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VOLUME 101 . NO 3

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Diagnosis & Discussion

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SUMMER 2014

Renewal time for the chapel—along with a lot more of the historic campus

What if there was a way for everyone

Familiar but now more audience-friendly—the renovated Page Auditorium

in the Duke community to stay connected to each other and to Duke?

DON’T MISS IT!

eunions 2016 ays a Devilishly Good Time.

year ends in a 1 or 6, start planning now for your Duke Reunion: April Go to DukeReunions.com for more information.

It never gets old

The chapel’s many roles p.24

Five views of a fifth title p.20

15-17, 2016.

The new DukeAlumni.com

All for One

An alumnus rejects his fear

p.34

| The meaning of eating

SPECIAL ISSUE

Coming Fall 2014

First-generation students—10 percent of undergraduates—are finding their voice on campus. p.28

A student works for justice p.36

POWER

Learn more: www.dukealumni.com/connect/

STORIES OF STRUGGLE, HUMILITY, AND TRIUMPH

Exploring the opportunities (and limits) of MOOCs

24

p.38

C. Ray Walker

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ravel with Duke

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NEWFOREVERDUKEINSIDE

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Every Annual Fund gift adds up to the collective experience our students and faculty enjoy today.

And it’s all

How Duke learned to be a better neighbor p.30 Chasing the next autism breakthroughs p.42

possible by you.

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TH ES EC

At the Marine Lab, and other labs

For students, missing out isn’t an option. p. 28

RE TS ISS

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FALL 2017

SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.

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Always Be Choosing

Make your tax-deductible Annual Fund gift before December 31 and have an immediate impact on the Duke way of life. dukeforward.duke.edu/dec31

DUKE MAGAZINE • FALL 2017

DUKE

Shaped by the Duke Coffeehouse: Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson ’93 p. 42

DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2017

es made in drones and robots, are people still necessary? ssue and more in our cover story. Here, graduate student right, launches a copter-style drone while fellow student Wilson, Elizabeth Mason, Julian Dale, and Nick Alcaraz look agazine.duke.edu to watch senior writer Scott Huler’s short at the Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C. Photo by Chris Hildreth

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Oh, the places research can go! p. 40

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How Coach John Danowski led his team toward a new tradition. p.22

Coastal Iberia Oct. 23-31

E

SUMMER 2016

REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER WORK A 9 —5?

G E T H ELP W IT H YO U R N E X T C A R EER M OV E .

made

Full Strength

dukealumnitravel.com Wai-O-Tapu geothermal pool, NZ Australia & New Zealand Oct. 28-Nov. 18

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WINTER 2015

It’s the little things and the big things, the day-to-day and the momentous. It’s the individual moments that all add up to an experience like no other. As lifelong members of the Duke community, these are the things we remember that make Duke so special. And you can help them endure.

Weathering the rankings storm

p.24

Columbia & Snake Rivers Journey Oct. 27-Nov. 2

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Now can he get back to the lab? p.24

F I N D A LU M N I A N D S TA R T YO U R N E X T A DVEN T U R E .

e do you want to go in 2015?

DUKE

Paul Modrich thinks winning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is great.

YOU CONQUERED THE QUAD. NOW, THE UNIVERSE .

riends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

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Go out there and learn

A student experience like no other

A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.

10 Years of DukeEngage p.26

“We just love it there!”

Made possible by you.

across campus,

DRONES and ROBOTS are taking research to new heights.

In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.

BEHINDTHESCENES What’s going on up there?

Our cover story shoot came at the end of a long day for Vince Price, and yet, accompanied by associate university secretary Maggie Epps, right, he came in game for all Duke Photography director Chris Hildreth and Duke Magazine art director Lacey Chylack, left, asked of him. He agreed to a wardrobe change without a blink, and even jokingly offered a few theatrical poses. Photo by Bill Snead

Whose home is this?

Vince Price

For the Duke graduate who lived here, it was a place where all that was collected served as inspiration and homage, and perhaps for visitors, as revelation.

Learn the answer and see more, beginning on page 38.

Photos by Alex Harris

Epworth Forever

A New President Takes Center Stage

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with Why it’s Duke’s most beloved dorm p.24

Jared Lazarus

an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

AF_Made Possible By You_Back_F.indd 1

10/9/17 2:54 PM

Pride. Nostalgia. Storytelling.

Issue after issue, Duke Magazine brings you insight into cutting-edge research, illuminating profiles of alumni, smiles drawn from campus memories, wonderment inspired by campus change, and the chance to engage with your alumni community.

Please support Duke Magazine. Checks payable to Duke Magazine (in the amount of your choice) can be sent to 312 Blackwell Street, Suite 101, Durham, N.C. 27701.

