Special 2015 Issue

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  • When I visited the September 11 Memorial for the first time, I walked slowly around the empty foundations where the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. I read the names engraved in bronze. The etched walls surround hollow caverns that hold deep pools of water, and I could not look down into the water or across to the mirrored set of visitors on the other side of the pool without facing those inscriptions. The names, and the lives that they mark, surround and define the space of the memorial.
  • "It’s super sexy,” Roger said, as he unsnapped the black nylon smock from the back of my neck and pulled it away from me, clumps of black fuzz falling from my lap to the floor. “You carry it.” Just minutes earlier, his clippers glided slowly over the curve of my head, the electronic hum deepening as they entered the brush. “You hear that?” he said. “That’s because of how dense your hair is.” I laughed.
  • But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us. —Ernest Hemingway, on Beryl Markham

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

  • By
    Some call the gym their home. Others gawk at these self-proclaimed "gym rats." So, good or bad, what's the hype?Thank you to: Zachary Bears, Daniel Celebucki, Won-Ji Lee, Oyintarelado Osuobeni, Sherry Zhang
  • Islam is largely a mystery in America; one in which the lived reality of Muslims has become disconnected with the perceptions of what it actually means to practice this religion.
  • When I look at teenagers today, I wonder whether I was ever really their age. They seem so much more self-possessed, so much more mature than I ever was. As a teen, I was a mass of insecurities, raised basically as an only child—my brother is ten years older— by working-class parents (my father was a tobacco farmer and ran a country store) who had never attended college. They pushed me to do well in school, and, like a good boy, I complied.
  • In late September 2006, as one of the most venerated events in professional golf drew to a close, a pair of eleven-year-olds were on hand to help present the trophy. Clad in the tricolors of the host country—their native Ireland— Leona and Lisa Maguire walked on stage to deliver the Ryder Cup to the winning European team.
  • Great stories have sticking power. Certain books stick with me, and I stick with them; I keep them constantly handy. One of them, still around after all these years, has a bold green-and-yellow cover with the words “The Definitive Text.” That’s James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and for me, it was definitive in revealing the surprising potential of storytelling. Portrait presented a coming-of-age tale just as I, more or less, was coming of age. This was the education of Stephen Dedalus.
  • Rafiq and I say goodbye and part ways early in the morning. The night before, the two of us, along with a few Palestinian and American friends, had been telling stories of the places we come from as we listened to the beautiful music of a spontaneously born five-man band. We were in Birzeit, a small Palestinian university town.
  • I have a black-and-white photo of me my father took during a childhood ballet class. Dad was an artist and an electrical engineer, a self-actualized man who encouraged artistic and academic expression. A man of few words, he was and is the beacon for my creative path that claims the world as my home.
  • The knowledge of my limited power became clear to me early in my career, and I recognize it each time I treat a person who has sustained an acute trauma that causes a spinal fracture and sadly, a spinal- cord injury.
  • The dirt road that leads to the village of Kagamo is jolting and narrow, little more than a gash cut into the foothills of northwestern Rwanda’s jagged Virunga volcanoes. As our Land Rover crunches over chunks of soft volcanic rock, my guide tells me about the people who live here. They are desperately poor, he says. Many eat only once every two days. They have no land. Most of the children will never go to school.
  • My philosophy of teaching draws on long-standing humanistic traditions. I strive not just to broaden intellectual horizons and facilitate more skillful analytical inquiry, but also to create a variety of reflective echoes once the details of a course have long faded. The capacity to pose tough questions, to place human behavior in larger societal contexts, to apply a variety of disciplinary perspectives to vexing societal problems— these are the hallmarks of education that truly last. But how can one achieve such goals in a world of information saturation and divided attention?
  • I can tell the story of my life through the clothes I’ve worn (or wanted to wear). It starts with the strict dress code at my elementary day school. The school uniform was a simple khaki skirt and white blouse, or khaki pants with a blue blazer. It was bland and un-threatening—a goodkid’s outfit.
