Sep - Oct 2009 Issue

Duke University Archives

In an e-mail exchange this August, financial writer Bill Cohan muses about where he would place the blame for the financial meltdown. Was it debt-indifferent consumers or careless regulators or not-so-independent rating agencies or a financial industry conditioned to ignore risk?

R. Larry Todd, Arts & Sciences Professor of music, has had a whirlwind year.

Go, team: Trinity's 1891 football team. Duke University Archives

 The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans has more money than 90 percent of the U.S. population combined. Lisa Keister '90 and her students are exploring why wealth distribution is this lopsided.

Visual, literal: Picasso's Segment of Pear, Wine­glass, and

Nurturing nature: Horticulturist Kilbane tends to hardy and perennial lily competitors. Michael Zirkle

No home: Thousands gathe

Thielman: DAA undergraduate scholar. Cary Norton

 

Gordon E. Stanley

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. Louis Circuit Court, where hundreds of slaves sued for their freedom in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Search for "Mike Posner LDOC" on YouTube. Find it, and you'll see an out-of-focus video clip that opens with a crowd of students crammed onto Duke's main West Campus quad. Then, the camera, held by someone on stage, turns to the right and rests on Mike Posner and his collaborator, rapper Big Sean. They start into a song, and the crowd is feeling it, singing along with "Smoke and Drive," a hit from Posner's recently released CD. It's a favorite for the students who have gathered to celebrate the spring semester's Last Day of Classes.

Early on the morning of Thursday, March 13, 2008, Robert K. Steel, Undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance, had breakfast with H. Rodgin Cohen, the senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, the Wall Street law firm. The gregarious Steel '73 asked Cohen how things were going. "He said, 'I'm great, but I'm kind of pooped,' " Steel recalls. "I was up late, and there are a lot of challenges at Bear Stearns."

 In 1959, a young meteorologist named Edward Lorenz set out to build himself a world. Naturally, the project entailed a few compromises:

What happened to a Neanderthal man named Shanidar 3 more than 500 centuries ago? Steven Churchill, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology, has an idea. Discovered in Iraq in the 1950s with a pierced ninth rib, Shanidar 3 has perplexed investigators ever since. Churchill was originally looking into Neanderthal's aerobic capacity and body shape for an article when, he says, the journal's editor asked him to speculate on what had happened to the rib.

Photos courtesy Jennifer Goodman Linn

Ian Baucom, professor and chair of the English department, has been named director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Baucom will succeed Srinivas Aravamudan, the new dean of the humanities in Arts & Sciences.Katherine Franz, assistant professor of chemistry, was named a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar.

Wheel of Steel, 2006, by Robin Rhode, South African, bo

  Courtesy John Stanbury  

Kadivar: envisioning a more democratic Iran. Jon Gardiner

Children born without thymus glands have given Duke researchers a rare opportunity to study how a new immune system develops its population of infection-fighting T cells.

Illustration Christopher Zacharow / photo Duke Photography

Thomas Concordia/Wireimage

Woodruff: distinguished journalist, analyst, alumna.

A newly identified gene may be able to predict not only the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease but also the approximate age at which the disease will begin to manifest itself.This new gene, TOMM40, may be able to predict when Alzheimer's disease develops within a five- to seven-year window among people over sixty.

Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture

Selections from the new DukeReads series