Barry Yeoman

When Titi Shodiya and Zakiya Whatley launched the science podcast Dope Labs, they started not by talking about science, but instead by telling the story of their friendship. “Zakiya and I met in grad school,” Shodiya Ph.D. ’15, a materials scientist and engineer, told listeners. “It was a tough time, to say the least. And in our pursuit to get the hell out of there, we became cousins. You know how Black folks do. She’s my play cousin.”

The defendant’s name was Mr. Scrub Bull. He entered Magistrate James McElroy Jameson’s makeshift courtroom in Pickens County, South Carolina, walking on four legs and escorted by rural and town policemen. There he stood, surely bewildered, as a court officer read the bill of indictments.

When a Duke-led research team won a $300 million federal grant to help develop an AIDS vaccine in 2005, the global situation was looking grim.

The honor of pressing the button fell to Matthias Gromeier. The button activated a pump that was connected to a syringe containing a genetically modified form of poliovirus, infused in a liquid. Once Gromeier initiated the process, the infusion would travel through a long plastic tube and into a small hole drilled into twenty-one-year-old Stephanie Lipscomb’s skull.

Atom Edwards is a high-school junior who carries himself with a confidence that not all his peers possess. The youngest of four siblings, he has a lanky frame and a hi-top fade that lightens at the tips like icing on a cupcake. He makes A’s and B’s; plays guitar, piano, and saxophone; and sits on the Teen Council at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art. He counts his friends by the dozen.

The evening begins with a local beer on the rooftop of The Durham Hotel. It’s breezy outside, and not yet dark, with a gibbous moon just starting to rise. Customers emerge from the elevator and ritually peer over the edge, taking in the aerial view of a downtown that ten years ago would have looked abandoned.

CLICK. A video of R&B musician Jill Scott fills the screen. She’s belting out “Strange Fruit,” a ballad written in the 1930s to protest the lynchings—hangings and other mob violence—that were terrorizing African-American communities. “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,” Scott sings, deep and throaty. “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Scientists have offered wide-ranging ideas about why being near the ocean brings us such calm. They include the negative ions found in ocean waves, which are believed to boost the mood chemical serotonin, and our evolutionary propensity to find safety in flat, unforested environments where predators can’t hide. Studies have linked swimming and other aquatic exercises to improved mood and sharper brain function.

On a Sunday afternoon this past March, Wallace J. Nichols took out a cloth drawstring bag and distributed its contents: oversized glass marbles the color of a tropical sea. “Hang on tight to your blue marble,” the tousle-haired marine biologist told the room full of adults celebrating Creek Week at the Durham County Library. “Don’t let it roll. Don’t drop it. Don’t throw them at the speaker or eat them.”

Art Pope J.D. '81 wants you to know that he did not buy North Carolina’s 2010 elections. “Depending on your perspective, I get far more credit and far more blame than I deserve,” says the Raleigh businessman, who in January 2013 became Governor Pat McCrory’s budget director.

Under a moonless sky in the North Carolina mountains, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate named Terry Sanford stood on the steps of the Henderson County courthouse and made a proposal that seemed audacious for 1960. It had been a stinking hot May day, but the night was cooling rapidly, and 350 voters had shown up to hear this former FBI agent and World War II paratrooper describe his vision.

On the first day of his marine conservation course this past January, Martin Smith told his eight undergraduates that they would play a game. One student would wait in the hallway. The other seven would stand around a conference table and go fishing.

When we adopted Scooter in 2008, my partner and I were curious about the ancestry of our sleek five-month-old puppy. Clearly she was a Labrador retriever mix, as the Durham County animal shelter had labeled her. She possessed the classic Lab muzzle, along with a dense black coat and an eagerness to please. But what else was she?

Last fall, Durham County health director Gayle Harris faced a thorny question: How do you get a confused and suspicious public inoculated against H1N1 influenza? The much-feared flu strain had already arrived in Durham, forcing Duke to cancel several summer youth camps. Nationwide, H1N1 had infected 22 million people, killing 3,900, according to estimates by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Still, persuading Durhamites to get vaccinated was proving tough.

 Tim Profeta M.E.M. '97, J.D. '97, director of Duke's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, arrives one April morning at the Capitol Hill office of a Republican senator from the Midwest. He's here to discuss one of the most difficult issues facing Congress this year: how to slow the devastating pace of global warming.

Reaching for the sky: Despite job-hunting disappointments, Conyers never gave up on his ch

December 2008. For the past seven years, Kelly Kennington Ph.D. '09 has kept her mind planted firmly in the 1800s. As a doctoral candidate in Duke's history department, she has immersed herself in records from Missouri's St.

 (Note: On January 20, 2009, Kevin Martin stepped down as chair of the FCC to join the Aspen Institute in Maryland as a senior fellow. )If Kevin Martin, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), was worried that the citizens of the Pacific Northwest were going to storm the podium where he was standing, his face never betrayed it.

 The week was not going well for rasta lobsta or for its creator, Mimi A.R. Koehl.

  As an August drizzle falls outside, thirty-one middle-schoolers sit at long tables in a North Carolina mountain lodge.

Before she showed up at Duke's Morreene Road Pain Clinic last year, Christy Anderson had suffered through intense migraines for more than three decades. They hunkered down in her forehead for days at a time, making her feel as if someone had planted a suction machine behind her eyebrows. During the worst attacks, all the forty-six-year-old Anderson could do was lie in the dark, motionless, hoping not to throw up. Raising her two children became an exhausting burden.

 Francis Brooke was still asleep in Baghdad's Mansour neighborhood when one of his houseboys came running in, shouting about a commotion on the street outside. It was 10:30 on a Thursday morning, and Brooke had spent the previous night with Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress.