Fall 2019 Issue

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FEATURES

  • An image of Duke alumnus Frank Konhaus and his wife, Ellen Cassilly
    Early evening. A crowd of fifty or so mills around two levels of galleries and assembly space: a modernist house filled with visitors, the living room lined with folding chairs, the kitchen island covered with wine bottles, pimento cheese dip, ham biscuits, and fruit. Framed photographs cover every wall, and people leaf through books and read gallery guides left in easy reach on shelves and windowsills. Out the windows to the north are acres and acres of peaceful green—Duke Forest is the neighbor—raked by magic-hour sunlight.
  • A headshot of NCMA director and Duke alumnae Valerie Hillings
    When her phone rang last fall, France Family Professor of art, art history, and visual studies Kristine Stiles recognized the voice on the other end of the line. “Do you know who you’re talking to?” the voice asked. “Of course,” she said. “Valerie.” Valerie Hillings ’93: student, research assistant, protégé, then friend and ultimately colleague, curator at the Guggenheim. A voice Stiles would never mistake. “You’re talking to the new director of the North Carolina Museum of Art!” Hillings told Stiles.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

  • Didn't read/Too long
    ANIMALS AND MICROBES
  • Image of Central Campus construction, 1973
    In May, students moved out of their Central Campus apartments for the last time. The buildings are now being razed, and the future of Central Campus is uncertain. Over its nearly forty-five-year lifespan as part of our university, the Central Campus apartments remained the same, but the vision for what they could be changed as the years passed.
  • images of various book covers
    We asked Jason DeParle ’82, a New York Times reporter and author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century, about what he learned about global migration from following a family for thirty years.
  • Image of the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship winners
    Jenny Tung ’03, Ph.D. ’10, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology, is among the recipients of a 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (popularly known as the “genius grant”). Her research involves understanding how social and environmental adversity affects health and survival over the lifespan of an individual. You were hooked on this field from your time in a freshman seminar, right? And that projected you into graduate school.
  • Picture of Peaches the cat, relaxing on Duke University campus
    She usually sits on top of her house, or she runs around in the grass,” says Jonas Meksem. On an early fall day, the junior stopped by to visit Peaches the Calico Cat on his way to Pitchfork’s, a campus eatery. Meksem peeked inside her cat home. No Peaches. “I try to make visiting Peaches a part of my daily walk,” says Meksem. “It’s great because she’s everyone’s pet, and everyone gets to take care of her.”
  • Image of the Mirror Shield Project, conceived by Cannupa Hanska Luger
    “Did you see the pink boots?”
  • Image of Chris Crabtree with some fans
    The Holly Springs Salamanders, losing 8-0 in the bottom of the ninth on a humid Piedmont evening, are down to their last at-bat. With desperation baserunners the ’Manders’ only sliver of hope, rising junior Chris Crabtree faced a three-and-one pitch well out of the strike zone. There are times when you take that pitch, work the base on balls, get a runner on, and hope against hope.
  • Image of upper molar of the micromammal
    A group of Duke and other scientists have found a tiny fossilized tooth that identifies the smallest monkey in the world’s fossil record. They have named the monkey and added it to the fossil record, which is cool. But what’s really remarkable is the effort behind the finding of that tooth and the vast hole in our understanding that the little fossil begins to fill.
  • Image of the Brodhead Center
    A century ago, in the fall of 1919, America’s colleges and universities were on the cusp of their first great expansion. Prior to the First World War, fewer than 50,000 bachelor’s degrees and 1,000 doctorates were awarded annually in the U.S.; by 1930, those numbers would more than double. In 1919, the first postdoctoral fellowships in the sciences were established by the National Research Council with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation; these new programs would revolutionize research.
  • Letter writing
    I was moved by the profile piece on Sandy Darity [“Sandy Darity Has Some Thoughts About Inequality,” Spring 2019]. First, congratulations to the magazine’s editors for the courage to take on the topic of racism as a cover story, not shying from its reality, and in fact, educating readers about the evidence for arguments about what some would call “radical” solutions to address our horrific national scourge.

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