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what’s in the box? Would you trust a machine-made prediction if you didn’t understand how you got the results? Professor Cynthia Rudin is here to share why you shouldn’t inherently trust opaque predictions and how transparency will save the world of data science. Finish the story at:
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INSIDE
Spring 2020 | Vol. 106 | No. 1
INSIDE
Spring 2020 | Vol. 106 | No. 1
In this unusual time, we present an unusual Duke Magazine. Inside this digital issue, you’ll
COVER
find stories about the life of the campus— before and after it was interrupted by the
pandemic. We also still share stories about fellow alumni, including a celebration of FORUM
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those taking on COVID-19 and its toll. As you explore, look for bolded words that will LINK you to expanded content from in and around the university. Enjoy!
EDITOR: Robert J. Bliwise A.M. ’88 MANAGING EDITOR: Adrienne Johnson Martin SENIOR WRITER: Scott Huler STAFF WRITER: Corbie Hill STAFF ASSISTANT: Delecia Hatcher PUBLISHER: Sterly L. Wilder ’83, associate vice president, Alumni Affairs ART DIRECTOR: Lacey Chylack, phase5creative, inc. DUKE MAGAZINE Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 E-MAIL: dukemag@duke.edu ADDRESS CHANGES: Alumni and Development Records, Duke University, Box 90581, Durham, N.C. 27708 or bluedevil@duke.edu • © 2020 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.
FULLFRAME QUIET PLACE: A cascade of the cherry blossom petals line a path of Duke Gardens, emptied by the pandemic. Photo by Orla Swift
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abits have changed in this time of viral anxiety, and I’ve developed a new morning routine: a roundtrip on foot between my neighborhood and East Campus. There I walk the perimeter path, invariably encountering (at some social distance) joggers, cell-phone-clasping walkers, adults with various kinds
of trailing baby-conveyers, and lots and lots of dogs. Along with, on one occasion, a forlornlooking student with three pieces of luggage; she was waiting at a campus bus stop. When would that bus come, where was she headed, and for how long?
Along Ninth Street, just off East Campus, I pass a storefront with an odd sign: “This location has been relocated permanently.” It brings to mind a strange reality: Life at Duke has been relocated. Not permanently, but definitively. I’ve thought a lot about that unknown (to me) student, and about Duke students overall. Seniors are experiencing an unexpected closing act in their college careers. In late March, one of those seniors, Shaina Lubliner, was lamenting the loss of Pippin, the musical she had been slated to direct for HOOF ‘N’ HORN. The show begins on the main character’s graduation day from the University of Padua, she reminded me. “College campuses are always ripe for Pippin. The search for fulfillment is something we all struggle with daily. What should we major in? What job will we get after this? Are we making our families proud? All of these questions seem so big and scary until we realize, as Pippin does, that these things come second to finding a place and people where you feel loved.” For Lubliner, who’s majoring in theater studies and public policy, that place was Hoof ‘n’ Horn. When she read the first university e-mail about COVID-19, “my first thought was the show,” she recalled. “Hoof ‘n’ Horn was my everything: my creative outlet as an actor and
"We are all treasuring the time we did spend together working on the show, and we have no choice but to accept this new reality. But it doesn’t mean we haven’t been scorched.”
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director, a sandbox to develop my leadership skills as a producer, and a family to laugh, cry, and party with.” Every day from her off-campus apartment in Durham, she has a moment of imagining an alternate universe where COVD-19 doesn’t exist, she’s on campus, and she’s regularly headed to rehearsal. “Theater asks you to open up, explore your emotions, be vulnerable in hypothetical situations that somehow become real. That cannot be done effectively online. There is a palpable magic in the room that doesn’t quite feel the same on Zoom or Facetime.” “It’s a dangerous thing to love something so much,” Lubliner said. “Bright lights, spectacle, razzle-dazzle tempt Pippin to burn himself out as well. We are all treasuring the time we did spend together working on the show, and we have no choice but to accept this new reality. But it doesn’t mean we haven’t been scorched.”
For all students, academic performance has taken on a new meaning. In late March, Duke’s history department ran its first-ever virtual defense of a doctoral dissertation. The Ph.D.-seeker was Ashton Merck. She analyzed how policymakers, business leaders, and consumers balanced various tradeoffs to define what makes food “safe,” and how those ideas changed over time.
“I think what I missed the most— the opportunity to celebrate an important milestone in the company of friends, colleagues, and mentors.”
Through the now-pervasive Zoom, Merck met with her committee, virtually, from the Durham house she shares with her partner. It “was certainly not how I ever imagined it would go,” she told me just a few days after her defense. Just before everything changed, she had asked some colleagues what to expect from a defense. “To a person, they all explained that it felt surreal and even a little anticlimactic. Now that I’m on the other side of it, I would argue that those qualities were only amplified by virtualization. I really liked the room I had reserved on campus, and I was really looking forward to seeing my committee all gather in the same space. At the same time, I felt like the quality of the discussion did not suffer; I felt like I got the same level of intellectual engagement as I would have from an in-person defense.” Still, not everything felt exactly right. “I think what I missed the most were some of the same things that the senior undergraduates are missing out on right now—the opportunity to celebrate an important milestone in the company of friends, colleagues,
and mentors.” Since her project focused on poultry, it seemed appropriate to suggest that her committee should reconvene over a chicken dinner. That didn’t work out. “But if social distancing works, they will all be there to celebrate with me once this is over.” While the celebration was less than it might have been, Merck fed her dissertation-minded peers a set of tips; they’re now posted online. Take the time to arrange your camera and lighting in advance. Avoid waving your hands close to the camera. Avoid nudging/jostling the table on which your computer sits—it makes the screen blur. If you have a cat or dog, the committee must see it at least once! And, to the accompaniment of images from the virtually assembled group: “This should go without saying, but this is a formal occasion. Dress the part. Note that I am even wearing formal shoes.” On her tip sheet, Merck also offered some “post-defense reflections.” Among them was this: “We are all so starved for social interaction these days (especially extroverts like myself), that I was often so eager just to speak words aloud to other hu-
ONLINE LEARNING • BY THE NUMBERS
ZOOM SESSIONS
1,400
4,753 Hours of Zoom
8,500 Participants
637
Classes at Peak
33/8/20 vs. 3/25/204
107,000
1PM
Peak Time
FIRST DAY of Online Learning • March 23, 2020
CONNECTIONS
1K
3ON CAMPUS vs. OFF CAMPUS4
18,000
Source: Duke Office of Information Technology DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2020
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mans.… Doing a practice Zoom call with friends, or having a long phone conversation, or yelling at passersby from your porch are all recommended activities to prepare on the day of a virtual defense.”
Unlike graduate students, with their long academic trajectories, first-years were just habituating themselves to the ways of Duke. Preston Bowman told me his lecture-based statistics and biology classes were going smoothly; they were combining pre-recorded video lectures with discussion periods and “office hours” with the professor. The “asynchoronous” (not-in-real-time) learning makes attending class newly convenient; sometimes the lecture style is slow for him, and he’s able to rev up the speed. His (smaller) Chinese and writing classes have built breakout groups to accommodate students across multiple time zones. Bowman's brainpower had landed him in an unusual position, for a freshman, in a Duke neuroscience lab that uses brain images of ZEBRAFISH to study neural circuits. An online lab experience sounds “oxymoronic,” he said, but by late March the lab had shifted to data analysis, which is home-friendly work. Over Zoom, he’s been participating in weekly lab meetings, additional discussions of journal papers, and individual calls with the lab’s principal investigator. Those calls, he pointed out, include not just updates on the research agenda but also checks on “how we are all doing emotionally.”
The biggest adjustment, he said, has been around the strange fact that he’s in college, but he’s also at home in Waco, Texas. In some ways, this has felt like a summer vacation: “Everyone is home, and I’m back to doing household chores. There are a million distractions with my family, and it is easy to get sidetracked when working on something.” But he’s worked to bring structure to his routine. “I try to keep my deadlines very well defined,” he said. “I closely monitor when I go to bed, when I wake up, and when I have my meals, so that my days have the same shape.” Structure is good in life, but so is the serendipity of running into people, getting to know them, and finding support in their company. That’s tougher in these circumstances. In Bowman’s words, “I miss most strongly the community that I was part of in Jarvis dorm. Although the group chat is still active, it is just not the same as physically being there with those residents. I miss not being able to meet new people and being able to meet my friends in person. I miss Duke itself, its sights and sounds.” But he also talked about a retrospective gratitude, as he put it. He tries to think of those random Jarvis moments as enduringly meaningful, not as fleeting. “Even in the face of crisis and tragedy, we can be appreciative of what we’ve experienced and look forward with the hope of more great times to come.” At some point, Duke will be the familiar Duke, and students will live and learn as they’ve come to expect. Or, to steal a song title from Pippin: “Morning glow is long past due.”—Robert J. Bliwise, editor
“Even in the face of crisis and tragedy, we can be appreciative of what we’ve experienced and look forward with the hope of more great times to come.”
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Remember our feathered friends Last year, scientists discovered that birds are facing a devastating crisis—steep, long-term losses across virtually all groups of birds in the U.S. and Canada have resulted in an overall loss of almost three billion birds, or almost 30 percent of birds, since 1970. With this in mind, I was dismayed that your Fall 2019 magazine had articles about the Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center, with horribly dangerous windows for bird collisions, and Peaches (“A Purrfect Arrangement”), an outdoor cat, with no mention or consideration of the bird deaths that both this building and this cat will cause. Two important ways that individuals can HELP BIRDS is by making windows safer and keeping cats indoors. There is a lot more I can say here, and stats I can provide, but I will keep this brief and ask that as an important voice, Duke Magazine be more wildlife/conservationthoughtful about its editorial content.
Victoria Campbell A.M.’06 Ithaca, New York
Editor’s note: The windows at Karsh are specially designed windows that deflect birds. There's a purpose I was surprised that your article “Toy Story?” [The Quad, Winter 2019] did not discuss the utilitarian PURPOSE of the ivory female manikins. These devices were used in medieval Japan when a physician was called to evaluate and treat a lady of the nobility and are referred to as “doctors’ dolls.” The lady’s female attendant would take this into the
giving
WINTER 2019
M AG A Z I N E
Inventive approaches to teaching and mentoring set Duke apart. That’s why we never stop innovating. THANK YOU for your incredible support of professors like Brian Hare who help students achieve their wildest ambitions.
room where she was closeted and ask the lady to point to the site of her pain. With her finger on that spot, the attendant would return to the physician. The physician could then ask additional questions, but more often than not he was not allowed into the room with the lady. Harold Wilkinson M.D. ’59, Ph.D. ’62 Westwood, Massachusetts .duke.edu
DUKE MAGAZINE • WINTER 2019
Letters&Comments
DUKE
One Big Step An AIDS vaccine isn’t in hand. But lessons learned from fifteen years of probing by a global team led by Barton Haynes makes it seem possible.
