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.’ ”

A few of our stories of realization came to us as spoken words, not as writing or images. We’re sharing them here as part of our podcast "The Devils' Share."

Memorial Day 2020 and Carteret County was as mobbed by tourists as Liz DeMattia has ever seen it.

It was the eleventh week of North Carolina’s COVID-19 quarantine, and while the official line out of Raleigh was of measured, phased reopening, on Carteret County’s Crystal Coast, tourists brought a sense of “We don’t need to wear masks! We’re at the beach! We’re on vacation,” DeMattia says. The population swelled to twice or even thrice its usual, the influx of mask-less tourists elevating infection risk, sure, but that was not their only impact.