week's Events

The Review debuts a new weekly list of upcoming events--including popular parties, interesting lectures, and important campus events.

Icy Welcome Fails to Ruin Bush’s Stanford Visit

On Friday, April 21, President Bush stopped at Stanford as part of his four-day California tour. While here, Bush conversed with Hoover Fellows and university officials about policy ideas in a relatively informal format. Originally, the discussion was to be held in the Lou Henry Hoover Building on campus.

Editor's Note: Imposed Silence

On Thursday, April 27, members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community (LGBT) participated in a national day of silence to commemorate the silence of those too afraid to speak about their sexual orientation.

Iraq Inside-out: An Exclusive Interview

My interviewee and I sat at one of those dinky metal tables by the CoHo. An astute observer passing by could have surmised that the Arab-looking man sitting across from me was an Iraqi-American, but not even Sherlock Holmes could have guessed that just 15 years earlier, in the aftermath of Desert Storm, this Iraqi man had been manning a tank as he and his fellow Shi’ites rose up against Saddam Hussein.

Book Review: Communism: A History

Not everyone can sum up the combined histories of the Cold War, Leninist and Stalinist Russia, and Marxist ideology in less than two hundred pages, but the illustrious Harvard historian Richard Pipes does this with surprising skill.

Smoke Signals

Protestors displayed a variety of signs during the April 21 demonstration. Some were witty, some were dumb. Some interesting—others were bland. Smoke signals examines some of the best and worst of the rhetoric protestors had to offer during the event.

Dissent: The Highest Form of Patriotism

Since the beginnings of civilization, governments have struggled with the inherent tension between individual freedom and the collective order required for a society to function. While, historically speaking, many societies have responded to dissent with authoritarian rule, liberal Western societies of the modern era adopt a decidedly more open and receptive approach to social discontent.