Pop Culture

Recently published books by alumni

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We asked Maureen Farrell ’01 about The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion (Crown), which she cowrote with Eliot Brown—the saga of the rise and fall of one of the most-valuable and most-hyped start-ups and its unusual leader.

Duke Magazine: What struck me in this book is that there’s something about the idea of a visionary that really captures people and that was a big driver in this story.

Students study political theater, then tell their own stories

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When Faulkner Fox planned her inaugural political-theater workshop for fall 2020, she didn’t predict an imminent summer of activism.

At first, she’d thought it would be an in-person class attending in-person theater, but then the coronavirus made that impossible. Months later, a second global phenomenon: The Black Lives Matter movement surged in response to murders like George Floyd’s, which Fox (and her students-to-be) experienced in real time. Fox hadn’t been anywhere. She hadn’t even been inside a grocery store, but then she was in the streets, marching for racial justice.

Center for Documentary Studies and Scene of Radio podcast host John Biewen

A really good listen

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You know about John Biewen’s bicycle if you have listened to episode eleven of season two of “Scene on Radio,” the podcast he created as part of his work as audio director at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. Season two of “Scene” was titled “Seeing White,” and in fourteen crystalline episodes, it addressed the issues of race in America by naming the elephant in the room: whiteness.

We can discover our shared humanity (with some help from Harper Lee)

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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.

A good collaborator knows when to put down the microphone

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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.

What Nina Simone taught an alumnus about freedom

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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?”

Illustration of Titi Shodiya and Zakaiya Whatley who host the Dope Labs podcast

Meet the Duke Ph.D.s on a mission to make science more accessible

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When Titi Shodiya and Zakiya Whatley launched the science podcast Dope Labs, they started not by talking about science, but instead by telling the story of their friendship.

“Zakiya and I met in grad school,” Shodiya Ph.D. ’15, a materials scientist and engineer, told listeners. “It was a tough time, to say the least. And in our pursuit to get the hell out of there, we became cousins. You know how Black folks do. She’s my play cousin.”

Game aims to help young people interact with police

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April Preyar ’96, a criminal defense lawyer in private practice in Chicago, was exhausted from helping one client at a time, arguing before a judge and jury, recognizing that 49 percent of Black males and 44 percent of Hispanic males will have been arrested by the time they’re twenty-three.

Work in progress

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Emasculated and neutered or evil and calculating? Domineering dragon lady or helpless concubine? In twentieth-century Hollywood, the choices for Asian-American actors were few and far between. Often, the roles available were reductive and one-dimensional—stereotypes come to life.

App is alumna's latest professional turn

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When she was growing up, Sima Sistani’s parents limited her TV time. One of the shows Sistani ’01 relished as a child was the sitcom Perfect Strangers, about a happy-go-lucky immigrant with an unbridled enthusiasm for all things American.

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