Traveler, Your (Digital) Footprints: Cappuccino catalysis

In Traveler, Your (Digital) Footprints, Chuer Yang ’27 explores the various internet rabbit holes she’s tumbled down.

I am endlessly drawn to the olfactory invitations sent by coffee shops. Their aromas are infused with the exhilarating breath of conversation, the quiet turned pages of books and the stochastic tip-tapping of computer keys. 

Back in high school, I concocted a masterplan to try as many of my hometown coffee shops as I could before I left for college. This endeavor culminated in a Yelp collection storing my travels across the city of Sacramento. Funnily enough, I never had a particular affinity for the taste of coffee then. The main attraction for me was always the ambience. I remember the first coffee shop that I really understood was Temple on S Street in downtown Sacramento. Perhaps I have an intrinsic affinity for so-called “third places,” or maybe it was just the caffeine — but watching the sunlight filter through the windows onto the various people reading, talking and working, I felt an inexplicable sense of excitement. 

I found economist Ariel Rubinstein’s Atlas of Cafes where one can think so long ago that I can’t even recall which rabbit hole I jumped down to get to it. In the vast treasure troves of cartography, this is one of my all-time favorites. The essence of the atlas is in the affix “where one can think.” The quality of coffee is completely irrelevant; the only criteria are the “atmosphere, lighting and noise level,” according to Rubinstein. The atlas is a community of those who like to steep their mornings in the synchronized chaos entailed by a simple cup of Joe. 

Rubinstein puts it best in his manifesto:

“In the University of Cafés, no one demands that research must be useful. From the outset, there is an atmosphere of apparent idleness and lack of purpose at the coffee houses, which is the suitable atmosphere for basic research.”

The University is just one big incubator for collision theory and every cafe is an enzyme of its own. In these arenas, I have exchanged and witnessed the exchange of countless books, theorems and ideas. The mind engages in collective wanderlust with all the other travelers from different walks of life. The acoustics are made to accommodate sounds, stories and voices from every discipline and to construct silk roads from continent to continent with spectacular ease.

For the first time, my adventure along the internet superhighway led to an in-person escapade. One afternoon, curious as to what coves might inhabit Stanford’s surroundings, I double clicked into Palo Alto. 

There, I found Cafe Venetia. And of course, I had to pay a visit. 

At Venetia, there’s no WiFi and the tables are sized to ensure that a Macbook would look displeasingly gargantuan on them  —  the cafe is a small haven in a town infused with cafe work culture. Since coming to Stanford, I have acclimated to the taste of coffee, so I ordered a cappuccino and spent a beautiful morning reading on Venetia’s patio.

At any choice cafe, the density of reactants is palpable and every person is guaranteed to have an ecstatic surplus of activation energy. The success of a collision hums in the background of jazz music through speakers; it hangs in the space between low lights swaying from the ceiling. 

While you’re here —  and whether “here” means a cafe or university —  indulge in every impetus of intellectual excess. You can scapegoat everything on the simple rhetorical question: if not now, when? Spend obscene hours in the Special Collections Archive, pop into everyone’s office hours just because, press the gas pedal all the way down any time something shiny catches your eye. The university is a bright symposium and to be a true student is to be a hedon of the mind and soul. 

The cafe is a hostel, a pit stop in each of our journeys to who-knows-where to do who-knows-what. So stay the night and get drunk on the perfume of caffeine. It’ll linger like the conversation you had yesterday over espresso.

To quote Rubinstein: “We are certainly enjoying the good life in academia”! 

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