Ryan Hoerger

THE CATALYST: Aaron Dinin ’05 graduated from Duke with an English major and a published novel to his name but had trouble turning that skill set into a career. To adapt, he taught himself coding and learned the back end of the Internet through Web development jobs, eventually moving back to Durham as the founder of a start-up called RocketBolt. Armed with a Ph.D.

THE VIEW FROM CAMERON In the future, we’ll see a merging between the virtual and the actual. Are we players in the real world? Or are we players who just act as if we’re in the real world? In Cameron Indoor Stadium for the Duke-Wisconsin game, the future arrived. The game was up there, on the giant scoreboard. But the game might as well have been down there, on the floor of Cameron, just below the concession stands with their (real-world) $8 box pizzas.

Duke wrestling coach Glen Lanham had a question for his newest wrestler: “Fowler, what do you have in that shoebox?” The shoebox contained all of Brendan Fowler’s wrestling gear. A former Blue Devil lacrosse star, he’d been using it for two weeks during summer training, not wanting to ruffle any of his new teammates’ feathers by taking anybody’s locker.

Laken Tomlinson was angry when he learned his grandfather had died.Years earlier, when he was a kid, Tomlinson had called 9-1-1 to help his grandfather, Ivan Wilson, who had collapsed in the bathroom at his Chicago home. He recovered in a week. A few years later, while visiting family relatives in his native Jamaica, Wilson collapsed again; this time, he died.

Last March, in Muhuru Bay, Kenya, twenty-eight young women from the Women’s Institute for Secondary Education and Research (WISER) were honored as part of the school’s first graduating class. It was an emotional event, a long time in the making.

Big changes are coming to Wallace Wade Stadium: luxury seating, a new press box, and maybe a sellout crowd are things to look for when you plan a visit for a fall Saturday in 2016 or beyond. One thing you won’t see? A track.

Photo by Jon GardinerIn mid-January, Duke women’s basketball senior point guard Chelsea Gray played sixteen minutes against Boston College, tallying 11 points, two assists, two rebounds, and four steals. But something didn’t feel right. Tests after the game revealed a fractured right kneecap, sidelining the two-time All-America selection for the season and ending her Duke career.

The catalyst: “Wkh dwwdfn zloo frpphqfh dw gdzq.” You might see this as a bunch of gibberish, but a student in Nicholas Gessler’s class would advise you to change each letter into the letter three places before it in the alphabet. The “gibberish” is now a warning: “The attack will commence at dawn.” Gessler, an anthropologist and espionage enthusiast, is helping students examine how an intelligence agency communicates information.

The eight miles to UNC-Chapel Hill just got shorter. In a corner of the Bryan Center’s upper level is a four-by-four-by-eight feet white box fitted with Bose speakers, a webcam, and a 60-inch LED TV screen, offering students a view into UNC’s student union building. An identical box gives UNC students a reciprocated glance into the BC.