Summer 2017 Issue

In "Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama," historian and author David Garrow Ph.D. '81 takes a detailed look at the formative years of the forty-fourth president. Garrow isn't new to writing big books. His "Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade" and "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Leadership Conference" both were more than 800 pages. His deep reporting has paid off; the King book won both the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the Robert Kennedy Award.

I was a thirty-five-year-old established executive working for Wachovia when I started the Weekend Executive M.B.A. program at the Fuqua School of Business. At Wachovia, I was used to working in teams and leading teams that had a common perspective. At Duke, I quickly learned what it means to be "Team Fuqua" and how enriching it is when you have people from all walks of life come together to accomplish a common goal.

Two events that happened within two days of each other got the attention of chemistry major Vaibhav Tadepalli ’17 and chemistry Ph.D. student Chris Reyes. But they had nothing to do with chemistry.On July 6, 2016, during a routine traffic stop, a Minnesota police officer shot and killed Philando Castile; on July 8, Missouri police officer Michael Flamion was shot and paralyzed as he walked toward his car during another traffic stop.

A Duke researcher explains the mystery of the cockeyed squidPh.D. researcher Katie Thomas is a visual ecologist—she studies animal eyes and how they develop and work—so you can easily understand her interest in Histioteuthis heteropsis. For the rest of us, though, and even for Thomas, the “cockeyed squid” exerts a pull that requires no Latin nomenclature to explain. “They do look really crazy,” Thomas says. “And there’s just a fundamentally interesting question in why they look the way they do.”

When the Duke Department Of V-DAY Zine came out, the single sheet of paper that origami turned into a sixteen-page publication, while impressive, was the least clever thing about it. “I would ask you to ‘be mine,’ ” reads one Valentine’s card panel, “but I recognize the problematic language of ownership that has been normalized in gendered power dynamics over time that leads to internalization of monogamy as natural and that relationships should be modeled after markets not private properties.” Another used words to disrupt a picture of the president.

In the basement of Biddle Hall, off a quiet midcentury-modern lobby where a fountain cheerfully splashes, hundreds of years’ worth of classic musical instruments sit, illuminated and displayed behind glass walls. The Duke University Musical Instrument Collection came to Duke in 2000 as the Eddy Collection, though new instruments and acquisitions enlarge the collection all the time.

THE CATALYST: At the turn of the decade, Scott Huettel, professor of psychology and neuroscience, was pitching a course on neuroethics, the new field that merges neuroscience and ethics so that, in the wake of substantial advances in understanding how the brain works, we know what we should do with this information. When Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, now a philosophy professor at the university, joined Duke in 2010, it was an obvious opportunity.

Both of you have switched research areas over your careers. What prompted the switching?

All night long people are up and down, the noise complicating sleep. Parties. Barking dogs. Motorcycles and cars driving by. Kids crying. People talking, laughing, using the bathroom. Sleep becomes a thing of fragments. We all know the story, right? Downtown Manhattan? Krzyzewskiville?

The time during each baseball game that should be most leisurely— the half-inning break— is often the most stressful for Jack Labosky.“Sometimes it’s kind of a mad scramble during the game [when] I’m probably going to pitch,” says Labosky, a third-baseman and rising senior who doubles as Duke’s closer. “I’m coming off the field and Coach points at me and says, ‘Get hot, you’re going in,’ and I have to run to the bullpen.”

A community of the defiantSusannah Meadows ’95 is an accomplished journalist and a mother. Her new book, The Other Side of Impossible: Ordinary People Who Faced Daunting Medical Challenges and Refused to Give Up (Random House), stems from a personal experience when her three-year-old son was in so much pain he was unable to get out of bed—but then, somehow, got better.

As of July 1, you are the chair of the Duke board of trustees. What’s been rewarding about being on the board? One rewarding project that comes to mind: We did a study of the relationship of the Duke health system to the university as a whole. We did a lot of work on the financial side and the governance structures. That was right down my alley. Anything I’ve been asked to do at Duke, I’ve done—it’s that rewarding.

When you meet WILL A. SMITH M.B.A. ’86, you should expect a greeting both energetic and upbeat.“My personality is to see the glass half full,” he says. “I think: I can fill that with more. I can fill it with something tasty and refreshing.”

One day while wandering the stacks in the Perkins Library in 1969, Duke student Charlie Bond idly opened a door to what he thought was a closet. It turned out to be a stairwell, blocked at the bottom.

Thamina Stoll ’17 is sharing the sort of story that has sentences like, “In the end, I know that everything will be okay,” right alongside, “You can’t fight the higher system.” It’s a complicated story with an uncertain ending.

IN THE DARKENED BLACK BOX of the tiny Brody Theater in Branson Hall, a cone of light shines down from a single spot, illuminating an empty circle on the dusty black floor. Surrounding it sit a dozen or so students holding scripts, their faces illuminated, their backs melting into the darkness.“I’m entrusting you with what is most important to me in this world,” reads one. “I know that you won’t betray me.” Says another, “Aeneas, it is time.”“Good,” the first responds. “I am ready.”

 

Spring Breakthrough brought academics right to students at Duke during mid-March; however, other opportunities took place off-campus. Alternative Spring Break, which, as part of Duke Student Affairs’ Alternative Breaks Program, allows students to both serve communities and gain awareness of problems that they wouldn’t otherwise encounter: Last year’s trip, for example, took students to San Diego to learn about human trafficking.

On a mid-March afternoon in Room 101 of the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building, Panera catering boxes stack high at the front of the room, a half-filled jug of OJ and green coffee cups scattered about; clear trash bags swell with boxes that previously housed sandwiches. A few ticks to the right are three first-years and a senior, diligently woodshedding song lyrics that they wrote the previous night and this morning—a song designed to both fit into the canon of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning play Hamilton and build upon it, matching styles if not source material.

Inside an industrial space filled with exposed brick walls and ceiling pipes overlooking the East River in Brooklyn, cameramen are setting up their shots while an assistant director gives last-minute instructions to a small studio audience. The place is buzzing with energy and tension. Over in makeshift backstage rooms, five finalists, divided into two teams of young college students/would-be entrepreneurs, are practicing their final elevator pitches.