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More to the story Your THEN/NOW column [Winter 2019] features Justin Walker ’04 describing what he thinks are his
10/4/19 2:37 PM
distinguished racist Steven Miller ’07, presidential adviser? Eugene Ely ’73 San Jose, California
Perhaps fairness or an interest in telling a bigger story should have dictated that you also include the fact that the ABA considered him unqualified for this appointment. qualifications for a lifetime federal judicial appointment. Perhaps fairness or an interest in telling a bigger story should have dictated that you also include the fact that the ABA considered him unqualified for this appointment. Or perhaps that his most significant achievement in the eyes of those who appointed him was his record as a toady for the undistinguished Brett Kavanaugh. What’s next, an encomium for the
We heard this more than once Re: A Tall Tale [Letters & Comments, Winter 2019]: While Mike Lewis ’68 was a tower of strength in the paint for Duke’s roundballers, his playing height probably was closer to 6’6” than 7’6,” as other alums surely have pointed out by now. Tom Bethea ’63 Oro Valley, Arizona
CORRECTION In the Then/Now column in the Winter 2019 issue, the location of the legal services program run by John Rosenberg ’53 was incorrectly identified. It was in Kentucky.
SEND LETTERS TO: Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 or e-mail dukemag@duke.edu. Please limit letters to 300 words and include your full name, address, and class year or Duke affiliation. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity. Owing to space constraints, we are unable to print all letters received. Published letters represent the range of responses received. For additional letters: www.dukemagazine.duke.edu.
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Figuring out what will and won’t grow
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How Duke Gardens is managing a changing climate
ust past the staff-only gate grow the plants that shouldn’t be. Here is a variegated agave and a mangave that somehow survived a North Carolina February. Here is a saw palmetto, native to coastal Georgia, which should not be thriving, and here is a sago palm, which should be dead. That dry yellow stubble is ginger and that shrub is a coral bean—both punished by the climate, but not fatally—and this cycad, a prehistoric plant that looks the part, really should be inside a greenhouse. Even the fig vine blanketing the wall behind the gravel bed of the Sarah P. Duke Gardens’ experimental plot would not have thrived in earlier, cooler eras. “This whole bed is an experiment of, Can we push these things to grow?” says Duke Gardens director of horticulture Bobby Mottern. “We’re willing to roll the dice and sacrifice and see what happens.” To a horticulturalist, it is of course exciting to grow plants native to Mexico or coastal California in historically temperate North Carolina. Then again, these experiments are only possible in the era of climate change. For native plants accustomed to colder winters and cooler nights, a warming world can interfere with metabolism and bloom cycles or exacerbate the threat of pests and disease. Sure, spring hits differently every year, and sure, mild spells are nothing new, but today’s mild spells are milder and last longer, Mottern says. The climate is changing, and so is what will grow—and won’t. “Plants need a chance to catch their breath, so to speak,” he says. If it’s too warm, and especially at night, they can’t rest and recover from the day, he continues. This is when North Carolina natives like the white pine suffer. An early spring throws plants’ patterns GROWTH: Left, into chaos, causing premature blooms. fig vine takes Redbuds, which typically bloom in late over a wall; March and early April, revealed their inset, a mangave magenta hues in early March. Duke thrives Gardens’ charismatic cherries allée very
nearly bloomed in February. “It’s becoming common that a lot of plants are blooming ten days to two weeks early, almost on an annual basis,” says Mottern. This is problematic for a botanic garden that draws out-ofstate visitors, many of whom plan their trips around cherry blossoms or the Terrace Gardens’ tulips. Even more troubling are potential repercussions in ecosystems themselves. Many birds feed on insects, and many insects feed on nectar—this is a given. Mottern is concerned about what happens when plants bloom before the insects that feed on them emerge. So how does a botanic garden, a place with conservation baked into its DNA, pivot in a warming world? To answer, Mottern hops in a golf cart—Duke Gardens doesn’t burn petroleum if it can help it—and gives an impromptu sustainability tour. “Doing everything that you possibly can to limit your carbon footprint is really what everybody needs to do,” he says. First stop, a mountain of sticks, branches, and pallets from Duke’s gardens and grounds. Every year or so, DUKE GARDENS grinds 3,000 cubic yards of landscaping debris into 600 cubic yards of mulch and compost. Only organic fertilizer is used, and pesticide is verboten. If mites attack a plant, the plant goes. The only exception to the pesticide ban is for the exotic invasive fire ant. Mottern points out examples of reuse. These benches were once sidewalk curbs. And this is castoff stone used in Duke Gardens’ drainage system, which guides water through a seventy-two-foot difference in elevation at such a pace that minimizes erosion but waters plants along the way. “It’s not just here to be pretty,” Mottern says. “There’s a purpose to it.” The cart crunches along the path, and soon it’s in the open, under clear skies and warm sun. It’s early March, and parents play with babies and young children in the open field below Flowers Drive. Teenagers sit flirtatiously close on what they somehow think are secluded benches. A young couple salsa dances in the grass with jubilant abandon. It’s a beautiful day—the kind Duke Gardens is famous for. It’s just here too early.—Text and photography by Corbie Hill
“We’re willing to roll the dice and sacrifice and see what happens.”
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Q&A
English professor Priscilla Wald is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Published by Duke University Press in 2008, the book seems strikingly relevant at a time of global pandemic. There’s an irony embedded in the idea of contagion, isn’t there, since it highlights the fact that human-to-human contact is both necessary and dangerous? Society means you have to take into account other people. Other people give you a reason for being, and make life worth living. But they can also pose a danger, including the danger of germs. Ideas are contagious. That’s how we communicate with each other. Of course, a near-synonym of contagion is communicability. You communicate ideas, you communicate feelings, and you communicate germs. All of those things circulate together. 10
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In the book you write about the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which, at least metaphorically, is all about a foreign ideology on the rampage. Has the meaning of contagion resided more in the realm of disease or the realm of ideas? The word “contagious” means “to touch together.” The earliest meanings that I found for the word have more to do with the contagion of ideas than germs. Contagion comes up a lot around the French Revolution. Depending on your perspective, revolutionary ideas spreading can be a danger or it can be a positive thing. With technology, contagious memes are bad,
or they’re good, again depending on your perspective. There are many science-fiction writers who have written about how contagious memes can have literal consequences. In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the computer virus that’s going around the Internet has real-world bodily consequences; it can kill people.
Describe the narrative frame that provides the focus for your book. The outbreak narrative refers to the vocabulary, the images, the plotlines that get picked up and become conventional ways we think about outbreaks. The story came out of a 1989 conference of epide-
miologists and other medical and public-health professionals who popularized the term “emerging infections” to describe the new dangerous communicable diseases that had come to their attention in the 1970s and ’80s. They claimed these were the result of globalization and development practices and needed a broader solution than medical science alone.
The outbreak-driven story spread, but the shape of the story became distorted from its origin point in medical science, right? It became a story as it circulated through journalism and popular fiction and film.
It starts out as a detective story: Where does this come from? What can we do about it? And then, of course, it’s a medical mystery: How do we contain it? And it becomes a thriller, a struggle between the microbe and medical science. Finally, it takes on mythic proportions as a story of profound communal identity. It circulates values and beliefs; we’re going to learn from it. We’re going to see a renewal of our sense of being human—human ingenuity, human faith, human triumph. Which is not the story the 1989 conference-goers were trying to tell.
So human triumph, as the endpoint, is important in this narrative formula. A crisis is always a turning point. If we are deeply threatened and then we turn the corner and see we have another chance, we are reborn, in a sense. Even the most apocalyptic of these stories tend to end with humanity’s rebuilding, with gratitude toward others for helping humanity make it through.
There are bound to be some bad impacts, at least for the moment, on our social interactions. This kind of crisis can bring out a lot of good in people. It also brings out a lot of our biases. I heard our president refer to a “foreign virus,”
This kind of crisis can bring out a lot of good in people. It also brings out a lot of our biases.
and I’ve heard officials talk about the Chinese flu or the Wuhan flu and heard about anti-Asian violence. The biases, the stigma, the racism that surface in these moments are distressing, and they’re very much part of the outbreak narrative. There are invariably certain populations that get
marked as diseased or irresponsible. In a crisis, people often look for something to embody their fear, something to blame, something concrete they can avoid. And unfortunately that can bring out our worst biases. During SARS and again with this coronavirus, since both of them started in China, people I know were avoiding Chinese restaurants and businesses in the U.S.
Is there a contagion story in popular culture that you find particularly powerful? The archetypal outbreak narrative is Outbreak. It’s certainly not a completely accurate film, even with its amazing actors. But it captured the basic narrative, and it was drawn from Richard Preston’s Hot Zone, the true story of a hemorrhagic virus that threatened to spread into the general population. Preston is the one who introduced into popular culture things like level-4 biolabs.
What do you hope changes as this real-life pandemic winds down? Medicine, epidemiology, and scientific research are all crucial. But they should not be the only things we’re thinking about. We should be thinking about the way we want to live in a globalized world— what is just, what is humane, what is
wise. Health is not just the absence of disease. Health also means general wellbeing. Everyone should have access to decent standards of living and primary health care. The biggest single vector that turns an outbreak into a pandemic is poverty. We should be thinking about addressing that first and foremost for humanitarian reasons. But if you consider the costs in human life and the economic costs of a pandemic, we cannot afford not to put the infrastructure in place for access to universal primary health care.
What about at the individual level? It’s hard to talk through fear. Fear makes people shut down. It makes people not listen; they listen to the extreme. This is a very serious disease. But people have to learn to distinguish between a wise set of public-health decisions by local governments and the feeling that some horrible, deadly, apocalyptic disease is on the loose. But you asked if this pandemic will change our day-to-day practices dramatically. I would be pretty surprised if practices such as handshaking and hugging change permanently. I hope people don’t stop touching each other. That’s a contagion we need. —Robert J. Bliwise
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GATHERING: Julius S. Scott, seated, surrounded by some of those he mentored and taught including, from left, Alexander Byrd, Celia Naylor, Kathryn Dungy, Jennifer Morgan, Vincent Brown, Claudio Saunt, Laurent Dubois, and Herman Bennett.
