The flight from Lima to Cusco takes an hour and twenty minutes, and the road from Cusco into the highlands climbs to nearly 20,000 feet. From there it descends, unpaved and passing along cliffs and through cloud forest and eventually into jungle over the course of ten, twelve hours. At the bottom is a little town, and from there one travels by river, because there are no more roads.

Britt Keith hustled around the kitchen and out into the yard for fresh clippings like an anxious mother hurriedly packing her kids off to school. She gently stuffed a handful of sumac, sweetgum, and tulip poplar leaves into brown paper lunch sacks labeled “Izzy” and “Slausy,” then tore the bags open a bit because Sifakas aren’t big on problem- solving. Carrots, sweet potatoes, in-the-shell nuts and a few other special treats were poured into Ziplock bags.

FOR THE UNITED STATES, the war in Afghanistan was the most protracted war in history—longer than World War I, World War II, and Vietnam combined. Shortly after the seemingly chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces in mid-August, the magazine convened a conversation among three individuals with very different perspectives on—and experiences with—the U.S. in Afghanistan.

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.

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.

At first, scheduling for COVID-19 vaccinations was tough, but even a month or so into it, chances are you waltzed through an organized, uncrowded, series of rooms in a hospital or medical center or drug store. It’s little short of a miracle. Half the population in the U.S. has had at least one dose of the vaccine, and though slowing, the numbers of the vaccinated continue to rise.

When a Duke-led research team won a $300 million federal grant to help develop an AIDS vaccine in 2005, the global situation was looking grim.

I recently attended a panel discussion with three scholars debating life in the “Anthropocene era,” the idea that humans are now the dominant force in shaping the ecological and even geological fate of our planet. With talk about the destructive consequences of our carbon emissions, the devastation of industrial food systems, and the depletion of our natural resources, the discussion was pretty bleak.

I stand on a small tributary of the Irrawaddy River. Across it is Myanmar—formerly Burma: I’m about as far west in the Chinese province of Yunnan as I can be. Borders between countries fascinate, for they illuminate different experiments in how we manage our natural world. Across the river, the land is going up in smoke. There’s a dense blue haze. At night, I see dozens of small fires, while overhead a satellite maps them from their thermal infrared radiation.

For a guy who spends his time studying climate change, facing down the future of an Earth warming at an astonishing rate, under the management of a population that commonly resists even admitting its problems, Drew Shindell seems surprisingly optimistic.

December 26 marks the tenth anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters of all time—the Indian Ocean tsunami, which devastated Indonesia’s Aceh province, killing some 160,000 people. Since 2005, Elizabeth Frankenberg, a professor of public policy, has led an Indonesia-based fieldwork project that has followed a group of 32,000 people (first interviewed, pre-tsunami, in 2004).

Sitting a comfortable distance from the U.S. military conflicts abroad, I had envisioned “coming home” as both a welcome departure from the battlefield and a new beginning for returning veterans. However, my perspective shifted upon interviewing one of the subjects from my first documentary.

Why do most of us love our homes? Because, of course, they are saturated with the memories of how we became who we are. Like the family photographs displayed within them, homes tend to archive good times, not bad ones.

Having HIV testing close to one’s home makes in more likely that one will get tested. At the same time, HIV preferences vary greatly across individuals, according to new research conducted by Duke Global Health Institute faculty members. The findings could help inform how HIV-testing services are adapted and expanded across sub-Saharan Africa.

This is how you mend a broken world. A war-crimes tribunal presses a genocide charge, some decades later, against the leader of the Bosnian Serbs. The president of Sudan, wanted on charges of genocide in Darfur, where violence broke out in 2003, stirs embarrassment and angst with his plan to attend the United Nations General Assembly. Bangladesh sentences a former lawmaker to death for the mass murder of Hindus during the country’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.

About a month before students were slated to land in Turkey last summer, the city of Istanbul erupted in a fury of protests. What began as a peaceful sit-in to oppose the demolition of Gezi Park soon morphed into large-scale demonstrations and indiscriminate police violence.

Mbaye Lo, assistant professor of the practice of Asian & Middle Eastern studies and leader of this past summer’s DukeEngage in Cairo program, reflected during that time about Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. He believes the dreams of the 2011 Arab Spring are still alive, but that Egyptians are in a state of “political exhaustion.”

More than 800 students from China enrolled at Duke last year, a clear indication of the university’s popularity in the nation. Now, after gaining the approval of the Ministry of Education, Duke will have a formal home in the country.

