Summer 2018 Issue

This summer, anxious freshmen prepare to see their new living quarters and meet the person they will be living with for the next nine months. Duke students arriving as freshmen today live on East Campus, which has been specifically designated as a first-year campus since the fall of 1995. But the freshman experience has varied widely since Duke became a university in 1924.

Sure, Jack Davis ’14 has seen and enjoyed Scream and Final Destination, those signature modern-day horror-film classics. Yet it wasn’t so much a love for the genre that led him to cofound Crypt TV. “My interest is in how tech and media intersect,” he says.

Enchantment, as you see it, is more than wish-fulfillment or escapism. It changes our relationship to the world, and it involves the little things we do to make the world go our way—tokens, devices, objects, words, images. But in an age of scientific rationality, aren’t we beyond enchantment?

April is crunch time for college tennis teams, and for the top player on Duke’s men’s team, redshirt junior Nicolás Álvarez, to step away for a week during the cruelest month, it had to be for something important.He had to win a match for his country.

RECOMMENDATIONS from Rae DelBianco '14 In her debut novel Rough Animals (Arcade Publishing), DelBianco makes a powerful entrance to the contemporary Western genre, weaving the poetic and laconic tale of a man on a meandering journey through the Utah wilderness. Here, she shares the works that have inspired her on her own writing journey.

Rodney Wynkoop settles into the spot near the front of the chancel in the chapel, the spot in the choir rows where he’s sat just about every Sunday for nearly thirty years.“When I’m sitting here during the sermon, I’m listening to the sermon, to be sure,” he says, perhaps slyly, “but often I just gaze around.” The ornate woodwork above the choir’s heads, organ pipes, stained-glass windows lining the aisles. “It’s just a beautifully designed place to be,” he says. “It can’t help but lift your thoughts to things beyond the ordinary.”

At a lectern in the White Lecture Hall on East Campus in March, civil rights activist, professor, and journalist Charlie Cobb admitted to his audience that activists mistrust how they’re represented by those not on the front lines. “Many of us have long been dissatisfied with the historiography of the movement,” he said.

What’s your best piece of advice to newly arrived Duke first-years? Embrace the creative confusion of your time at Duke, the freedom to explore new ideas and try out the full range of possibilities before you. And more important, get some sleep! What’s your best piece of advice to freshly graduated seniors? Stop now and then—especially when you are at your busiest—to pause, reflect, and relax. These pauses will help clear the path ahead.

When Adam Wax A.M. ’96, Ph.D. ’99, president and chief scientist of Lumedica, has a question about the basic science behind the design of the affordable, cutting-edge biomedical imaging machines Lumedica makes, sometimes he needs to go back to his lab at Duke, where he’s professor of biomedical engineering.The journey covers exactly one stairway.

Nearly a year later, the niche in the chapel’s entrance remains vacant. But no one has forgotten about it.

ANIMALS IT’S A WORLD OF TRADEOFFS, PART I: Toenail fungus seems to have given up sexual reproduction in order to more effectively reproduce on your feet. IT’S A WORLD OF TRADEOFFS, PART II: Snapping shrimp queens without rivals have smaller pincers and lay more eggs; those in colonies with multiple queens have larger pincers and lay fewer eggs.

When I’ve taught magazine journalism, my departure point has been Tom Wolfe’s essay on “The New Journalism.” It’s an argument for applying familiar literary devices—scene-setting, point of view, symbolically meaningful attributes—to the work of nonfiction.