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When a community was born
Graduate students return to campus to celebrate a mentor and a moment.
n the Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center’s Moyle RAYMOND GAVINS, not just research techniques but also “how Boardroom, filled with a clutch of history professors to carry yourself as a respected person in this profession.” He and graduate students, Jennifer Morgan Ph.D. ’95 passed that cultural learning to the next generation, and they recalled a similar gathering at Duke more than thirty haven’t forgotten. years before. Then, she stood in that group with Julius “Something amazing happened here from the early to midScott Ph.D. ’86, who was on the faculty, and the two ’90s,” said Vincent Brown Ph.D. ’02, professor of history and shared a quiet conversation. Herman Bennett Ph.D. ’93, now African and African American studies at Harvard. Professors married to Morgan, stood nearby. like Scott and Gavins, he said, reached out to create a genera“Julius said, ‘Look at that. All the black graduate students tion of African-American scholars. Like many others, Brown in the history department who have been admitted in the last mentioned senior associate dean for graduate programs and asfifteen years are in the room,’ Morgan said. “And I looked sociate vice provost for academic diversity Jacqueline Looney, around, and I was like, who else? who “was more than anybody else responsible for creating that “And he was, like, ‘You, Herman, and me.’ ” specific moment. By admitting so many people with a cluster Morgan allowed a moment of silence to emphasize her of similar kinds of interest, she helped to create a concern for point. “But then the next year there were three more,” she said. the long black freedom struggle, from the slave trade all the “And the next year there were six more,” and it became clear way to the civil rights movement.” Looney herself calls it “the that the Duke history department, along with the graduate perfect storm, the perfect combination of energy and interest school, was making a change and and Duke focusing on increasing a choice. “It was a real moment.” the number of black students,” not “It was a real moment.” And that moment led to this just in history but across the gradone, when she returned to Duke uate school as well. Unlike earalong with Scott and six other graduate students from that ly efforts at desegregation, in which black students were few moment—almost all people of color, and all leaders in the and scattered, their numbers supported their work. “It’s not academic history community, professors at Harvard, Rice, surprising they were all successful,” Looney says. “They didn’t New York University, Columbia. For “THE COMMON WIND: have to go far to find someone who looked like them.” A Symposium on the Influence of Julius S. Scott’s Writing Speaker after speaker shared thoughts about that moment and Teaching,” held in February, they joined a standing-room in graduate history studies at Duke and how the connections crowd of faculty, staff, graduate students, and visitors to disthey made still resonate. They all learned to do scholarship cuss not so much Scott’s book, A Common Wind, but rather broad enough to be conceptual, not limited to a specific time, his legacy in what Duke professor of history Laurent Dubois place, or person. They remain in contact, they work with a in his introduction called “the grad school moment.” widening circle of scholars, and they train and serve as inspira“It was a moment that was bigger than Julius,” said Mortion to the current generation of graduate students. Third-year gan, now professor of social and cultural analysis and history history Ph.D. student Sarah Amundson is part of a working at NYU. “He shaped our work in ways you’ll hear us all talk group in history that read A Common Wind, and she praised about, but he also brought us together in these really importthe accessibility of Scott’s writing and his broad approach to ant and enduring ways.” They didn’t just work together: They sources and research. “And he’s trained so many of these hisformed a community of young scholars of color. torians that I really admire that are here today, too,” she said. One by one, the professors spoke about their time with Scott Perhaps Kathryn Dungy Ph.D. ’00, associate professor of at Duke. Some referred to Scott’s scholarship. Said Bennett, Caribbean and Latin American history at St. Michael’s Colnow professor of history at the City University of New York: lege, best expressed the widespread feeling in the room. Scott’s “Every laptop I’ve had has had a copy of A Common Wind,” book takes its name from the way knowledge circulated among Scott’s seminal work on communication among African AmerAfrican-American populations on “a common wind.” A simicans during the revolutionary era at the turn of the eighteenth ilar communication began at Duke in the ’90s and continues century. Others focused on less purely academic lessons. Scott to blow. himself reminisced about learning from Duke professors like “We are,” Dungy said, “that wind.” —Scott Huler
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WATCH The Common Wind symposium
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DR/TL*
Brief mentions of things going on among Duke researchers, scholars, and other enterprises
ANIMALS AND MICROBES There are lots of possible reasons why BABY PANDAS are born at about 1/900th the size of their mothers. It turns out most of the suggested reasons are wrong. It may be because they’ve only gotten really big relatively recently, evolutionarily. Nobody really knows why, though.
➔ SOLAR
STORMS may explain some whale strandings. Whales
use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, and solar storms cause a kind of static that may overwhelm their senses.
➔ BUTTERFLIES know how to
make black even blacker than black. They use 3D structures on their scales to capture light so that it sort of disappears into their wings. The structure is amazingly thin, too.
➔
MALE
CHIMPS whose moms were present during their tween and teen years had higher odds of survival later in life than peers who lost their mothers before they finished puberty.
➔ If you put new ingredients
in their VACCINE AGAINST COCAINE, mice don’t get as high as they otherwise would.
PEOPLE VIRTUAL THERAPY for people recovering from knee-replacement surgery (delivered in-home via online visits with therapists, along with therapy managed by a digitally simulated coach) had outcomes just as good as those who saw therapists in person. Saved money, too.
➔
The Zika virus didn’t disappear just because you
stopped hearing about it; the GOOD NEWS is it seems antibodies against it travel from pregnant mothers to their babies in utero. ➔ Modified poliovirus used as part of a CANCER VACCINE may help treat not just glioblastoma but also pediatric brain tumors.
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MISCELLANY LOCAL CONSERVATION can help sinking coastal cities and ecosystems facing problems (like coral bleaching) from climate change. Large-scale responses are still required, but local actions help, too.
➔
Electrical engineers have created a way to create electronics that can PRINT DIRECTLY onto delicate surfaces like paper and human skin. Get ready for embedded electronic tattoos and bandages containing patient-specific biosensors.
➔ FILTERING, however you do it, is helpful for removing some PFASs
(perfluoroalkyl substances, nasty industrial pollutants often called “forever chemicals”) from your water. Reverse-osmosis and two-stage filters worked best, but no method removes all of them, sorry to say.
➔ Regarding water
after it’s been involved with people, it turns out that a conveyor belt made of rubber bands worked really well in separating liquids from solids in a real-world test of a response to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “REINVENT THE TOILET” initiative in India. In India, though, they have a washing culture; in South Africa, where they have a toilet-paper culture, the toilet paper gummed up the works.
➔ A new model of
the crazy chemical and physical interactions inside rock miles below the Earth’s surface under enormous heat and pressure can understand EARTHQUAKE behaviors and origins, even in multiple rock types. The model could help researchers better predict earthquakes—or maybe even try to stop them.
DUKE A company started by three Duke engineers who played on the football team has won the NFL’s inaugural 1ST AND FUTURE INNOVATIONS CHALLENGE, winning $50,000 and tickets to the Super Bowl. Kevin Gehsmann M.E. ’19 founded the company, Protect3d, with Clark Bulleit ’19 and Tim Skapek M.E. ’20 after the trio used scanning and 3D printing to create a special pad for the clavicle of quarterback Daniel Jones ’18 after an injury.
➔
Medical student Jenna
Armstrong is among twenty-eight U.S. recipients selected for a GATES CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARSHIP, which covers tuition and living expenses while completing a graduate degree at the University of Cambridge. Armstrong is Duke’s fourteenth Gates Cambridge Scholar.
➔ NOOR
TASNIM ’18 has been named one of eighteen Luce
Scholars for 2020-21. The Luce award provides stipends for living and professional placement in Asia. Tasnim has been an employee at Duke Alumni Affairs. n
Click on the BOLDED WORDS to link to additional details and original papers.
* Didn't Read?/Too Long? Well, we did, and now we're all smarter.
New director, new direction
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Duke University Press looks beyond academia and embraces new technology.
ublishing a beloved, Christmas-themed collaborative book with the Duke Libraries and Durhambased Horse & Buggy Press in a two-month window at the end of 2019 should have been the big news for DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. And really it was, but first the Dean Smith jokes. That’s the name of the press’ new director, hired from Cornell University Press in April 2019 to replace Steve Cohn, who had directed the press for more than twenty-five years before his retirement. The “up is down” comments of course dominated social media. But the new director of Duke Press would prefer to be known for his accomplishments, and that quick and collaborative publication demonstrated the direction Smith sees for the press. “With the change in directorship,” he says, “we want to face more outwards.” And though less-academic, more outward-looking books are not unknown for Duke (it published Little Man, Little Man, the only children’s book by author James Baldwin), Smith sees an opportunity for the press to publish books less separated from the press’ home. “I’m not going to say ‘regional,’ ” he says. “But I do want to align
our vision more with the university,” whose connection with its community and the South have been strengthening. “I’m looking for those kinds of opportunities. “The kind of stories that come out of the South that aren’t going to be straightforward.” Enter Allan Gurganus and A Fool for Christmas. Gurganus, author most famously of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, is a North Carolina native, lives in Hillsborough, and has taught at Duke. In 2018, he donated his archives to the Duke University Libraries, and the archives included art, given that Gurganus was trained as a painter before he turned to writing. Dave Wofford, of longtime Durham publisher, designer, and gallery-related Horse & Buggy Press, had met Gurganus years before and had produced with him a hand-printed version of Gurganus’ famous story It Had Wings. Wofford reached out to the library about getting “some of this work out of the boxes and into the light.” University librarian Deborah Jakubs asked Smith whether the press wanted to collaborate, and off they went. “We met at Horse & Buggy,” Smith says, “and it was done in twenty minutes. There wasn’t any question what we wanted to do.” A Fool for Christmas is the retelling of the nativity story, set in small-town North Carolina. Gurganus wrote
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“With the change in directorship, we want to face more outwards.”
it in 2004 for NPR’s All Things Considered, and it has become a classic on the radio and at readings, though it has never before appeared in print. Horse & Buggy provided the design and production, Gurganus provided the manuscript and artwork, and Duke Press provided marketing and distribution. The meeting took place in October, and the finished staplebound book was in stores in late November. It sold more than a thousand copies, “and if we had enough content for a spine, we could have sold a thousand more” using print-on-demand technology, Smith says. Print-on-demand of course only became more important during the upheaval caused by COVID-19. With employees required to work from home and Amazon halting orders and warehouses closing, the press needed to respond. Teams led by Allison Belan, director of strategic innovation and services, and editing, design, and production director Nancy Hoagland swung
into action, and within days a thousand Duke Press titles were ready for print-on-demand: Customers can order them online, and they’ll be automatically printed and shipped. COVID-19 has shut down the country, but Duke University Press is still in business. With technologies like print-on-demand and e-books, the job of the publisher demands more responsiveness than ever, Smith says. “Will the day come when we can use data science to generate a monograph?” without even an author, he asks. “I don’t know. But if you can work with those guys down there,” among Duke’s researchers into artificial intelligence, he wants to do it. Given that world of open-source, on-demand, and electronic publishing, he loves that the press is getting attention for something so completely bookish. “The codex,” he says, of the physical book, “the quidditas of that project is front and center.” Whether the future is open-source, electronic (at Cornell he doubled the press' output of electronic texts), on-demand, or something not even yet predictable, Smith just wants the press to be open to new things. One new series under discussion, for example, is called “Studies in the Grateful Dead.” —Scott Huler XX: XX
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BookClub WE ASKED
Brad Balukjian ’02, who teaches biology at Merritt College, a community college in Oakland, California, where he is the director of its Natural History and Sustainability Program, and who is now author of The Wax Pack (University of Nebraska Press) about what he learned from chasing down all the players in a single pack of baseball cards from 1986.