Students wanted Bethzaida Fernandez, a lecturer in the Spanish language program, to take them home—not to her place in Durham but to her native Costa Rica. For the past two years, with a small grant from the Romance studies department, Fernandez has done just that.

Laine Wagenseller ’90 felt helpless when he first met Adolf Baguma during a service trip to rural Uganda. Orphaned as a young child, Baguma had suffered debilitating burns when a teenage aunt threw scalding banana leaves on him as punishment for trying to get food. Baguma couldn’t walk upright—his legs were twisted by fused scar tissue—so he got from place to place by scooting himself along on all fours.

Floating along Inle Lake in Central Burma, I lean over and run my hand through the warm water. As I do, my eyes never stop searching that one hill I came more than 10,000 miles to see. Most tourists, if they  choose to stop on the lake, will pause to take picture after picture of the fishermen, the floating villages, the temples, and the jumping cats. The engines to their boats then fire back up, and they head off, chattering away and comparing shots taken.

One of the hallmarks of getting old, I'm told, is thinking that everything is getting steadily worse. I must still be young, then, because I am confident that Duke has gotten better since I was a student. I arrived at this conclusion this past May, when I returned to campus to deliver the commencement address.

Although still in its pilot year, the Duke Alumni Association’s Faculty Fellows program already has been well-received. With enthusiastic buy-in from the initial class of fellows to growing demand from regional Duke chapters for continued intellectual engagement with the university, the initiative formalizes an integral component of the DAA’s Forever Learning focus.

Though this summer marks the inaugural DukeEngage program in Togo, its faculty director is quite established in the West African country. Since the mid-1980s, cultural anthropology professor Charles Piot has studied the politics, economies, and traditions of the Togolese people, conducting his twice-a-year fieldwork primarily in northern rural villages.

Duke students traverse all sorts of distances before setting foot on campus, but few have covered as much cultural and geographic ground as Nash Mepukori.

Global health has grown from a certificate program in 2006 to a full major, albeit one offered only as part of a double-major program of study. The major offers students a multifaceted approach to global health challenges and is one of the country’s first liberal-arts majors in global health.

A $50 million gift from Anne and Robert Bass of Fort Worth, Texas, will launch an initiative to encourage students and faculty members to collaborate across academic boundaries—and to give them the tools to tackle some of the most vexing society-wide issues.

From late November to early December, a bit of United Nations alphabet soup hit the sweltering heat of Doha, Qatar. As part of the course “U.N. Climate Change Negotiations Practicum,” ten select master of environmental management candidates from the Nicholas School of the Environment attended the eighteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

For the discerning Duke student who wanted to jumpstart his or her international exposure and couldn’t get enough of the freshman Focus experience, last year’s Duke INtense Global (DIG) fit the bill. The three-semesterlong interdisciplinary program had its test run in India and Russia and featured culture-and language-immersion components.

Before arriving at Duke in July 2010 as an assistant professor of public policy, Hal Brands had been sifting through documents captured after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq for the Institute for Defense Analyses. The institute opened the papers to researchers in 2010, and several papers by Brands’ team have been published recently, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the authoritarian regime.

The catalyst: Associate professor of literature Negar Mottahedeh conceived the idea for the course after the 2009 post-election crisis in Iran, when protesters used sites such as Twitter, Balatarin (the Iranianbased social network), and YouTube to instantaneously share information and plan their actions. “Social media doesn’t create movements, but it allows for ease of organization,” she says.

Kendall Bradley ’11 checked her phone and gave herself thirty-five minutes to fall apart. She’d left Nick in the gaping mouth of an MRA machine, his eyes full of pain and fear, and was finally alone. Or, at least, as alone as one could be in the ghastly circus of the hospital triage room, which teemed with people in various states of agony. Somewhere on the streets of Ho Chi Minh there had been an accident, and victims were being carried in in shocking states of disfigurement.

In the summer of 2010, Nyuol Tong ’14 returned to his home village of Ayeit in what is now South Sudan for the first time since he was five years old. He saw the remnants of war. Destroyed houses. Scorched land. Scarred people. Scarce jobs. A young population. And no schools. “Not even a single school,” Tong says. “That was a horrifying fact.”

Tropical birds, trees may not be adapting fast enough to climate change.

International Association's FoodFest becomes a savory tradition.

Photo above: Culinary adventures Hokkien noodles, pikliz, and baklava were among the international delights available for sampling.