Or donate online.

Go to gifts.duke.edu, type Duke Magazine in the search box, and select it in the drop-down menu

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Game on!

Inside the making of the first women’s varsity softball team p.24

Astounding artistic aspirations

Pushing boundaries. Elevating artistic expression. Exploring educational frontiers. Thanks to planned gifts supporting fellowship endowments at The Graduate School, Duke graduate students like Quran Karriem have the support they need for academic research, professional development and the advancement of arts and sciences.

Made possible by you.

Quran Karriem is a Ph.D. student in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures at The Graduate School.

Working with Thomas F. DeFrantz, professor of African and African American studies and of dance, Karriem creates hardware and software interfaces that blur the line between physical and virtual experiences.

Read about alumna and Duke Dean Emerita Caroline Lattimore’s planned gift to benefit graduate students on page 61.

April 13-15, 2018 Time changes everything, except true Blue friendships. Come back to reconnect, recapture, and recreate all of your special moments at your 2018 Duke reunion.

Your reunion begins online at:

www.DukeReunions.com CELEBRATING THE CLASSES OF: 1958, 1963, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993,

1998, 2003, 2008, 2013 and the Half Century Club

Go online to register today!

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for the next generation of Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | (919) 681-0464

www.DukeReunions.com Duke Alumni Association Reunions Office • Box 90572 • Durham, NC 27708-0572

INSIDE Spring 2018 | Vol. 104 | No. 1

COVER

To build Team One Putting together Duke’s first varsity women’s softball team took more than finding some players and coaches.

By Lucas Hubbard

Chris Hildreth

FEATURES:

4

Inconvenient fame

FORUM

7

Kate Bowler is everywhere because of a best-selling book about life before and after her cancer diagnosis.

By Scott Huler

THE QUAD

Bonobos’ preferences, mock crises at Winter Forum, boomers and millennials share

44

Crash landing

With its voyeuristic theme, the first novel of Dan Mallory ’01 is a best seller, making him a sudden celebrity by another name.

The Class of 2009 entered the workplace during the Great Recession, and that’s made a lasting impact on their lives and careers.

By Drew Adamek

64

DEVILIST

Grammy-winner Eric Oberstein ’07 suggests some road-trip tunes.

COVER: Photography by Chris Hildreth

32

Lissa Gotwals

FOREVER DUKE

Yunghi Kim

24

Yunghi Kim

38

FULLFRAME ON THE RISE: Crews install wooden beams at the construction site of the Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center on Chapel Drive.

The center is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2019.

Photography by Megan Mendenhall

Forum

UNDERTHEGARGOYLES

A

ndrew Johnson and John Tyler: What could possibly link them together? Well, they both were U.S. presidents. And they both were—in the unanimous verdict of students who were scrutinizing their legacies—“horrible.”

Four students had come together for a “Spring Breakthrough” class—a nontraditional take on spring break—that researched, reflected on, and ultimately ranked U.S. presidents. Spring Breakthrough is all about offering classes that have no grades, have no pressure, but have lots of potential to force students outside their intellectual comfort zones.

Other classes had students mucking around in the marsh to study crabs (at the marine-life-minded Duke Marine Lab), constructing a lightweight bicycle (an endeavor led by a classical studies professor, presumably attuned to classic bicycles), and spending time with puppies (to learn about shared evolutionary ties—and just to enjoy the company of puppies).

“Presidential March Madness” fed off, appropriately, the frenzied bracketing that accompanies college basketball’s version of March Madness.

It was organized by POLIS (otherwise known as 4 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

The Center for Political Leadership, Innovation, and Service), part of the Sanford School. The two leaders of the course—Fritz Mayer and B.J. Rudell, director and associate director of POLIS—configured the first-round pairings.

Some of those pairings pitted a great legacy against a great legacy (think Duke versus UNC).

There, in the same region, were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Other pairings were purposeful in a way that seemed inspired—or devious. William Henry Harrison was in a bracket with his grandson, Benjamin Harrison; and John Quincy Adams with George W. Bush, both sons of presidents. It was Franklin Pierce versus James Buchanan, a battle over who was more responsible for the Civil War. And John F. Kennedy versus Lyndon B. Johnson, a matchup meant to explore whether J.F.K. contributed to L.B.J.’s successes—or to his failures.

The students had a lot of history to sift through, and a lot of debates over how to weigh various factors in assigning “greatness.” Barack Obama beat out James Garfield, William Taft, and William McKinley and was in an Elite Eight matchup with Abraham Lincoln.