what anger really is. It’s a radical form of self-pity. When I get angry now, I think about that. First of all, I’m not a sportsI’ve always thought of fear—which is a big theme in the writer. So, would these guys even talk to me to begin with? book—as sort of the most destructive force in the universe. I’m, like, cold-calling people, and trying to explain it fast Hate and anger, these are just like the faces of fear. And so, realenough so they don’t hang up on me, and then get them to ly the book is about…that to live a life that is not controlled by actually participate. fear, you have to basically accept fear—don’t fight the fear. It’s And then, what if they all were boring, or what if they were sort of counterintuitive; I know for me growing up, going to busts? So, there’s that. There’s also the book that I had always Duke, I was always told by my parents and everyone, “Rely on envisioned—which I’m glad to say I was able to be faithful your brain. Your brain is your best friend. Your brain is what’s to—was ambitious and risky in the sense that it was not your going to get you ahead in life,” and that’s all true. But what XX. traditional sports book. Most books in the genre of sports are they don’t tell you is that there’s a lot of noise in there. And so, biographies, or they’re about a particular team, once you learn to accept that you can’t control or a particular season or athlete. And what I what pops into your brain—you’re going to was trying to do was really this cross-genre get all kinds of stuff—you can’t control what book that went across memoir and travel and comes in, but you can control your reaction to sports—baseball. And it’s not easy to pull that it. I think that’s the key. “When you off, because it’s like how do you tell the story feel angry, On being a fan now: of these fourteen guys, and my own story at When the book starts out, these are the guys the same time, and not lose the reader? you’re just that were my heroes as a kid; these guys are I have one friend who—when I was in a really feeling these larger-than-life athletes. Now that I’ve moment of doubt—she said, “This book is taken this journey, they’re still my heroes, I’m inside of you, and it has to come out, no matsorry still a fan, but it’s not because of anything to do ter what,” and I think she was right. for yourself.” with baseball. It’s because of their willingness On understanding your emotions: and their courage to be vulnerable and to be It’s kind of a bit of a paradox that I struggled open, and the things that I discovered on the with, which is these guys that were treated badly, abused by trip about how much in common we all have with them. their fathers, they actually, as I described it in one case, they’ll I think also this concept has as much to do with me as with weaponize their anger. They use that anger toward their fathem. In other words, in order to see your heroes in this way, thers and channeled it into aggression, which, in some ways, you have to be open and self-aware yourself. And there may be made them better athletes because they were able to have an some fans out there that are not so open about themselves, and outlet and channel that, and maybe make them sort of into not as self-aware, where they may not want to know. They may these fierce, aggressive competitors. Now, to me, it’s both inlike that distance. It gives them security to know, I think, or to dulging your feelings and shutting them out. In some ways, not know, in this case. As an adult, I don’t see any reason why they were immune to the underlying feelings, but they were I should put anyone on a pedestal because they hit a ball really sort of indulging in the surface-level feeling. I love when [forfar. That doesn’t impress me. What impresses me is that you mer Philadelphia Phillies pitcher] Don Carman says, “When can talk openly about your insecurities. That’s what I value. n you feel angry, you’re just really feeling sorry for yourself,” This interview has been edited and condensed. which I thought is a great and very profound way to express On why his book is a tribute to risk-taking:
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RECOMMENDATIONS from Ben Cohen '10
BY DUKE BY DUKE ALUMNI ALUMNI & FACULTY & FACULTY Privilege X (XX) (HarperCollins) Mary Adkins ’04 X
In Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks (HarperCollins), Cohen, a Wall Street Journal sports reporter, explores probability through stories of basketball, Shakespeare, the art world, Spotify, personal experiences, research, expert opinion, and more. Below, he offers a few books that inspired him.
Moneyball by Michael Lewis Simply the best sports book ever written. It made a whole bunch of kids obsessed with sports want to work in front offices. It made me want to be a writer. The incredible story, the oddball characters, the counterintuitive idea, the irresistible reporting, the killer sentences on every page—this book is why Michael Lewis is the master.
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis It’s a love story between two brilliant psychologists that also happens to be a mind-blowing page-turner. The degree of writing difficulty was so insanely high, but you would never know that when you read it. One of the authors of the original, seminal paper about the hot hand was the great Amos Tversky—the very same Amos Tversky who is the costar of this delightful book.
Boom Town by Sam Anderson I’ve never had particularly strong feelings about Oklahoma City. And then I read this perfect book about Oklahoma City. Now I’m fascinated by Oklahoma City. The hilarious Sam Anderson’s history of the weirdest place in America told through the weirdest team in the NBA was an inspiring reminder of something Duke taught me: that basketball happens to be a wonderful excuse to explore the rest of the world.
John Adams Under Fire (Hanover Square Press) Dan Abrams ’88 and David Fisher Reclaiming Our Political Roots: Rethinking Church in Nationalist Times (Wipf and Stock) Yohan Hwang M.T.S. ’12 From Here to Equality (The University of North Carolina Press) William A. Darity Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of public policy, African and African American studies, and economics; and A. Kirsten Mullen Modernizing Copyright Law for the Digital Age: Constitutional Foundations for Reform (Carolina Academic Press) Randolph May ’68, J.D. ’71 and Seth Cooper Dub – Finding Ceremony (Duke University Press) Alexis Pauline Gumbs Ph.D. ’10 Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners (Columbia University Press) Thomas Borstelmann A.M. ’86, Ph.D. ’90 In the Waves: My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine (Dutton) Rachel Lance Ph.D. ’16 City of Peace (Koehler Books) Henry Brinton ’82 Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke University Press) Nicholas Brown Ph.D. ’99 Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (Duke University Press) Leo T.S. Ching, associate professor of Japanese and East Asian cultural studies Christianity and the Art of Wheelchair Maintenance (Wipf and Stock) Stephen Faller M.Div. ’99 Hercules and the King of Portugal: Icons of Masculinity and Nation in Calderón’s Spain (University of Nebraska Press) Dian Fox A.M. ’77, Ph.D. ’79
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Where science meets art—and all that jazz A Bass Connections project explores the sonic characteristics of saxophone mouthpieces.
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ave Finucane sits in an empty jazz club on a Wednesday morning, a microphone before him and an unfamiliar mouthpiece in his sax. Senior Gia Jadick is at her laptop, a finger on the record button. Jadick starts the take and Finucane plays, but it’s not jazz that emerges from the horn. Rather, it’s slow, methodical octaves: a concert A; a concert E. Finucane doesn’t play very long before he’s done. Then he switches mouthpieces and does this again. And again. And again. First, he plays a new-ish Vandoren—a decent-quality mouthpiece—and then he plays a copy, which is a little loud-
team leader Matthew Busch, who’s based in Duke’s physics department. After you bought a mouthpiece, Busch continues, the refacer would tailor it to your needs as a player. Nowadays, this is all but a dead craft, and demand for vintage— and aging—mouthpieces of this era is high. “People know what mouthpieces Coltrane was playing in the ’50s and the ’60s. That’s been documented,” says Finucane. Jazz players “apprentice” by listening to the masters, he continues—Trane, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson—which often entails buying a mouthpiece that gets you in the neighborhood of their tone. After that, once players are confident in their sonic vocabulary, they find their own voice. For Jadick, a double-major in physics and political science, getting to know these mouthpieces has opened “A difficulty every scientist faces new frontiers in her instrument. She has two horns—a loudmouthed pepis whether or not explaining a band sax, which bears its share of phenomenon makes it less exciting—or dings, and a jazz sax, which she babies—but hadn’t realized that switchat least that’s something I’ve faced.” ing mouthpieces can truly transform an instrument. er and more trebly. Then he plays an Otto Link of unknown In fact, it can even change a player’s character. In her audio year, modified by an unknown refacer. Its sound is rich but analysis role with this Bass Project, Jadick has heard classireedy, smooth but with a bite. This mouthpiece growls in the cal players go jazzy simply because of a difference in mouthlows and crackles a bit in the highs—it has personality; it has piece. Granted, this is all so subjective—jazzy phrasing, faspirit. Then Finucane plays a copy, which is a different flavor vorite mouthpieces, desirable tone—which thrills Jadick. “I of smooth, with resonant lows and rounded highs. “This is have many philosophical thoughts on the interface between a better copy than the other copy, I think,” the jazz player art and science,” she says. “A difficulty every scientist faces is notes. whether or not explaining a phenomenon makes it less excitAnd the process continues. With each mouthpiece the ing—or at least that’s something I’ve faced.” saxophone’s sonic character transforms, and sometimes proGranted, taste is central here, so players like Finucane rate nouncedly so. the mouthpieces they play. Yet the quantitative data include Some of these are one-of-a-kind vintage mouthpiecinterior measurements of each mouthpiece, peaks and relaes—rare, top-quality, expensive gear. And some are clones, tive sonic frequencies in the recordings, and questions related micro-CT scanned and 3D printed at a Duke laboratory to machining techniques and material density. And when all through “The Art and Craft of Saxophone Mouthpiece Deis said, done, and compiled, Busch, Jadick, and the rest of sign,” a Bass Connections project that aims to understand, the “Art and Craft of Saxophone Mouthpiece Design” team preserve, and even reproduce what makes these vintage may be a few steps closer to unlocking the magic—ahem: mouthpieces so sought after. science—of vintage saxophone mouthpieces. “It is very precise,” says Jadick. “Very small changes in the “A lot of art feels [like an] impulse or an expression of yourmouthpiece affect their quality.” self, but you use tools to do that,” says Jadick. Having a more Between the 1940s and ’70s, such infinitesimal changes precise understanding of the tools “allows you to enjoy the were made in-house at instrument stores. Every shop had art more,” she adds. “I really do appreciate understanding its own refacer, says research-and-development engineer and the science behind art.”—Corbie Hill DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2020
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GoDuke.com
TOGETHER: The team, including, center, Coach Ogilvie, and Wisner, right, huddle at the 2017 ACC Cross Country Championships in Louisville.
