One pope was a woman, so the story goes. The year was 855 and even those attending her papal procession didn’t know she was not a man until she dropped to the ground and gave birth to a child. The tale of Pope Joan is told in Incominciano Le uite de Pontefici et imperadori Romani, or Lives of the Popes and Roman Emperors, which was published in 1478 by a monastic press at the Ripoli convent in Florence.

On the day of a show, even an empty theater has a peculiar energy. It’s as though a wild thing has escaped, and no one knows quite when it will appear again. That alchemy of excitement and fear is catnip, not just for performers, but also for the folks who recruit the talent, set the stage, and watch it all unfold from the wings.

Streaked with ancient limestone dust, the scientist hovering near Steve Churchill’s worktable waited to see his reaction to the fossil she’d surgically removed from its eons-old resting place eighty meters below ground. Crammed in the tent’s open window, a camera crew from National Geographic gathered more footage. Researchers came in and out, sidestepping the tangle of cables and lab equipment. Two bloggers tapped away on their laptops.

Orientation Week is days away, but already skittish students are filing into the East Duke lecture hall, clutching their security blankets—backpacks, water bottles, spiral notebooks sticky from sweaty palms. Most of them met each other the day before, as they wandered the stuffy, unfamiliar corridors looking for their dorm rooms, or later that evening over dinner in the basement of Gilbert-Addoms.

After spending childhood summers sweeping up sawdust and eating lunch atop overturned drywall buckets on her father’s construction sites, Marnie Oursler M.B.A. ’13 swore off the building business. Then the bullish real-estate market of the early 2000s caught her attention. A property sales agent at the time, she lived on peanut butter sandwiches for two years until she’d saved enough to buy a $250,000 fixer-upper in Bethany Beach, Delaware.

Community service is more than a social or moral obligation, says John Graham Ph.D. ’94, D. Richard Mead Jr. Family Professor of finance at Fuqua. It can be good business, too.

In today’s casual, open-plan office where teamwork and flexibility are prized, hierarchy is often seen as too rigid, a Mad Men-like relic as productive as a threemartini lunch. But according to research from Aaron Kay, associate professor of management at Fuqua, employees may actually perform better in more traditionally structured organizations.

This summer, Fuqua’s long-anticipated M.M.S. program in partnership with Duke Kunshan University (DKU) welcomed its inaugural class of students. The thirty-seven students from eight countries will study together for ten months. They’ll spend the first three terms on the Durham campus with the 113 students enrolled in the M.M.S.: Foundations of Business program.

A few years ago, an irate father in Minnesota demanded to meet with the manager of his local Target store to discuss why his teenage daughter was getting coupons for maternity and baby products in the mail. The embarrassed manager apologized for the mix-up and called the father a few days later to make amends. This time, however, it was the father who apologized. It seems his daughter, he’d just found out, was indeed pregnant.

During last year’s G8 Summit hosted by the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron and social-finance pioneer Sir Ronald Cohen invited leaders in the impact-investing community to join a task force seeking ways to boost economic investment for the common good.

Billy Pizer, professor of public policy, economics, and environment, and his colleague Tim Profeta, director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, wanted to find a hands-on way to engage students with the issue of emissions regulation. The Bass Connections energy-theme courses, in which graduate students and undergrads work together in small interdisciplinary groups, seemed the ideal setting in which to launch a new research project on the topic.

After taking professor Helen “Sunny” Ladd’s core public policy course, Aliya Pilchen ’13 was eager to sign up for another class taught by Sanford’s foremost expert in education finance. But there was one problem: Pilchen was only a junior, and the class she had her eye on was offered to graduate students.

When Kentucky attorney general Jack Conway ’91 stepped behind the podium last March to announce he would no longer defend the state’s same-sex marriage ban, he was, in effect, walking onto the national stage. He was not the first attorney general to take such a stance—there had been seven before him, and more since—but his five-minute, heartfelt remarks went viral, and the moment became another turning point in the marriage-equality movement.

Retelling the Story: Deondra Rose

Under the stewardship of Anirudh Krishna, Sanford professor and associate dean of international academic programs, Duke’s educational outpost in Udaipur, India, has become a hub for research and experiential learning.