Spring 2017 Issue

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FEATURES

  • Here’s an exercise to focus the mind: Imagine a new nuclear-arms race with no end in sight—except, maybe, Armageddon. And so in late January, Jack Matlock’s personal website carried his “Open Message for Presidents Trump and Putin.” As the two leaders were preparing for a phone chat, the time was right to acknowledge that their countries should be cooperating around common problems, particularly the dangers associated with nuclear weapons.
  • 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. Nuns typeset and bound the volumes and even were paid for their efforts.
  • It’s really hard to tell if you’re sleepy or confused,” Genevieve Lipp ’10, M.S. ’13, Ph.D. ’14 says to her EGR 244: “Dynamics” class at 9:07 a.m. on a Friday in mid-January. While her comment draws a few nervous laughs, it’s not an unfair claim. She’s outlining the polar frame for an audience of almost forty sophomores—the whiteboard replete with derivatives, trigonometric functions, and derivatives of trigonometric functions—and if the students are processing the material, well, then it’s a pretty subtle processing.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

  • “Would you like to fly a plane?” asks Rett Newton, Ph.D. student at the Marine Lab, cheerfully proffering the controller to a Parrot Bebop, an inexpensive starter drone that beginners can safely manage. I give, in order, what I assume must be the two most common responses to that question. First: “Has anyone ever said ‘no’ to that question?” (no one has).
  • The Duke University Archives recently received the Joseph Mitchell Papers on Max Wicker, a collection of letters, news clippings, and other documents that culminate in a 2006 paper, “The 1954 Firing of Max Wicker and Two Other North Carolina Student Directors, Jimmy Ray and J.C. Herrin,” by Joseph Mitchell M.Div. ’53, Ph.D. ’62.Max Wicker, a 1952 Duke Divinity School graduate, was president of Duke’s Baptist Student Union (BSU) in 1953. After graduating, he was hired to work at Duke by Jimmy Ray, secretary of the statewide BSU.
  • For the first time in Duke’s history, alumni will have a place of their own on campus. Construction of a new alumni center—a four-building cluster that will include event space, meeting rooms, offices, and Duke-themed exhibitions and displays—is beginning this spring, with the goal of opening in 2019.
  • By
    On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall began to fall in Germany, and with it communism in Eastern Europe. PENKA KOUNEVA Ph.D. ’97 was an aspiring composer living in Bulgaria, and her parents told her it was time to leave.“There was chaos. Nobody expected communism to collapse,” Kouneva, now a Hollywood video-game composer, says of that time. “My parents told me, ‘You have to look for an opportunity to study composition in the United States.’ ”
  • What’s a day like in your life as an entrepreneur? It’s chaotic! A lot of the ecosystem for an entrepreneur is staying involved and developing. So, I reserve two nights per week to go to networking events. Sometimes DukeGen comes to New York. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs through those events. The challenges we face are similar, and I’m reminded that this is a community that is always there for me.
  • By
    Shining a light on deathAs technology and medicine advance, the most basic of biological phenomena can be revisited, questioned, and altered. Haider Warraich, a cardiology fellow at Duke University Medical Center, is particularly interested in the endgame—death—and his new book, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life (St. Martin's Press), explores the process of dying and its symbolic importance. Here he shares the impetus behind his interest. 
  • Things got interesting early on in the Vietnam Staff Ride taken by the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy (AGS) in early January. Sparks flew on the very first evening when Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan exchanged harsh words. “He pointed out that he had been part of the Vietnam independence movement before it began the purging of noncommunist members and reproached me about the use of violence,” Ho said. “I reminded him that the history of independence movements was a history that had violence at every stage.“I quoted Thomas Jefferson.”
  • As Duke’s vice president for finance and treasurer, Tim Walsh oversees an array of financial and operational functions, ranging from accounting, procurement, and real estate to merchandise and licensing. How big is Duke’s budget, and how tuition-dependent is Duke?
  • THE CATALYST: Television isn’t a standard jumping-off point for an academic course. But The Wire, the acclaimed HBO series that ran from 2002 through 2008 and that Entertainment Weekly ranked as the best-ever TV show, isn’t standard television. Its layered, engrossing depiction of Baltimore—informed by creator and writer David Simon’s work as a police reporter for The Baltimore Sun—appealed to Anne-Maria Makhulu, an associate professor of cultural anthropology and African & African American studies.
  • By
    Forget Sundance and Cannes. Duke could hold its own film festival using the work of these acclaimed graduate student directors.Jeremy Lange: When he was working as a magazine photographer in 2006, Lange realized he didn’t know what was going on in the Middle East. “I realized I didn’t know anyone fighting in the wars. And I felt really removed from the whole thing. I felt I had a whole duty as a citizen to figure out what was going on,” Lange says.
  • By
    The Center for Documentary Studies hosts a night for fans of podcastsStrings of bare bulbs softly illuminate a darkened Motorco Music Hall in Durham. Rows of benches and folding chairs fill the room, and two enormous speakers flank a stage with no piano, no instruments, just more chairs, microphones, and a single computer. This won’t be singing and dancing—this will be listening.
  • Mark Hecker ’03 takes the same approach every time. He shows up in front of a D.C. public high school, out-of-place in well-worn jeans and a T-shirt, or maybe a long-sleeve dress shirt with a very adult collar, carrying a homemade sign, looking like a protester.
  • "THE INTERNET ASSUMES EVERYONE IS WHITE.""A strong statement maybe, but Winston Henderson B.S.E. ’90, J.D. ’96 takes out his phone to offer a simple demonstration.

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