Just keep moving
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Running with the track and field team suddenly became a different story.
he runners wear black and blue on an overcast day. They stretch with motions balletic and graceful. It seems so effortless and fluid, the way they move. Two of us stand out: director of track and field and head men’s coach NORM OGILVIE, cool and easy in his gray business suit, and me. I’m in running shoes, sure, but yellow shorts and an orange shirt—thankfully not any rivals’ colors. Oh, and I’m twice the age of the first-year athletes. My confidence is high. I’m a runner, yet I’m here as a writer. The guys around me—the men’s track team— they’re at Duke to run. All I have to do is keep up during
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their “jog” through Duke Forest. Their jogging pace (about a seven-minute mile) is my fastest, which I’ve only achieved once during a timed 5K. So all I have to do is maintain my top speed for as many miles as I can alongside Duke’s fastest distance runners. And all while talking. Maybe my confidence is too high. One Coach Norm pep talk later and a mass of twenty-odd runners sweeps away from the track, carried along broad pavement to the Cameron Boulevard light like snowmelt seeking sea level. There we pause, waiting for the light to change and sparking with potential energy. Don’t walk turns to walk and we surge across, bold en masse and
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into the forest. The team rockets along well-trod trails and then deeper into the woods, chatting and laughing easily. It’s everything I can do to keep up. The pack seems unstoppable, insoluble. Seems. “I have been lonely on my runs for sure, and I miss my team,” Matt Wisner admits weeks later. “We all are in the same situation right now where we’re running alone.” Quarantine approaches its second month, and the pack is scattered, with the runners only encountering one another over Zoom calls. Ogilvie, whose twenty years as men’s track and
the University of Oregon, where he plans to study journalism as a graduate student. “I figured I’d move out west for a change,” Wisner says lightly, relieved even by the subject of life after quarantine. But first will come interminable weeks of isolation—a long race if ever there was one. Wisner has good days, when he wakes up energized and driven, and he has the other kind. On these, his worst days, the pandemic feels like a dress rehearsal for climate change’s worst-case scenarios: lousy international collaboration; people quickly destitute and unable to pay rent. It keeps him up at night.
“Running has been a constant for me when everything else is unpredictable.”
Kimberly Romine
cross country head coach have Good day or bad, though, cemented his reputation as a Wisner still laces up. He keeps winner of championships and moving. a trainer of champions, is re“Running has been a contiring. And Wisner, two-time stant for me when everything All-American and holder of else is unpredictable,” he says. two school records, is finishNone of us predicted in ing his senior year home in early March, for instance, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. that the run I tagged along Wisner came tantalizingon would be one of the men’s ly close to competing in the track team’s last together. We 2020 NCAA Track & Field all knew about COVID-19, Indoor Championships in Wisner recalls, but couldn’t Albuquerque, New Mexico, imagine the all-encompassing where he and fellow star athdisruption looming mere days lete Erin Marsh, a junior, were in our future. GO: Wisner, right, and teammate Charles Cooper, slated to represent Duke. The Our immediate thoughts left, in the 1500m race at the 2019 Battle of the two flew to New Mexico, only instead turned to the roots Blues in Durham. for said meet to be canceled. and rocks of the trail and By the time they returned, the runners around us. Don’t campus was deserted and everything had been called off, instumble. Keep pace. Run close but respect your neighcluding the outdoor ACC conference championship meet bor’s stride. Cross Erwin Road without getting squished. that Duke would have hosted. Cross the highway off-ramp without getting squished. My “I remember when I was a senior in high school visiting thoughts as we race between the trees are that I’m running Duke,” Wisner says. “Coach Norm said, ‘Four years from farther and faster than I do on my usual solo runs. I am part now when you’re a senior here, you’ll have your final ACC of something larger than myself, if briefly. championships right here on our home track.’ Junior Alex Miley, his shaggy blond hair straight from “Wild, right?” the ’70s, runs on my right. He asks me what I like about If there’s a light, it’s that the NCAA is making allowances running. “The solitude,” I say, and we laugh as we run befor seniors on athletic scholarships who want to compete cause there are so many of us. for a fifth year. Granted, there’s variability between conferI would answer differently if he asked me today. —Corbie Hill ences and universities, but this will allow Wisner to run for
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Apocalypse now and then
Students explore the meaning and lessons of the end times.
enny Knust stands in front of the dozenand-a-half students in her class in the Gray Building and asks each to pick one of the little cards she has prepared. That exercise sorts them into groups based on the seven churches of Asia, each of which received a letter at the instruction of Jesus, according to the biblical book of Revelation. In their groups, the students discuss the topics of those letters—which basically tell the churches to hang on and keep the faith—and the us-versus-them mentality that suffuses the letters and the whole book of Revelation. Knust, professor of religious studies, points out the mysterious symbols throughout the book. Those symbols can be best interpreted, Knust says, by looking backward at the times the writer of the book has endured. “Which is funny,” she goes on, “because apocalyptic literature is really about the future.” Welcome to Religion 361, “The End of the World: Apocalyptic Arguments From Antiquity to the Present Day,” a course looking at the past but very much focused on the present. The course was designed and planned,
crisis, and the searing Vietnam War story Apocalypse Now. It addresses end-times movements like the Shakers and Jonestown. And it engages with texts like The Future Birth of the Affective Fact, which discusses how the fear of what’s next can seem more important than whatever is actually happening. Which already seems like a great observation before you even read the beginning. That essay starts as follows: “ ‘The next pandemic,’ screams a 2005 headline in Quebec’s reputedly most sober newspaper, ‘does not exist yet.’ ” Whoa: a little close to the present moment, but here we are. In class the students write “My Weekly Apocalypse,” responses to the readings. The responses commonly include references to current events (a swastika painted on campus) and popular culture (regarding fear and violence, one student referred not just to the required reading but also to Yoda, a more contemporary mythological figure). The modern gaze never leaves their discussion. “Most of the time,” one student notes, “it’s pretty clear at the beginning of the movie who are going to be the one
Does positing the end of the world make people more likely to act? yes, during what may be the sixth great extinction, during the rapidly advancing climate crisis, and in year three of a tumultuous political era. But before, it’s worth mentioning, the coronavirus had made a name for itself. Apocalypse, that is, has only increased in our awareness since Knust got the idea for the course. In fact, “that’s why I’m teaching the course,” she says. “Because I really don’t want to be it.” We may be going through an apocalypse or something that very much feels like one, but this is one Knust, along with her students, plans to understand, or at least put into context. “As opposed to one we’re going to just abandon to destruction and despair.” Does positing the end of the world make people more likely to act? Less likely to act? The course looks at more than apocalyptic books of the Jewish and Christian bibles and the Quran—Revelation in the New Testament, for example, and Daniel in the Old. It embraces texts like Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, about apocalyptic environmental degradation. It watches movies like Angels in America, about the AIDS
or two people who are going to live.” Schuyler Nowicki, a junior majoring in religious studies, took the course because he’s always been interested in mythology, much of which includes apocalyptic stories. That gives him a perspective on our moment: “I see a pretty dark outlook on the future right now, but in some ways everyone from every society has always thought the world was ending,” he says. “But it hasn’t yet.” That somewhat glass-possibly-half-full approach would cheer Knust. “I think apocalyptic arguments are terribly destructive,” she says. “I’m hoping to be convinced otherwise, but my gut feeling tells me they discourage people from acting.” She quotes one of her students, who said, “We spend way too much time on disaster preparedness and not enough on disaster aversion.” Whether it’s an apocalyptic movie or a book of the Bible, the ending, the students agree, is that ultimately God—or at least the good guys—will win. But “the pleasure,” Knust says of apocalyptic literature, lies in “finding out how we get there.”—Scott Huler
LISTEN to the students’ manifesto on why the coronavirus isn’t apocalyptic
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ForeverDukeDOERS
COVID-19
SO S .
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These alumni are among the many who have answered the call...
MEDICAL Jill Obremskey ’86
The doctor is the director of Community Health Services in Tennessee; her team is tasked with testing and contact tracing to limit the virus.
Brandin Yan ’18
Helped organize an effort to replenish personal protective equipment for local hospitals.
Vikram Devisetty ’02, M.D. ’07, M.B.A. ’07
Caring for positive COVID-19 patients.
Reza Zsilinskzka ’11, M.D. ’16
The emergency medicine resident talked to NBC News about the scene at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
FOOD 5 Catherine Fei ’17
Helped start the Denver chapter of Frontline Foods, to support local restaurants and local health-care professionals.
Julia Wyatt Love ’83
Started Feed the Fight Durham NC, which raises money to pay local restaurants to provide meals to local health-care professionals.
3 Jacinta Ingram Curtis M.S.N. ’17
A pediatric acute care nurse practitioner helping those affected in Durham.
FROM 3D PRINTING RESPIRATORS TO POTENTIAL THERAPIES: Learn how Duke scholars and researchers are addressing the pandemic HERE. 26 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
COMMUNITY Emily Jorgens ’14
Helped create Helping Hands, a website to match people needing help with deliveries with volunteers to assist them.
Audrey Wang ’19, William Bernell ’19, Jennifer Hong ’19
Created the fundraiser Masks4NYC, to order and distribute FDA/CE-registered face masks to health-care workers; at press time, over 3,000 masks were already on the way.
Priya Achaibar B.S.E. ’15
Helped organize PeoplevsPandemics.com, a site that connects people who need help and people who want to offer some.
3 Angus Jackson LL.M. ’18 S hifted a portion of the production
for his biotech start-up Attwill Medical Solutions to make hand sanitizer for essential workers.
CHILDREN & EDUCATION 3Emily Kragel ’16 and Logan Beyer ’17
Created ColoringforCovid.com, free downloads of coloring pages and books with information about the virus for kids 5-10.
David Shiffman ’07
The marine biologist has chatted with and answered nearly 2,000 students, and counting.
6Alexandra Pancost Johnson ’99 Helped her four children start Facts 4 Food; children make videos of something they’re curious about and post a video presenting their research. For every 25 facts, 25 cans of food are donated.
