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.

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.”