Spring 2018 Issue

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FEATURES

  • Kate Bowler is told that if she goes to Amazon. com, types in “ever,” and watches the autofill, of all the products in the entire world her best-selling new book, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, will come up second. The only thing more popular on Amazon is “everything bagel seasoning.”
  • From a curious interplay between an imagined window and a real window, Dan Mallory ’01 conceived The Woman in the Window. The debut novel, he’s happy to point out, is the first in twelve years to enter The New York Times best-seller list at number one. There are deals with publishers in forty countries, along with a movie deal. There are quotes from celebrity authors (Stephen King among them): “a noir for the new millennium”; “totally original”; “a dark, twisty confection.”
  • Helin Gai ’09 ate the most memorable burger of his life at West Union’s Loop Pizza Grill on September 14, 2008. The economics and math double-major was just starting his senior year and had already secured an offer for a great job after graduation. The foreseeable future seemed assured as he settled in to enjoy a warm Sunday afternoon on campus.
  • Sophomore Deepti Agnihotri remembers a story one of her classmates told last year about finding her significant other, a tale that culminates in her classmate proposing over the phone. Her reactions? “ A: That was so gutsy. B: I can’t imagine anyone in my generation doing that, ever,” she says. “And C: It’s just so cool to hear people’s experiences from a different time that I wouldn’t usually get. “And now they’ve been married for over thirty-five years,” she says.
  • One evening this past winter at an event celebrating the opening of the brandnew Rubenstein Arts Center, I watched from a few feet away as the dancers of the American Ballet Theater performed in the “jewel box,” the center’s glass-enclosed second-floor dance studio. The lights were low, but from my chair under the towering windows, I was close enough to see the sweat on the dancers’ brows and the intensity of their muscular movement. I felt a sudden burst of inspiration to join them, to get up and dance with the dancers. Thankfully, I resisted.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

  • For the season of beach trips and camping trips and, well, many hours behind the wheel, Grammy-winner Eric Oberstein ’07 shares his top road-trip tunes. “Aguanile” by Marc Anthony This 2007 remake of the 1972 hit opens up as a rumba and heads into a hard-hitting salsa groove. It’s an infectious track that will have you dancing in your seat — perfect for kicking off your journey.
  • Fifty years ago, on Sunday, April 7, 1968, a recording of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech played over loudspeakers to 500 Duke students assembled on what is now Abele Quad. This was the first day of the Silent Vigil, organized in response to the assassination of King a few days before. The students had decamped from President Douglas M. Knight’s house in Duke Forest, which they had occupied since the evening of April 5.
  • By
    As she received the 2017 Liz Silverstein Agent Manager of the Year award, Pamela Green ’85 listed three gestures that came from others and that aided her journey to becoming president and CEO of her own agency, Durham-based PMG Arts Management. She asked her colleagues to be mindful of those gestures as they work with others: affirmation (for those with potential), she said, the benefit of the doubt (teach what they need to know), and second chances (hire them again).
  • What sparked your interest in rivers? I went to college for physics. One day my undergraduate adviser pulled me aside and told me I would not be a good physicist. I left college and meandered around the West for a while, and I got a job assisting a hydrologist at Mount Rainier National Park—basically schlepping water samples for the National Park Service. I discovered I loved hydrology, so I went back to college to finish my degree in physics and then became a hydrologist.
  • Picture the South China Sea, east of Vietnam and west of the Philippines, dotted with made-in-China products. Those would be pseudo-islands—artificial islands or pumped-up natural islands, complete with military airstrips, seaports, and bases. Shots are fired, a vessel is sunk, and sailors are lost, near the ominously labeled Fiery Cross Reef. The picture becomes unstable.
  • By
    WE ASKEDKen Ilgunas A.M. ’11, a backcountry ranger and perpetual traveler, has a new book, This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back (Plume). The notion of private property seems ingrained in the American ethic; Ilgunas, however, discovers in his research that this wasn’t always the case. So, we asked him: What surprised you most about the history of property law in America?
  • A few minutes into the 2018 State of the Union speech, the president makes his first factual claim: “Since the election we have created 2.4 million new jobs.” FactCheck.org is on the case immediately, offering a quick take. “In Trump’s first eleven months, employment increased by 1.84 million,” it notes, “12 percent lower than the 2 million jobs that were created in the previous eleven months.” That quick take moves out on FactStream, an automatic fact-checking app getting its first beta test.
  • Most research labs at Duke have clear markings. A framed sign on the wall with a professor’s name; his or her own separate space protected from peons. But on the bottom floor of the Levine Science Research Center, only a crinkled sheet of printer paper— hanging from another lab’s entrance—gives away the Small Molecule Synthesis Facility. To find the SMSF, the paper explains, you need to go “straight ahead through this door” and “follow the corridor down to the ice machine.” On the right is your destination.
  • Brian Hare admits he was kind of rooting for the bonobos.
  • By
     ANIMALS 
  • Andrew Johnson and John Tyler: What could possibly link them together? Well, they both were U.S. presidents. And they both were—in the unanimous verdict of students who were scrutinizing their legacies—“horrible.” Four students had come together for a “Spring Breakthrough” class—a nontraditional take on spring break—that researched, reflected on, and ultimately ranked U.S. presidents. Spring Breakthrough is all about offering classes that have no grades, have no pressure, but have lots of potential to force students outside their intellectual comfort zones.

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