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C
omputers might be work tools, but they’re also distraction machines. That’s especially true for those who work from home and struggle to resist Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other diversions beckoning from just a click away. Taylor Jacobson ’07 understands, for he is also one of the teeming distracted masses yearning for concentration. That’s why he came up with Focusmate, a “virtual coworking” service touted as a way for users to hold themselves accountable for getting stuff done—essentially by doing it for an audience. Users connect remotely via Skype for an agreed-
J.P. Morgan executive working on her marketing business “went great,” he says. And so Focusmate was born. Jacobson previously worked in executive coaching and facilitation, and he’s one of three full-time Focusmate employees, all in the vicinity of New York City. The company has investors and operates on a “freemium” business model, where you can get up to three sessions a week without charge. Paid subscriptions are five dollars a week, which enables an unlimited number of sessions. About 750 people signed up the first week last fall, but business has really picked up thanks to the effects of the coronavirus. As closures and lockdowns took hold in mid-March, Focusmate’s traffic skyrocketed more 500 percent. “Everybody has this than One Focusmate level of anxiety—not loyalist who uses it just about getting sick more than ever now Martha Hopkins, but also fears about iswho works in book how we’re going to development and make a living.” marketing from her home in Austin, Texas. It had already been a “total game-changer” for her productivity, but now Hopkins finds it even more valuable. “It’s something I feel everybody needs upon amount of time, state their goals, and get to to know about right now,” she says. “Everybody has work, each in sight of the other. And while that this level of anxiety—not just about getting sick but sounds like an odd method, it does seem to work for also fears about how we’re going to make a living. You some people, using technology that usually induces can use Focusmate sessions to compartmentalize what distraction to battle distraction. you need to get done: ‘I can at least have fifty minutes Like they said in those old Hair Club for Men ads, where I quit worrying because I’m thinking about Jacobson isn’t just the founder, he’s a client—and something else.’ It’s still an awesome thing, and it really also something of an evangelist. He stumbled onto helps with isolation.” the wonders of two-way online motivation a few years Jacobson echoes that sentiment in describing Foback, more or less by accident, during a Skype session cusmate as less of a company than a community. with a friend. “We are social and tribal animals, and this social“We’re both longtime procrastinators, so we were distancing separation is very unusual for us,” he says. brainstorming harebrained ways around it,” Jacobson “Our tendency at times of crisis is to come together, says. “We happened to be on Skype, so we gave this but we can’t physically do that right now. At its core, a try, and it was amazing. It was also pretty clear that Focusmate is finding what works for people as social we’re not the only ones out there with this problem.” animals and bringing that to a virtual environment. Jacobson had some hesitations about trying this with At this moment, we need ways to connect more than a stranger, but a virtual collaboration with a former ever.”—David Menconi
28 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
I
n “Hot Vinyasa I,” one of the fifteen-minute “sexy audio stories” offered by an app called Dipsea, Laura starts taking yoga classes from Mark. During their first class, as Mark touches Laura, things get hot pretty quickly. “He comes up behind me, laying his large hands onto my hips,” narrator Laura says. The relationship progresses from there. This isn’t some porn podcast, but a new type of erotica, aimed at women and at setting the mood and sparking imagination. The focus is mind, rather than body. “This type of storytelling is pioneering a new type of fiction, and it’s not borrowing from established playbooks; we really are writing it ourselves,” says Gina Gutierrez ’12, Dipsea’s chief executive officer and cofounder. “It is designed with an objec-
according to Gutierrez. The name comes from the cofounders’ desire “to be incredibly accessible and approachable”—as in the listener being able to dip her toe into a sea of stories. The company says research shows that 90 percent of women use “mental framing” (or scenario conjuring) to get turned on. Gutierrez was a psychology major at Duke, which she says she found to be a place filled with people of diverse interests and passions who pushed her in a good way. After graduating, she worked as a brand and design strategist, doing work for clients, including Google, Facebook, and DoorDash. But she wanted to put her passion for psychology to better use. In December 2018, that desire became San Francisco-based Dipsea, cofounded with Faye Keegan, who serves as the chief
“We’re doing something that’s very fragile.” tive, to make people feel excited and turned on to their own ideas and to stimulate someone’s erotic imagination, along with being very psychologically safe. That’s a lot of different factors. We’re doing something that’s very fragile.” And women seem eager for it. In its first eleven months, Dipsea the app has been downloaded more than 300,000 times, and Dipsea the company has attracted $5.5 million in seed money,
technical officer. Subscriptions for the app’s stories cost $9 per month or $48 per year and have been sold to people in the United States, the European Union, Australia, Latin America, and elsewhere, according to Gutierrez. Most of the subscribers identify as women and are twenty-five to thirty-four, with about half being single and half in relationships, she says. Dipsea employs writers,
narrators, and producers, recording the stories in its own studio, but also works with creators from around the country. The stories are “edited really rigorously for the things that we believe matter, which include believability, consent, proactive communication, pleasure,” and they meet the criteria for “an aspirational or approachable fantasy,” Gutierrez says. “They have both an aspirational quality to them, but also are fantasies that one might imagine could happen to you. We believe that when you’re able to place yourself inside of a story, it’s that much more exciting.” Feedback shows that Dipsea users include married couples who have reinvigorated their sex lives, trauma victims who use the app to introduce sexuality into their lives, and people who are exploring their sexual preferences, Gutierrez says. Other users find the app helps them have conversations with their sex partners, on things such as preferences and trying new practices that might otherwise be difficult to have. “We want to empower people to tap into their sexuality more easily and on their terms,” Gutierrez says. “And we think there is something so immensely powerful outside of the bedroom to be able to take that on in practice. You feel more confident, and you feel more in touch with yourself.”
—Tom Kertscher
DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2020
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ForeverDukeNEWSMAKERS
Duke Today
SAMIR NURIYEV A.M. ’05 was nominated as chief of the presidential administration in the Azerbaijani parliament.
MAYA DURVASULA ’18 won a Knight-Hennessy Scholarship. She will pursue a joint J.D./Ph.D. degree in law and economics at Stanford University.
Bella Bann/Duke Chronicle
Courtesy Sara Fidler
SARA FIDLER ’97 was named president of the Maryland Independent College and University Association (MICUA).
HALEY GORECKI ’19 earned the United States Basketball Writers Association (USBWA) All-America honors.
Duke Photography
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
BECCA WARD ’12 won her third NCAA fencing championship on the national stage in women’s saber.
MARKUS FJORTOFT ’17, M.M.S. ’18 has joined the football club Hamilton Accies in the United Kingdom.
30 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
Courtesy Carter Vance
Project Gaia
HARRY STOKES ’71, M.F. ’74 is the cofounder and executive director of Project Gaia, which pioneers ethanol- and methanol-fueled stoves as an alternative to wood, charcoal, and kerosene.
CARTER VANCE M.B.A. ’05, J.D. ’05 was named the first general counsel of lottery app Jackpocket.
NITA BYRD M.DIV. ’12 has been named chaplain and dean for spiritual engagement of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.ew York.
LINDA H. MARTIN J.D. ’96 has been recognized as one of the 2020 Notable Women in Law by Crain’s New York Business.
7Have news to share about your achievements and milestones? Submit a class note and read your classmates’ latest news by logging into alumni.duke.edu.
DUKEISEVERYWHERE
XX
KAITLIN PAYNE ’16 began her
fourth year as a medical student at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia like every other student across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic—remotely. But for medical students like Payne, remote learning presented her with an interesting challenge: Her rotation in obstetrics and gynecology was canceled, as was a critical exam she and other students must take before applying to residency this summer. Payne has turned to virtual simulations, conferences with residents via Zoom, independent reading (and when she needs a break from it all knitting a Duke hat or taking a walk on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). Through it all, she says she can’t help but think of how her life would have been different: Right after graduating from Duke, Payne took a “gap year” before going to medical school. “If I had not taken that year, or if I had been a year older, I might be on the frontlines of this pandemic,” she says. That realization motivates her to appreciate and advocate for the health-care workers sacrificing their lives for others during this time. “Applause and prayers are wonderful,” she says, “but if you can donate blood, lobby Congress for more personal protective equipment, offer child care or a hot meal to nurses, doctors, and respiratory therapists in your community—that’s even better.”
Philadelphia Number of alumni:
4,174
Instagram: @kaitlinpayne
ForeverDukeRETRO When a different pandemic disrupted campus
D
In 1918 and 1920, influenza temporarily changed Trinity College. | BY VALERIE GILLISPIE uke’s spring semester is unlike any that came
before it. Students are largely absent from campus, classes are online, and spring traditions—even commencement itself—are canceled or postponed. As we feel the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it’s helpful to look back at how the campus weathered a global influenza epidemic that struck 100 years ago, coinciding with the end of World War I. In 1918, Trinity College had yet to become Duke University. The school, located on today’s East Campus, had fewer than 500 students. In the fall of 1918, the majority of the male students enlisted in the Student Army Training Corps (SATC) at Trinity. The SATC was a program under the United States War Department to enlist currently enrolled students and provide them with training. Trinity was just one of hundreds of colleges and universities that hosted such programs. The SATC radically changed life on the Trinity campus. Those enrolled in the program were no longer fresh-
men or seniors—instead they were divided into sections based on age. Fraternities, literary societies, and campus publications were largely on hiatus. No Chanticleer was published in 1918, and the first issue of The Chronicle during the 1918-19 school year was not published until November, following the armistice that ended the war. As the SATC became ascendant, a global influenza pandemic emerged. It reached Durham and Trinity in September 1918, and over 200 students and several faculty members contracted the flu. In the November 21 issue of The Chronicle, the course of the epidemic was detailed. Of particular interest is the way the students were triaged if showing symptoms:
An example of the way the work was done, as soon as a boy was reported sick, he was at once looked after. “Thermometer squads” were formed who went to every patient twice a day and took his temperature and made a record of it. Mild cases were simply dosed with such medicines as seemed necessary and the proper diet furnished. Cases of a more serious nature were placed in the hands of trained nurses. “Thermometer squads” were formed who Even more serious cases were placed under went to every patient twice a day and took his the care of a physician. In this way the strength of the doctors and nurses was temperature and made a record of it. conserved and used to the greatest advantage possible. FLU: Left, a 1918 headline tells the story; below, the Student Army Training Corps
The school was proud that not a single student died of influenza that season. By November, with the war and the worst of the flu over, attention could return to studies. In response to students pleading to cancel final exams, the faculty met in what The Chronicle described as “that mysterious and secret council known as ‘Faculty Meeting.’ ” Following it, the faculty announced that students would receive credit, but no examinations would be held until March. The Chronicle breathlessly reported that “After the reading of the above resolutions, the eye of every student on campus has beamed with new lustre, and every heart has throbbed with more
Photography Duke University Archives
delight in its longings for the joys GAME OFF: The 1920 basketball of the Christmas holidays.” team had a Sadly, a student, J.W. Neal, did game in Raleigh succumb to flu-related complicacanceled. tions in April 1919. His decline was quick, and he lived for only a few days after the symptoms began. The Chronicle reported, “His mother arrived in Durham yesterday morning in time to be at the bedside of her son before he died, but he never regained consciousness after her arrival.” The impact of influenza can also be seen in the Alumni Registers (predecessor of Duke Magazine) of 1919 and 1920, with notices of alumni deaths scattered throughout. A second wave of influenza struck North Carolina in February 1920. In early February, the basketball team had to cancel a game in Raleigh, “on account of the seriousness of the epidemic of influenza in that city.” Soon after, on Valentine’s Day, students entered “voluntary quarantine.” Under a headline that boasted “Influenza Situation on Campus Excellent,” The Chronicle reported: Upon the advice of Dr. Joseph Speed, advising physician for the college as a whole, the students were requested to go into voluntary quarantine Saturday. By this request the authorities asked the students to refrain from going down town except on pressing business, and when doing so to sign out on the book at the office.
The reason for this precaution is to avoid bringing the epidemic, which is raging to a considerable degree in the city of Durham, into the college. Places of amusement in the city have been closed for some time, and the public schools were closed a few days ago. Congregating in drug stores, cigar stores, and street corners is warned against. Street cars are prohibited from receiving passengers in the excess of the normal seating capacity. Thus far students have been exceedingly wise and prudent in the observance of the precautions recommended by the authorities, and if they will but “carry on” as they have been doing, there is no reason why Trinity College should not get past the epidemic without suffering noticeably. As in 2020, athletics were canceled during the quarantine in 1920. It was lamented that there wouldn’t be an end to the season, but happily contests were restarted in late February. Trinity College took home the state championship in men’s basketball that year, a bright spot during a troubling time. Although the spring of 2020 has been disruptive and unsettling, perhaps we can find some comfort in looking at our past, and seeing that we have come through disruptive and unsettling times before. We’ll come through this one as well, making our own history as we do it. n Gillispie is the university archivist.
