A few days ago I found myself back at my old alma mater, Stanford University, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Linguistics. Much was familiar to me since I left nineteen years ago—the building, the offices, a few of the faculty, the random musical equipment lying around—but there were some changes. The most notable was in the first floor break room: the built-in bookshelves that had long stood at the end of the room had been removed, replaced by a standing table and bar seating. It was a small matter of remodeling, and to be fair the contents of the bookshelf had mostly been moved around the corner into the copy room. But it was a bit of a shock to see, because I remember so vividly the wall full of old journals that adorned those shelves. There stood more peer-reviewed, scholarly studies in linguistics than I had previously seen amassed in one place without a trip to the library, all accessible at my fingertips to just flip through any time I stepped out of my office. It was an inspiring sight to make a young graduate student feel like they were part of something bigger, and much older, than whatever they were working on at the time. I sometimes pulled a random journal off the shelf just to see what was in it, part of a larger goal I had of somehow expanding my mind beyond the barriers of my own work. At that stage of my career I cannot say I understood everything or even much of what I read.