FEATURES

  • My grandfather cracks open his bedroom door and pushes his face carefully into the thin crease between the door and the frame.My mother is in the hallway.“Hi, Dad,” she says to his eye, backlit against a slice of bedroom light. “Come on out, Dad. It’s okay.”The crease collapses as my grandfather shuts the door. Then, it slowly opens again, just enough to see his eye peering into the crease. His eye hits my mother’s once again, a dart to a bullseye. “Come out, Dad. It’s okay.”The door shuts. 
  • Two players remained at the 2012 World Series of Poker $10,000 Pot Limit Hold’em Championship: Phil Ivey, widely regarded as the best poker player in the world, and me, an equity derivatives trading veteran who only recently had become a professional poker player. At stake: a first-place payout of $446,000 and a World Series of Poker gold bracelet, representing the most prestigious title in the poker world. I was playing for my second bracelet, while Ivey was playing for his ninth, the second most of any poker player in history.
  • Jimmie Banks’ first job as an electrician at Duke involved changing lightbulbs in the chapel—lowering the chandeliers weekly to replace any that had burned out. It came naturally, since he had spent a few years before that working for a Raleigh company that changed factory light bulbs.He’d been a cook, too, and he’d wired up mobile homes and laid down underground wires and fiber-optic cables.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

  • It takes a leap of faith to put aside a lifetime of reason and science and jump into the arts. Particularly when so much time, energy, and study has gone into the rigorous training necessary to become a doctor. But several years ago, that’s what I did. I finally revealed a hidden part of my personal picture. In medicine, as a doctor, I sought to unlock the secrets of the body; in art, I am unlocking the secrets of my soul.
  • There were eleven students in Mr. Drummond’s high-school English class. From my seat at the corner table, I furnished a weak smile. Nobody knew how close my tears were.
  • No,” rattled Darth Vader, the word squeezed between two sharp exhales of breath. “I am your father.”The line signaled the climax that The Empire Strikes Back had been building to, perhaps the most shocking twist of the original Star Wars trilogy—that Luke Skywalker was, in fact, the son of the Sith Lord he intended to defeat.
  • The act of confession, as a Christian practice, should be guarded as a holy rite. Confession requires trust with secrets that confessing persons often have hidden from people they love. They even may have long hidden a secret from themselves. Confession—an act of speaking about one’s most vulnerable and troubling truths to another person designated as sacred—should involve the kind of trust no one else can reveal, exploit for gain, or use to manipulate the person confessing. 
  • One of the interesting things about secrets is that we share them, expecting the people we share them with to not share them further—and then those people do share them further.So the first question we need to ask is, Why do people share secrets? If they're things we don't want people to know, why do we share them? We don’t share all secrets, but what sharing secrets represents is a tradeoff: a tradeoff between social acceptance and the desire to keep our less-than-holy behavior private.
  • There are no secrets anymore!” I hear that sentiment often as a neuroscientist and data scientist. Entrepreneurs hungrily anticipate that brain-machine interfaces will read thoughts directly from your brain. Medical researchers wrestle with data that are increasingly difficult to scrub clean of information that can identify you. Citizens voluntarily give away information about themselves that previous generations fought to keep private, creating ethical tensions for innovative scientists who use social media for their research.
  • Baseball coaches communicate with players by using complex series of gestures, touching shoulders, hats, belts, elbows, noses, ears, to signal intention without alerting the opposing team. Duke volunteer assistant coach Jason Stein serves as the team’s hitting coach and during games calls signals as the third-base coach.  Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Q: How many signs do you have to keep track of when you’re coaching third base?
  • I study farming and gardening manuals from Renaissance England. These books provide an unusual perspective on the ways that men—often working men—and sometimes women perceived the non-human world. Their understanding of the boundaries between self and environment tended to be much more porous than ours: Plants and people existed along a readily discernible continuum. The phase of the moon, for example, might affect a farmer’s mood but also the mood and behavior of livestock, as well as the growth of crops.