LEARN MORE from The Rubenstein Library’s materials related to the history of epidemics, pandemics, and infectious disease. DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2020
33
ForeverDukeIN MEMORIAM 1930s
Helen Day Jackson ’48 of Lakeland, Fla., on Jan. 31, 2020. Kathleen O’Gorman Reynolds ’48 of Island Heights, N.J., on Nov. 22, 2019. John A. Vousden M.F. ’48 of Lexington, S.C., on Dec. 14, 2019. Joseph E. Warner Jr. ’48 of Winston-Salem, on Dec. 10, 2019. Ruth M. Hogg ’49 of Naples, Fla., on Jan. 21, 2020. J. Robert Regan Jr. ’49, M.Div. ’52 of Culpeper, Va., on Dec. 9, 2019. Raymond M. Richeson ’49 of Salisbury, N.C., on Feb. 12, 2020. James A. Robins III ’49 of Durham, on Jan. 31, 2020.
Dorothy Gray Kunkle ’36 of Westmont, Pa., on Nov. 18, 2019. Hazel Ann Gantt Josey ’37 of Columbia, S.C., on Jan. 3, 2020. Louise McBride Rosehill-Phipps ’38 of Monterey, Calif., on Jan. 29, 2020.
1940s
Virginia Gandy Van Nest ’40 of Tucson, Ariz., on Dec. 22, 2019. Lee Goodwin Alexander ’41, A.M. ’47 of Savannah, Ga., on Nov. 25, 2019. Henry S. Wentz ’41 of Lancaster, Pa., on Jan. 5, 2020. Henry C. Profenius ’42 of Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 9, 2020. Emilie Frantz Crigler ’43 of Charlotte, on Dec. 18, 2019. Joseph W. Grossenheider ’43, J.D. ’48 of Springfield, Mo., on Feb. 10, 2020. Gloria Bachman Storer ’43 of Columbus, Ohio, on Dec. 5, 2019. Charles R. Hamilton ’44 of Decatur, Ga., on Dec. 11, 2019. Wilma Smith McMillan ’44 of Salt Lake City, on Jan. 30, 2020. Eleanor Beckner Gilman Hand ’45 of Macon, Ga., on Jan. 11, 2020. Merthel Greenwell Lundy ’45 of Wichita Falls, Texas, on Jan. 20, 2020. Jay K. Beam ’46 of Rockville, Md., on Jan. 16, 2020. James C. Smith ’46 of Oak Island, N.C., on Jan. 9, 2020. Rebecca Watson Bronson ’47 of Lakeland, Fla., on Feb. 1, 2020. James E. Hart Jr. ’47 of Waycross, Ga., on Dec. 8, 2019. Warren S. Haun ’47 of North Little Rock, Ark., on Feb. 5, 2020. Shirley Smith Nifong ’47 of Raleigh, on Jan. 18, 2020. Matilda Paty Seward ’47 of Johnson City, Tenn., on Dec. 29, 2019. John V. D’Albora Jr. ’48 of Rockledge, Fla., on Jan. 8, 2020. Ralph P. Edwards ’48 of Blacksburg, Va., on Jan. 6, 2020. John R. Frazier M.F. ’48 of Newberry, S.C., on Feb. 12, 2020.
1950s
Robert W. Chapman ’50 of Charlotte, on Jan. 6, 2020. Nancy Earle Fortini ’50 of Durham, on Jan. 24, 2020. C. Ray Jones ’50 of Dunwoody, Ga., on Dec. 3, 2019. Mary Ann Maxfield Monk ’50 of Lake Charles, La., on Dec. 12, 2019. Simmons I. Patrick ’50, M.D. ’50, H ’50-54 of Kinston, N.C., on Dec. 10, 2019. John A. Stewman III ’50 of Matthews, N.C., on Feb. 4, 2020. William C. Britt ’51 of Nashville, Tenn., on Dec. 23, 2019. Robert E. Fleming ’51 of Henderson, N.C., on Dec. 6, 2019. Ellen French Fuller ’51 of Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 4, 2020. Phyllis White Lindsey ’51 of Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, 2020. Mary Stormont Pollock ’51 of Milwaukee, on Feb. 4, 2020. James I. Taylor Jr. ’51 of Edgecombe County, N.C., on Dec. 30, 2019. L. Stacy Weaver Jr. ’51, J.D. ’53 of Fayetteville, N.C., on Dec. 16, 2019. Edward D. Bafford ’52 of Baltimore, on Dec. 25, 2019. Janet Garber Caldwell ’52 of Lemoyne, Pa., on Dec. 21, 2019. Eugene F. Corrigan ’52 of Charlottesville, Va., on Jan. 25, 2020. David D. Delong ’52 of Wyomissing, Pa., on Dec. 29, 2019.
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34 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
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MORE DUKE MEMORIES ONLINE T. Frances Yeager Dunham ’52, Ph.D. ’63 of Pensacola, Fla., on Dec. 25, 2019. Betty Routon Ellsworth ’52 of Fayetteville, N.C., on Dec. 4, 2019. Louis I. Gaby M.F. ’52 of Orlando, Fla., on Nov. 2, 2019. David W. Nylen ’52 of DeLand, Fla., on Dec. 29, 2019. Elizabeth Lassiter Reck ’52 of New Orleans, on Nov. 28, 2019. H. Daniel Stillwell Ph.D. ’52, M.F. ’54 of Asheville, N.C., on Nov. 30, 2019. Jerre D. Boren ’53 of Elkin, N.C., on Feb. 8, 2020. Carolyn V. Tompkins Cassidy ’53 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Nov. 26, 2019. Judith Hull Clarkson ’53 of Atlanta, on Jan. 5, 2020. Jean Bryan Feild ’53 of San Diego, on Dec. 2, 2019. Gerald A. Kramme ’53 of West Deptford, N.J., on Dec. 4, 2019. Robert E. Lee B.Div. ’53 of St. Augustine, Fla., on Nov. 14, 2019. Carlos M. Lyon ’53 of Decatur, Ill., on Nov. 25, 2019. Stephen A. Wainwright ’53 of Durham, on Dec. 12, 2019. Robert A. Warden ’53 of Hilton Head Island, S.C., on Dec. 16, 2019. Janet Burkley Bonnesen Cockle ’54 of Omaha, Neb., on Dec. 4, 2019. Noel P. Dillon ’54 of Baltimore, on Dec. 27, 2019. Raymond J. Ripper ’54 of Swarthmore, Pa., on Jan. 21, 2020. D. Reid Tickle M.D. ’54 of Wilson, N.C., on Dec. 14, 2019. James G. Wilhite ’54 of Lexington, Ky., on Feb. 12, 2020. Brooks Eaddy ’55 of Gastonia, N.C., on Dec. 4, 2019. Robert E. Kinneman Jr. M.D. ’55 of Culpeper, Va., on Nov. 26, 2019. James D. Lloyd ’55 of Durham, on Feb. 14, 2020. Cameron S. McRae ’55 of Springfield, Va., on Jan. 6, 2020. Martin R. Siegel ’55 of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., on Dec. 17, 2019. Ray G. Smith A.M. ’55 of Venice, Fla., on Feb. 5, 2020. David McElroy Ph.D. ’56 of Mobile, Ala., on Feb. 4, 2020. Reginald A. Murray ’56 of Auburn, Calif., on Nov. 17, 2019. Gerald R. Shugar ’56 of West Palm Beach, Fla. on Feb. 17, 2020. Ruth Wheeler Weed M.R.E. ’56 of Louisville, Ky., on Jan. 6, 2020. Harry A. Whitaker Jr. M.D. ’56, H ’57 of Atlanta, on Jan. 5, 2020. William J. Wortman Jr. ’56 of Statesville, N.C., on Jan. 6, 2020. William F. Bailey Jr. ’57 of Hillsborough, N.C., on Dec. 8, 2019. Fred W. Caswell ’57 of Hilton Head Island, S.C., on Dec. 20, 2019. A. Bruce Craddock ’57 of Bluffton, S.C., on Dec. 10, 2019. George E. Lyndon Jr. B.Div. ’57 of Wilmington, N.C., on Jan. 23, 2020. William G. Sharpe IV ’57, M.Div. ’60 of Burlington, N.C., on Jan. 11, 2020. Elizabeth Huggin Collins ’58 of High Point, N.C., on Dec. 22, 2019. James H. Jones Ph.D. ’58 of Lafayette Hill, Pa., on Dec. 7, 2019. Carol Cooper Schoenberger ’58 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Dec. 15, 2019. William C. Spencer Jr. ’58 of Asheville, N.C., on Nov. 19, 2019. Anne Townsend Thomas ’58 of Riverside, Calif., on Jan. 19, 2020. Richard D. Wuensch ’58 of Baton Rouge, La., on Dec. 7, 2019. Miles C. Gregory M.D. ’59 of Roanoke Rapids, N.C., on Dec. 12, 2019. Nancy Rissler Jones ’59 of Springfield, Va., on Dec. 19, 2019. William D. McCormick Ph.D. ’59 of Austin, Texas, on Nov. 7, 2019. Stanley S. Moles M.D. ’59 of Belleair, Fla., on Jan. 5, 2020. Kenneth B. Moser Ph.D. ’59 of Decatur, Ill., on Dec. 8, 2019. Donald W. Richman H ’59-63 of Martinsville, Va., on Feb. 8, 2020. Anne Bowden Wilson ’59 of Raleigh, on Dec. 11, 2019.
Find links to full obituaries for Duke alumni at
alumni.duke.edu John W. Kilgore A.M. ’60, Ph.D. ’65 of Rocky Mount, N.C., on Nov. 5, 2019. Jake M. Stone M.F. ’60 of Franklin, Va., on Dec. 15, 2019. Woodrow E. Walton B.Div. ’60 of Fort Worth, Texas, on Dec. 27, 2019. Michael P. Bell ’61 of Chocowinity, N.J., on Jan. 27, 2020. Leon M. Galloway III ’61 of Hendersonville, N.C., on Dec. 19, 2019. Carolin Beatty Head ’61 of Annapolis, Md., on Dec. 29, 2019. Richard P. Seidel ’61 of Morehead City, N.C., on Jan. 11, 2020. Thomas R. Styers Jr. ’61 of Winston-Salem, on Feb. 11, 2020. Walter A. Whitehurst B.Div. ’61 of Virginia Beach, Va., on Jan. 4, 2020. Bennie D. Barker M.Ed. ’62 of Chapel Hill, on Jan. 2, 2020. Michael J. Bradshaw ’62, M.Ed. ’67 of Wilson, N.C., on Feb. 10, 2020. Allan B. Markham Jr. ’62 of Durham, on Jan. 17, 2020. Jack B. Yarbrough M.Div. ’62 of Winston-Salem, on Dec. 24, 2019. E. Towson Moore Ph.D. ’63 of Durham, on Jan. 21, 2020. C. Frederick Rolle ’63 of Sarasota, Fla., on Dec. 27, 2019. Shirley Heiden Ruby ’63 of Oviedo, Fla., on Dec. 25, 2019. Louis F. Tidwell J.D. ’63 of Tampa, Fla., on Feb. 6, 2020. Caroline Hilton Woodard ’63 of Nashville, Tenn., on Dec. 7, 2019. Robert J. Bertrand LL.B ’64 of Lakeland, Fla., on Dec. 23, 2019. John F. Bridgers ’64 of Fuquay-Varina, N.C., on Jan. 23, 2020. James E. Brydges Jr. ’64 of Virginia Beach, Va., on Jan. 18, 2020. David B. Dubin M.D. ’64 of Loomis, Calif., on Jan. 11, 2020.
