Joshua Wagner

I'm Josh, an aspiring journalist from Los Angeles. I'm interested in the intersection of philosophy and literature; you can find my writings at ArtNowLA, The New York Times, and The Stanford Daily.

Google Podcasts •

Back in America - How would you go to Zoom School as a homeless youth? We asked Bridging Tech, a charity devoted to overcoming the digital divide

In 2021, it is nearly impossible to get anything done without a laptop: apply for a job, go to school, safely connect with friends, or schedule a COVID-19 vaccine appointment. Yet, there are fewer laptops in existence than humans on this planet, presenting a unique challenge for unhoused students. Bridging Tech in a new charity that seeks to redistribute hardware and other education resources to this vulnerable population across the digital divide.
Back in America •

Back in America: Who should get the vaccine first? We didn’t know so we asked a philosopher

As countries worldwide scramble to vaccinate their citizens against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, governments have to make the uncomfortable calculus of who deserves to get the vaccine right now. The ones who are spreading it the most? The ones in essential high-risk jobs? People over a certain age? That threshold is unclear and hotly contested. With several months to go before vaccines are readily available to any desiring American adult, legislators have to ask The Question: who first? And, as
Insomniac Leopard •

‎Insomniac Leopard: On the Death of Forever with Tom Moynihan

In this inaugural episode, Josh sat down with Tom Moynihan, a research contractor at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, to talk about extinction, barnacles, and the future of the world machine. Does knowing that climate change is fast-approaching, that the COVID-19 virus may infect us any day, or that the human race will be extinguished long before the death of the earth change our behavior at all?
Back in America •

Back in America: Zionism, Mysticism, and the Law: Sam Shonkoff and his students on American Judaism

What is really at question is the American way of life. What is really at question is whether Americans already have an identity or are still sufficiently flexible to achieve one. This is a painfully complicated question, for what now appears to be the American identity is really a bewildering and sometimes demoralizing blend of nostalgia and opportunism. ––James Baldwin In recent months, shows about Jewish thought and theology (Pretend it’s a City, Unorthodox) have populated Netflix’s “Trendin
Art Now LA •

Matt Bollinger: 'Labor Day'

Neatly tucked into the front gallery at M + B, Matt Bollinger’s "Labor Day," confronts viewers with a scattered panoply of shapes. Each work, painted specifically for the show, seems to spring to an idealized life, replete with muted color schemes and rhyming characters––many who resurface in Bollinger’s hand-drawn animations. At stake is a melancholic vision of America, caught between a neoliberal drive towards productivity and the dissatisfaction of the labor itself.
The Stanford Daily •

Senior Column: The final statement

If you ever walk toward the Anderson Collection from the Main Quad, right past the Sapp Center, you’ll come across a tree. A yucca that Jane Stanford transplanted there in 1894 to mark the boundary of what would become the Cantor Arts Center. As a place, Stanford is populated with such distinctive trees — the junipers at Landau, the ficus at Encina, the gold wattles on Mayfield. Trees haunt the campus. Where I saw it To the left and then twice that Distance again further and further In this
The Stanford Daily •

The Dualist: The ruined image

There is no photograph that is not a failure. To take a photo of something (and not another thing) belies an implicit ethical relationship to that thing; to be seen is to be loved. The implicit goal of the photograph is to depict a portion of reality in exacting detail, to reproduce the world as it actually is experienced. As Soviet cinematographer Dziga Vertov writes, “Our eyes see very little and very badly … so we invented the camera to penetrate more deeply into the visual world.” Yet, our m
The Stanford Daily •

Badlands: Q&A with head curator Reilly Clark

Reilly Clark (’19) and Reily Haag (’19), co-presidents of the Profession Art Society of Stanford, head-curated an art exhibition, Badlands, currently at the O’Donohue Stanford Educational Farm. Focusing on indigenous photographer Josué Rivas’ photographs of protests at Standing Rock, Badlands also features work directly responding to Rivas’ intense images. The Daily sat down with Clark to discuss the experience of curating an exhibition, putting everything together and the stakes of such a proje
The Stanford Daily •

Wagner: Stanford and its crushing freedom

In my five quarters on campus, it seems like we are continually talking about our own endless achievements and abilities. In order to get into Stanford, everyone had to do Something at their high school, aspire to some natural talent that they would develop. Collecting bones, base jumping, cultivating coffee beans — just talk with people from your freshman dorm, you’ll begin to realize all of the weird and interesting passions that we all have. And receiving a Stanford acceptance means that the
The Stanford Daily •

Respecting silence

Philosophy comes too late. The point at which an aesthetic idea or concept is formalized and widely accepted enough to persuade a publisher, receive a book deal, meet a deadline and enrapture an audience is the point at which it becomes embalmed. Like a motionless monument, the Academy transmutes the living and breathing into deadened flesh, binding in order to analyze and dissect, not allowing for fresh air. The act of study opposes the experiential act of being present to the world and seeing
The Stanford Daily •

Abstracted spaces

People are abstract like art is abstract. Representational, paraphrasable, inaccurate and unable to be made perfectly mimetic. A failure. I recently went to The Anderson Collection to stare at Philip Guston’s characterization of a disembodied overcoat, “The Coat II.” Depicting a floating overcoat flanked by empty, black shoes and a flowing river of what can only be blood, the piece serves as a ghastly self-portrait of the artist as guilty, as not being able to offer up more than fictionalized re
The Stanford Daily •

Us and them

I like lunch. There’s nothing more comforting than sitting at Wilbur lunch with a friend on a weekday staring at a burrito bowl. Looking around the crowded dining hall, I wonder how many hidden faces are of people I might recognize from my freshman dorm, from class, from miscellaneous encounters. And, I ask myself the same angsty question I asked myself in high school: How much can we possibly know about one another? It seems like we can break down the kinds of interactions that we have into tw
Load More Articles