Winter 2020 Issue

Illustration of Tallman Trask and the buildings he influenced View the printed version

FEATURES

  • Illustration of roots
    In the spring of 2018, I joined a group of student leaders and student activists in a protest on the stage of Page Auditorium during Duke’s Reunions Weekend. This weekend was a gilded one, as newly inaugurated President Vincent E. Price welcomed generations of Duke graduates to revel in just how far the university had come on so many accounts. In fact, this was a special celebration of the legacy of student activism.
  • A Sengi peeks out from among the Djiboutian landscape
    MAYBE THIRTY FEET from the campsite something rattled in a trap. It was nearest Galen Rathbun’s sleeping bag, and it wrecked the veteran ecologist’s sleep. “God, that animal has been keeping me up all night long,” the California Academy of Sciences’ Rathbun told Duke’s Steven Heritage a few hours later, when the scientists woke up early enough to beat the fierce Djiboutian sun. The two exchanged a meaningful look, and while they were discussing how to proceed, Rathbun picked up the trap and peeked in.
  • Duke Forest trees
    The forest works on a different time scale. Duke Forest, 7,000 acres in six divisions sprawled across Durham, Orange, and Alamance counties, where hardwoods tower and even Highway15-501 becomes a distant rush that actually might be a river, or the wind in the pines. When life speeds up, the forest slows it down.
  • David Perpich in front of the New York Times headquarters in New York
    In his final year at Duke, David Perpich ’99 wasn’t keen on writing an economics thesis. He told his father that he had a better idea: working as part owner of Devil’s Delivery Service in Durham. “So,” Joseph G. Perpich fired back, “you want to deliver food instead of writing a senior thesis?” “I said, ‘Don’t think about it that way,’ ” David Perpich recalls. “ ‘Think about the experience of learning about what it is to do something entrepreneurial.’ ”
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ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

  • ANIMALS AND MICROBES
  • Scene from "Juneteenth"
    Film producer, director, and writer Neil Creque Williams ’06 wanted to make movies by the time he was seven, when in second grade, his teacher let him show his home videos during lunchtime. “I watched a lot of animation—Little Mermaid, Lion King—and just wanting to watch behind the scenes, like how did they animate it? I was just fascinated by that stuff,” Williams recalls. “You get wrapped up in the technology—if we had this, I could do that—and eventually you realize, no, none of those things. You tell a story.”
  • Brett Tyne ’97 can seamlessly switch from a Western Texas twang to a lyrical Scottish accent straight from the Highlands. Some might call her a modern-day Henry Higgins, but she’s really a dialect coach, who traverses the world to help actors learn tricky accents for movies and television shows. Tyne recently worked with Renee Zellweger to master the breathy Hollywood accent of the 1930s for her 2019 Oscar-winning performance as Judy Garland in the movie Judy.
  • As time has marched on through this pandemic and our cool spring days became long and hot summer days that turned to fall and now winter, it is so hard to believe that what I used to refer to as Alumni World Headquarters has now become my dining-room table and my laptop.
  • WE ASKED Marjoleine Kars ’82, Ph.D. ’94, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (The New Press), about how she found this untold story and what compelled her to write about it.
  • EVERYONE LOSES TIME to COVID-19. Martin Fischer lost most of a month to masks. “I’m not getting anything done other than this,” says Fischer, associate research professor in the department of chemistry. “The last three weeks have been this, 100 percent.” By “this” he meant media availabilities, Zoom interviews, and various other responses to his attempt to help out as masks spread through the culture.
  • John Aldrich, who specializes in American politics and behavior, is Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of political science, a former president of the American Political Science Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  The common view is that high turnout favors Democrats. With the recent election, has that assumption been forever overturned?
  • Rap Godz image
    In the spring of 2020, JaBria Bishop built her first video game. It was a 2D side-scroller—think Super Mario Brothers—which she believes she called Lunar Dreamscape. In it, a little girl wakes up in a lost world. Bishop’s idea for this whimsical game was for the players, too, to feel lost, so she designed it accordingly. “I wanted the player to also feel how the little girl feels,” she says.
  • ON A BRIGHT AFTERNOON early in the fall term, associate dean of students Amy Powell is taking a walk through a West Campus residential courtyard, and she sees three guys sharing one of the tables under a shelter for lunch. “Hey, friends?” she calls. “If you’re done eating, can I ask you to put your masks back on?” Three masks go back on. There is at least a hint of eye-rolling, to be sure, but overall the guys just go along, doing what they know they’re supposed to do.

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