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1960s
Edward E.C. Clebsch Ph.D. ’60 of Clarksville, Tenn., on Dec. 14, 2019. Lawrence T. Hoyle Jr ’60 of Philadelphia, on Nov. 30, 2019. John L. Hughes H ’60-64 of Augusta, Ga., on Jan. 8, 2020. David P. Ivey ’60 of Asheville, N.C., on Dec. 2, 2020.
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35
KEEP CALM AND ART ON Temporarily closed but available online.
Maria Berrio, Syzygy (detail), 2017. Collage with Japanese paper and watercolor on canvas, 80 x 96 inches (203.2 x 243.8 cm). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Gift of Nancy A. Nasher (J.D.’79, P’18, P’22) and David J. Haemisegger (P’18, P’22), 2018.7.1. © Maria Berrio. Image courtesy of Praxis Gallery, New York. Photo by Peter Paul Geoffrion.
ForeverDuke Frank E. Eakin Jr. Ph.D. ’64 of Richmond, Va., on Jan. 26, 2020. George S. Friedman A.M. ’64, Ph.D. ’72 of Troy, N.C., on Jan. 2, 2020. William Seale A.M. ’64, Ph.D. ’65 of Dallas, on Nov. 21, 2019. David H.S. Hardin M.A.T. ’65 of Danville, Va., on Nov. 25, 2019. David D. Kerman ’65 of Swampscott, Mass., on Nov. 17, 2019. Claude A. Lavarre Jr. ’65 of Newport, R.I., on Dec. 17, 2019. James G. Nuckolls M.D. ’65, H ’67, H ’72 of Galax, Va., on Jan. 6, 2020. Larry A. Rogers M.D. ’65, H ’67 of Charlotte, on Feb. 8, 2020. Mildred Anderson Shailer ’65 of Hollywood, Fla., on Nov. 24, 2019. L. Arnold McCullers ’66, M.S. ’67 of Mechanicsville, Va., on Feb. 3, 2020. Mary Kathlyn Brigmon Ramm ’66 of Hillsborough, N.C., on Dec. 5, 2019. Henry B. Biller Ph.D. ’67 of South Kingstown, R.I., on Dec. 30, 2019. David M. Holdt A.M. ’67 of Tolland, Conn., on Dec. 6, 2019. Michael A. Thrasher ’67 of Washington, D.C., on Jan. 12, 2020. Eric C. Bergman ’68 of Washington, D.C., on Feb. 15, 2020. Thomas M. Francis M.F. ’68 of Augusta, Ga., on Dec. 7, 2019. John H. Krimmel Jr. ’68 of Schnecksville, Pa., on Jan. 3, 2020. Edward Malinzak J.D. ’68 of Grand Rapids, Mich., on Jan. 6, 2020. Walter S. Bradley ’69 of Tilghman, Md., on Jan. 17, 2020.
1970s
Lynne Darby Morris ’70 of Chapel Hill, on Nov. 26, 2019. Judith Ann Barnes Music ’70 of White River Junction, Vt., on Feb. 1, 2020. R. Glen Smiley ’70 of Austin, Texas, on Jan. 15, 2020. James W. Stines Ph.D. ’70 of Blowing Rock, N.C., on Jan. 20, 2020. Philip M. Van Hoy ’70 of Charlotte, on Jan. 25, 2020. Peter T. Meszoly J.D. ’71 of Bethesda, Md., on Nov. 24, 2019.
Thank you, Alumni Admissions Advisory Committee (AAAC) Interviewers!
Stacy A. Nunnery M.H.A. ’71 of Statesville, N.C., on Dec. 10, 2019. Edward T. Porter ’71 of Winchester, Mass., on Jan. 17, 2020. Richard B. Reidinger Ph.D. ’71 of Washington, D.C., on Dec. 10, 2019. Ralph H. Short Jr. ’71 of Denver, on Dec. 5, 2019. Phyllis Salisbury Casavant ’72, M.Ed. ’74 of Signal Mountain, Tenn., on Dec. 25, 2019. Janet Keyser Cumberland M.Ed. ’72 of Durham, on Jan. 11, 2020. Alexander G. Paderewski ’72 of Sarasota, Fla., on Dec. 26, 2019. Samuel W. Bearman ’73 of Pensacola, Fla., on Dec. 6, 2019. Linda Cathey Wingard M.Div. ’74 of Cleveland, Ga., on Dec. 21, 2019. William E. Privette M.Div. ’75 of Cary, N.C., on Nov. 30, 2019. Richard C. Spivey M.Ed. ’75 of Rome, N.Y., on Jan. 31, 2020. Thomas E. Carr ’76 of Durham, on Dec. 4, 2019. Marquetta Kay Wriston M.H.A. ’76 of Clear Creek, W.Va., on Jan. 31, 2020. Wendy L. Havran ’77 of La Jolla, Calif., on Jan. 20, 2020. Lisa Cottrill Kaufman M.S. ’77 of Knoxville, Tenn., on Dec. 17, 2019. Thomas J. Whildin ’77 of Bethlehem, Pa., on Dec. 7, 2019. Robert D. Mintz A.M. ’79 of Raleigh, on Dec. 3, 2019. .
1980s
Patricia Jeanne Wohl ’80 of Vienna, Va., on Jan. 19, 2020. David M. Dolan ’81 of Dallas, on Nov. 23, 2019. Michael Ehrie H ’81 of Ashland, Ky., on Dec. 11, 2019. James B. Hawkins J.D. ’82 of Gallatin, Tenn., on Dec. 6, 2019. Roland B. Gray J.D. ’83 of Avon Lake, Ohio, on Dec. 1, 2019. Junya Sato LL.M. ’87 of Durham, on Jan. 29, 2020. Brian P. Deppen ’89 of Swarthmore, Pa., on Jan. 14, 2020. Theodore J. Mitchell M.Div. ’89 of Champaign, Ill., on Jan. 11, 2020.
This season...
4,338
alumni volunteers conducted
13,483
prospective student interviews
all over the world for the undergraduate CLASS That’s more than
OF 2024.
27,000
volunteer hours for Duke!
Interested in becoming an AAAC interviewer next fall? Check your eligibility and learn more about the AAAC here: alumni.duke.edu/aaac-interviewer DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2020
37
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1990s
George E. Johnson ’90 of St. Paul, Minn., on Feb. 14, 2020. Stanley B. Kirsch Jr. ’90 of Los Angeles, on Jan. 11, 2020. Patricia Ann Peroni Ph.D. ’91 of Davidson, N.C., on Dec. 24, 2019. Jerry D. Dubose M.B.A. ’92 of Clemson, S.C., on Dec. 21, 2019. Nicole Angela Remington Walter ’92 of Portland, Ore., on Jan. 30, 2020. Amy Ruth Gillespie J.D. ’93 of Washington, D.C., on Nov. 24, 2019. David H. Efird ’94 of Charlotte, on Jan. 9, 2020. Suzanne Palminteri M.E.M. ’94 of Washington, D.C., on Nov. 30, 2019. Peter C. Vitanzo H ’99 of Wayne, Pa., on Feb. 6, 2020.
2000s
Stephen T. Vineyard M.Div. ’01 of Sterling, Va., on Jan. 22, 2020. Chelsea Davis ’04 of Allen, Texas, on Feb. 9, 2020. John W. Gibbs III H ’04 of Greenville, N.C., on Feb. 11, 2020. Janet Ruth Parsons A.M. ’05 of Durham, on Jan. 10, 2020.
2010s The only collection of Duke merchandise in the world that actually comes from Duke University
BE THE FIRST TO KNOW about new arrivals, special collections, sales events and more! To sign up, visit dukestore.com and click on the BTFTK icon.
Alexander H. Hartman ’11 of Chevy Chase, Md., on Jan. 28, 2020. Mark B. Herzog ’15 of Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 2, 2020. James H. Fisher III M.B.A. ’17 of Raleigh, on Feb. 4, 2020.
2020s
Zane N. Gill ’20 of Pensacola Beach, Fla., on Nov. 1, 2019. Morgan D. Rodgers ’20 of Warrenton, Va., on July 11, 2019.
Duke Young Writers Middle and High Schoolers
Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, Mystery & Detective Fiction, Horror & Ghost Stories, Experimental & Fan Fiction, TV Scripts & Reviews, Blogs & Essays, Podcasts, Poetry & More. Collaborate on Writing Exercises with Other Campers
Benefit from One-On-One Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Duke Youth Programs’ on-campus programs have been Instructionfor From Professional cancelled for the 2020 summer season. Be sure to check the website updates on YOUTH PROGRAMS Teacher-Writers online programs that will be offered this summer. Current Grade Level for School Year 2019-2020
@DukeYouthPrograms @DukeYouthPrograms
Offer and Receive Feedback from Peers REGISTRATION OPENS DECEMBER 2, 2019 Session I June 14 - June 26 Session II June 28 - July 10 Session III July 12 - July 24
We provide open enrollment with no application requirement. Just head to: LEARNMORE.DUKE.EDU/YOUTH/YOUNGWRITER • Youth@Duke.EDU • (919) 684–6259 38 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
Engage in Activities Including Field Trips to Local Museums and Businesses Meet Other Talented Young Writers
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A L S O AVA I L A B L E A S A N E - B O O K A N D A N A U D I O B O O K
Zoom, zoom, zoom...
L
ike you, the staff of the DAA is working at home. But we’re not disconnected from each other. And we’re not disconnected from you. Already our FOREVER LEARNING team has sent out a newsletter with an engaging mix of virtual experiences, dynamic lectures, and relevant
information. We’ve hosted a women’s coffee klatch via Zoom. And we’re in the process of turning dozens of our previously planned in-person events into virtual ones—book clubs, faculty talks, even a few events with President Price. It’s been a big pivot after a sudden change. We were just celebrating another successful WOMEN’S WEEKEND—600 alumnae came to campus to talk about everything from science to self-care to leadership and faith. I remember thinking then how lucky I was to be among this group. Now, in a deeper way, I know how right I was. And as we navigate this time, I know that while the Blue Devil community may be apart, we’ll always be together. Be safe, be well, and be Forever Duke.
Sterly
STERLY WILDER '83 ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, ALUMNI AFFAIRS
40 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
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