One of the students, sophomore Elliott Davis, argued that James Polk should advance over Washington in the Sweet 16. “I hadn’t even heard of James Polk before the class,” he said later. “But I discovered that he had a very ambitious agenda, including acquiring Texas and the Oregon Territory, winning the Mexican-American War to acquire much of the American Southwest, and paving the way for the Panama Canal.” All accomplished in just one term.

Along the way, the students were lobbied by partisans of the various presidential players; Mayer and Rudell had alerted presidential historians that the game was afoot. A Chester Arthur biographer said in a message to the class that his president “should/will beat Millard Fillmore,” but that beating Teddy Roosevelt “is a tall order.” Still, he campaigned for Arthur as “an unlikely champion of civil-service reform, building the foundation of

It's your turn! a modern federal movement for the progressive presidents who followed him.” For his part, a T.R. biographer insisted that “[a]side from the land grab in Panama, he never ordered a military interThe students vention that cost a single had a lot of life.”

As they made the case history to for some preferred presisift through, dent, the students recited and a lot of policy achievements—the Social Security Act, the debates over Federal Highway Act, the how to weigh Voting Rights Act. But various factors their bigger conversations concerned bigger matters: in assigning whether a presidency was “greatness.” devoted to equity and fairness, remained scandal-free, bolstered the institutions of government, and promoted a moral image of America abroad. All of which led to questions like: What are we to make of Lincoln’s shifting views on slavery?

Lincoln, in the end, was validated. He emerged as the champion among presidents.

—Robert J. Bliwise, editor

The theme for our

2018 special issue is “fear.” That could refer to things that go bump in the night, that time you overcame and took a leap, or that thing you wanted to do but just could not.

We want essays, art, or any creative expression that takes the theme in dynamic, personal, illuminating, and surprising directions. Are you in?

If so, send your ideas to adrienne.martin@daa.duke.edu

by May 31.

(There's nothing to be afraid of.)

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.

DUKE MAGAZINE Spring 2018 | Vol. 104 | No. 1 | www.DUKEMAGAZINE.duke.edu EDITOR: Robert J. Bliwise A.M. ’88 MANAGING EDITOR: Adrienne Johnson Martin SENIOR WRITER: Scott Huler CLAY FELKER STAFF WRITER: Lucas Hubbard ’14 CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Christina Holder M.Div. ’13 STAFF ASSISTANT: Delecia Hatcher PUBLISHER: Sterly L. Wilder ’83, associate vice president, Alumni Affairs SPECIAL SECTIONS EDITOR: Bridgette Lacy ART DIRECTOR: Lacey Chylack, phase5creative, inc. PRINTER: Progress Printing OFFICERS, DUKE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION: Jack Boyd ’85, president, Sterly L. Wilder ’83, secretary-treasurer DUKE MAGAZINE Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 PHONE: (919) 684-5114 FAX: (919) 681-1659 E-MAIL: dukemag@duke.edu ADDRESS CHANGES: Alumni Records, Box 90581, Durham, N.C. 27708 or bluedevil@duke.edu • © 2018 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.

DUKE MAGAZINE

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Megan Mendenhall Jared Lazarus

HUSH: Morning in the Gothic Reading room

TRIUMPH: Senior Grayson Allen’s last win in Cameron 6 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

MISTY Nighttime at the West Campus Steam plant

Quad

THE

Jared Lazarus

Jared Lazarus

LIFE ON CAMPUS FROM EAST TO WEST

MAGIC HOUR East Campus Union Building at twilight

Megan Mendenhall

Megan Mendenhall

OUTREACH Introducing young women to STEM subjects

LOVE Valentine Craft Pop-up DUKE MAGAZINE

SPRING 2018

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THEQuad

DR/TL*

Distilled mentions of things going on among Duke researchers, scholars, and other enterprises

ANIMALS As a result of human encroachment on habitat, Southern Africa has 11 percent fewer CHEETAHS than previously thought; an area the size of France contains only about 3,600 adults.

When ROUNDWORMS have to do without food, they resort to burning internal food, just like people do.

RED-CAPPED ROBIN-CHATS in Uganda imitate the calls of other birds, even imitating duets.

When transparent SHRIMP flip their tails to move quickly, they become briefly nontransparent, probably due to increased blood flow. If you’re transparent to keep from being eaten, by the time you’re flipping for your life, you’re probably not fooling anyone anyhow.

PEOPLE The left and right HEMISPHERES of your brain may have different strengths, but they communicate a lot and help each other out on an ad hoc basis.