  • As a journalist, I saw secrets as gold, glittering with the allure of a good story. I was always on the lookout for other people’s secrets, ready to ferret them out, wanting to shine a light on what was hidden. Working in Russia, I trafficked in secrets about atrocities committed during World War II and buried in a Polish forest, or Soviet secrets hidden in KGB archives and revealed only after the fall of communism.
  • The hacking of the 2016 American election. The WannaCry ransomware attack on Britain’s National Health Service. The penetration of 500 million Yahoo accounts. The story of modern secrets is, in part, the story of the technology that protects them (or fails to). It’s the story of encryption, computer science, and cryptology, of the ever-increasing complexity of algorithms designed to shield information from prying eyes—and, seemingly inevitably, of their failure.
  • Early in my days as a freelance journalist, I was on the lookout for a book subject themed to some sort of big human drama. I found that theme one morning on a path along a rosemary-scented Jerusalem hillside—the site of Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. The path was flanked by orderly rows of carob trees, their branches hung with the long brown pods, the very kind, probably, that had sustained John the Baptist in the wilderness.
  • Tokyo, JapanAugust 1980I’m sitting in my bedroom staring at the wall. I feel like I’m in one of those fun houses in an amusement park, where everything seemingly familiar has become strange and unpredictable. Angles and perspectives have shifted. And it’s sinking in slowly that this is not a temporary situation. I’ve entered into a new paradigm, and I can’t go back.
  • Whenever I tell people that I traveled to Duke Kunshan University to teach a course about Henry David Thoreau and China, I often receive a bemused look and a response that goes something like this: “Thoreau seems so quintessentially American. How could you possibly relate him to China, let alone energize twenty-first-century Chinese students to study him?” 
  • I kept the secret of my father’s criminal conviction, and later incarceration, for the falsification of patient records and the distribution of controlled substances for five years. I never intended to keep this information from people; I didn’t say anything because I always held hope that my family’s situation would improve. Instead it got progressively worse.
  • Whenever my elementary school class ran laps for PE, to not finish last felt like a victory in itself. Our gym teacher would yell out across the track, urging me to pick up the pace or admonishing me if my run turned to a walk. When my friends finished their laps, they’d stand on the sideline. Some would shout encouragements while others would loudly rib me for my apparent lack of fitness.
  • Each of us on the “Staff Ride” to Vietnam had a job to do. We were studying the Vietnam War, especially the pivotal Tet Offensive (1968), from the perspective of historical actors—both American and Vietnamese. Each participant on the ride, organized by the Duke University Program in American Grand Strategy this past winter, studied a specific historical participant, educating each other about the perspectives of the individuals we portrayed.
  • The nefarious ways of the modern-day supermarket apparently are widely known. The journalist Jack Hitt, writing in The New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1996, detailed numerous tricks grocers use to make us buy food we don’t want or need, such as playing slow tempo music and using “cunning” product placement on shelves.
  • “Secrets Protected, Secrets Exposed: The Balancing Act in Our Democracy” was the theme that drew alumni and others for a Duke Magazine event this past spring in a secrecy-minded place—Washington, D.C.
  • I never knew my Uropa (“great-grandpa”), but he has haunted me all my life. My mother tells me I inherited his hands, large and long-fingered. Growing up, I sometimes looked at my hands and thought of him signing orders, as he must have done, for the Third Reich in World War II, for Adolf Hitler.  Because Hans Ernst Posse, my great-grandfather, was a member of Hitler’s cabinet. 
  • My First Communion took place in May of 1988. We were lined up double-file (boy-girl) outside of All Saints Catholic Church in Dunwoody, Georgia. It was hot and humid in my navy suit and tie, and my heart was racing. I was a shy, obedient eight-year-old, and I remember being nervous about going into the confessional with a priest to confess my sins for the first time. 

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