Special 2021 Issue

You take political freedom for granted if you are in the 20 percent of the global population that the nonpartisan think tank Freedom House defines as living in a country that is mostly free.

Here’s the deal: I don’t have a middle name. Of my seven brothers and sisters, I’m one of two who didn’t get one. All the other middle names were chosen with great care and consideration, laden with nostalgia, nuance, a bit of poetry. Me, I got zilch. Such, perhaps, is the nature of the middle child, a happy addition to a burgeoning family but spared, or bereft of— depending on one’s perspective—the intense focus on nomenclature that comes in the birth order with firsts and lasts.

A conservative student announces to the class that his experience during his first semester in Duke’s Visions of Freedom Focus program dispelled prior concerns that he would be ostracized by his fellow students and penalized by his professors on account of his political beliefs. Instead of condemnation, he encountered spirited debate within an intellectually diverse community of friends.

We began a conversation with Ed Magee M.B.A. ’04 on another topic, and we ended up deep in discussion about racism, anti-racism, and the enormous complexity of our moment. So when the topic of freedom came up, we naturally reached out to him, and he leapt at the chance to share his thoughts. “I’d kick off the conversation with the Nina Simone quote that the meaning of freedom is simply ‘no fear,’ ” he said in an email. Simone’s famous quote comes from a filmed interview in which the High Priestess of Soul responds to the question, “What does ‘freedom’ mean to you?”

Social studies is the lowest-priority core class, always. History is not viewed as being as central or important as math and English, and science got a huge boost with Sputnik, the growth of the U.S. space program, and now the focus on STEM areas. I’ve always somewhat begrudged the lack of attention. History teachers have always banded together in the knowledge that we provide the most important core content; after all, if you don’t know where you’ve been, you can’t know where you are going. We have commiserated over the lack of attention.

I understand that on some days you will nurse lonely you will argue with mirror swallowing distorted images telling yourself that you are not this kind of ugly you will select colors that say “available” and draw on a face that will make you believe that the last one who doubted your beauty was both blind and stupid I fear that in those moments you will forget in the middle of lonely is one you are the one who has overcome insurmountable obstacles

I make my living with words, and that’s what rap is—words—but I can’t freestyle. I nerd out on the linguistic intricacies, the staggering poetry and ironclad rhetoric, the references-within-references-within-references of billy woods and Jean Grae and Quelle Chris and Open Mike Eagle; of Q-Tip and GZA and MF Doom and Andre 3000. But I can’t freestyle.

At Duke University, surfing is not a career. Period. Nor should it be. On the surface, it makes no sense. Blame geography. Durham overflows with charm, intelligence, and ambition, but shrivels raisin-dry when it comes to opportunities associated with riding open-ocean swells. If I wanted to ascend the ranks at Goldman Sachs, steer the ship at Apple, or direct policy in the White House, Duke offers a time-tested launchpad. If I hoped to make a meaningful contribution to the eccentric tapestry of surf culture, I’d be best served combing the California coast.

Although it was ratified in 1791, the Second Amendment has undergone a radical transformation in the fifteen years since I graduated from law school. My introduction to the Second Amendment came in 2007, a few months after starting work at a Washington, D.C., law firm. My boss—former U.S. Solicitor General and future Duke colleague Walter Dellinger—asked me what I knew about the amendment.

I watched the COVID-19 pandemic unfurl from Tokyo, where my family lives. In Japan, a strong cultural imperative compels individuals to be sensitive to the needs of others. This requires complying with rules that can be inconvenient, and even nonsensical, but are understood to be for the common good.

Joseph Fernandez-Moure wants to free you. He wants to get you out of jail. But he’s not baking a cake with a file in it; he wants to get you out via injection. So, no, he’s not talking about the I’ve-committed-a-crime jail, of course. The metaphorical jail this trauma surgeon is talking about comes from the limitations people face when they suffer one of the least-studied injuries people encounter: rib injuries.

On March 16, 2021, a gunman opened fire in an Asian-owned business in metro Atlanta, killing four people. He then drove about thirty miles south targeting another Asian business, where he killed three more people. And then, he crossed the street to a third Asian business and killed another person. In the span of an hour, eight people were fatally shot, six of whom were Asian women. Two days after the shootings, my favorite teacher from high school, a man I admired, took to social media and declared that race had nothing to do with the crimes.

I began studying the writings of Friedrich A. Hayek, the social theorist and Nobel laureate in economics, back in the 1980s and quickly became hooked. My initial interest was in his insights about the limits of economic science, that when dealing with an ever-changing complex adaptive system like the economy, the sort of prediction and control we might hope to exercise over it is severely limited. In Hayek’s words:

I was born and raised away from the reservation, like the vast majority of Native youth of my generation. However, my grandfather grew up on the family allotment near Ada, Oklahoma. Papaw was the biggest cultural defender in my family. He was a Chickasaw artist who could draw, paint, sculpt, and carve with equal beauty. When I was a toddler, Papaw carved me a bow and set of arrows so I could accompany him during archery practice in the garage. He told me that we must always use a bow to hunt because it wasn’t fair to the animals to hunt with guns.

Well before COVID-19 rooted us firmly into the digital world, people had embraced digital connectivity. Wearables like Apple Watch, FitBit, Oura rings, and more are so popular that nearly one out of every five Americans is wearing them. People have become increasingly more comfortable sharing sensitive information to gain insights about themselves.

In March 2020, as it became clear that we would be spending more time cloistered in our homes than ever before, I took up gardening. In the midst of chaos, digging in the dirt felt fitting, I decided. I would participate in a human experience that went back for millennia, in times of crisis and in times of peace. It felt universal.