  • What if our only hope—and the only hope for the integrity of life online, of life, period —is our passionate sense of radical kinship and an unwavering commitment to solidarity against oppression?On the six-year anniversary of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent presidential election, I was reminded of who we were to each other when Twitter was fresh and still not quite tainted by the self-promotion and commercialism that defines it today.
  • You might think that your ability to reason—and all the brainpower that entails—helps you make good decisions. Reason does help, much of the time. If you face a decision about how to rebalance your retirement portfolio, for example, you should indeed list the pros and cons of different options, estimate your income sources and needs, and calculate what’s best for you. All that reasoning requires a lot of mental energy!
  • On the night of August 7, 2007, I sat in a beautiful ballpark on the San Francisco Bay and watched as the personification of power in baseball stood at the plate. The fans stood behind him, a full-on throaty roar, curious given that by that point, he was as much chemistry experiment as ballplayer.
  • Among the hundreds of roles the late Broadway actor Kevin Gray ’80 played during his career, there was none he treasured more than the title character from Phantom of the Opera.
  • Farrell created a new emergency response app called CriticaLink after living in Bangladesh, where there are 160 road fatalities for every two in the United States. The app allows first responders to connect with doctors and trained health-care volunteers to address road emergencies in countries that lack an ambulance response system. It won Bangladesh’s 2015 National Mobile App Award in the Health and Environment category. In May, Farrell was in Nepal training volunteer first responders when the first of the country’s two earthquakes hit.
  • By
    Marketers have long known that when consumers are in a hurry, they’re more likely to spend a little more for a product they want or need. Jordan Etkin, Fuqua assistant professor of marketing, set out to discover what’s behind this phenomenon and whether it also applies to situations in which there’s no actual time constraint.
  • By
    The Enron and Worldcom scandals helped stem the practice of packing corporate boards with go-along company insiders. Now the cards have been flipped, and increasingly, CEOs are the lone insiders on boards packed with outsiders.
  • By
    A federal incentive program designed by Fuqua professors to spur the development of drugs for rare or neglected diseases has found its first bigticket impact investor. The Global Health Investment Fund (GHIF) announced in March a $10 million investment in a nonprofit pharmaceutical company to register a new treatment for river blindness, a devastating disease that affects more than 37 million people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • By
    A life-sized cutout of DC Comics hero The Flash streaks across the wall of Dean Bill Boulding’s office. It’s a fitting mascot for the marketing and leadership professor, who is at ease with the lightning speed of cultural change and impervious to the frictions that mire leaders in the past. Since taking the helm at Fuqua in 2011, Boulding has become the school’s philosopher coach, an approachable yet erudite presence with a mission to promote a purpose-driven model of business leadership.
  • By
    Finance professor John Buley is an enthusiast—for teaching, for Duke, for the power of markets, and for the potential of impact investing to change the world.Buley was a managing director at J.P. Morgan and came to Fuqua frequently while his son, Thomas Buley ’10, was an undergraduate student. He spoke to students about careers in banking. He also spoke about his work in a newly formed initiative, J.P. Morgan Social Finance, exploring how capital markets could provide funding for impact investments.
  • By
    By focusing on the well-being of children today, we’re ensuring the health of tomorrow’s adults, says Karen Remley M.B.A. ’97, the newly appointed executive director and CEO of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). “We have a reactive healthcare system—we tackle illness after the fact—but by addressing the physical, emotional, and social health of our children, we improve the overall health of our society going forward.”
  • By
    Trinity College gets a new leader
  • THE CATALYST: Aaron Dinin ’05 graduated from Duke with an English major and a published novel to his name but had trouble turning that skill set into a career. To adapt, he taught himself coding and learned the back end of the Internet through Web development jobs, eventually moving back to Durham as the founder of a start-up called RocketBolt. Armed with a Ph.D. in English, a decade of experience, and the realization that conventional classroom learning does not adequately prepare students to recover from inevitable failures, he stepped back on campus to fill that void.

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