Everybody already knew humans had big “expensive” brains—that our brains require a lot more energy, proportional to a resting metabolic rate, than the brains of chimpanzees or squirrels or mice. But it turns out that plenty of other animals (some lemurs and tree shrews and even the pygmy marmoset, for example) spend just as high a percentage of their ENERGY ON THEIR BRAINS. But just try getting them to help your mom with her e-mail.

At-risk teens ate less-healthy food and slept less well when they were exposed to real-life VIOLENCE; teens not identified as at-risk slept poorly but did not show changes in diet. Both groups were more active after exposure to violence.

When you move your eyes, your EARDRUMS move, too, making tiny adjustments in the opposite direction. Nobody is quite sure why.

If you plot BAD-GUY BEHAVIOR (we’re talking about guys) over time, it peaks in adolescence and then slowly declines as age increases. But that curve turns out to cover two groups: guys who become knuckleheads around adolescence and then get over themselves, and guys who start out bad and stay bad all their lives.

MISCELLANY Trions are QUASIPARTICLES, and they are themselves made up of groups of three quasiparticles (disturbed electrons are quasiparticles, and so are things like holes and excitons—and we are totally not kidding). Trions turn out to behave manageably in carbon nanotubes and thus might be highly useful in a new generation of electronics.

Simple machine-learning models with publicly available data seem to be able to do as good a job with CRIMINAL SENTENCING as opaque and expensive private “black box” algorithms.

Not only can labs use different cells to perform different parts of a BIOENGINEERING process, they can help researchers come up with a framework to know when using multiple cells is the way to go.

DUKE Duke is joining with Delta Airlines on a sustainability program that will plant and maintain a thousand trees in the Triangle and purchase 5,000 additional carbon-offset credits to cover Duke’s business-travel CARBON FOOTPRINT. The combined result will be like neutralizing 9,000 roundtrip flights between Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Duke has a pot of NEW DEANS, beginning July 1: Wildfire expert Toddi Steelman will become the dean of the NICHOLAS SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT. This will be Steelman’s third residence in the Triangle: She earned her Ph.D. from the Nicholas School in 1996 and taught at North Carolina State University from 2001 to 2012. She spent 2012-17 as the first permanent executive director of the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Environment and Sustainability.

Judith Kelley, an expert on human rights, democracy, and international elections, will become dean of the SANFORD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY. Kelley has been at Duke since 2002 and has received the Susan E. Tifft Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring Award and the Brownell-Whetten Award for Diversity and Inclusion. She replaces Kelly Brownell, who moves to head the school’s new World Food Policy Center.

Karen L. “Kerry” Abrams, the vice provost for faculty affairs and professor of law at the University of Virginia, has been selected as the next dean of DUKE LAW SCHOOL. Abrams is an authority in both immigration law and family law.

Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu for links to further details and original papers. * Didn't Read?/Too Long? Well, we did, and now we're all smarter.

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ROOMMATES THEQuad DORM TRINITY HOUSE

Brigitte Blanco

HOMETOWN: Fort Lauderdale, Florida MAJORS/MINORS: public policy, biology, Innovation & Entrepreneurship certificate STUDY ABROAD: Copenhagen, Denmark MOST VISITED CAMPUS SPOT: Brodhead Center (specifically the green couches facing the fireplace on the first floor near Café)

T

he newest residence hall on campus, Trinity House, will welcome its inaugural class of first-year residents in August. But for now, the massive 500-person dormitory—colloquially referred to as “Megadorm” by students—temporarily houses second-semester juniors returning from fall study abroad.

Imposter Syndrome: The juniors living in Trinity House still have a somewhat foreign experience—they’re the only group of non-first-years living on East Campus.

“You kind of forget what you had to go through living on East as a freshman,” Brigitte says. “And now we have to deal with the overcrowded buses and everything again. It’s just navigating a new way of living.” Adds Dina, “When you overhear freshmen conversations, it’s kind of like going down memory lane. But I think all of us are pretty much completely removed from freshmen, except when we’re on the bus.”

Dina Xie

HOMETOWN: Mountainside, New Jersey MAJOR/MINORS: public policy, German, economics STUDY ABROAD: Berlin, Germany MOST VISITED CAMPUS SPOT: The Loop (because of milkshakes, burgers, and really good pasta)

Lucky Number Eight: According to several studies, receiving eight hugs a day helps to maintain a healthy brain. The roommates often kick off their mutual quests for eight by giving each other the first hug of the day before leaving for class on West Campus.

(T-R)exorbitance: “With a full set of amenities—including ping pong and pool tables, a 25-seat movie theater, and full-size beds—Trinity House is “like living in a hotel.” Dina cites the Jurassic Park video game, one of the several entertainment options available in the dormitory’s arcade, as her favorite perk. She also

acknowledges that those comforts raise questions on excess and inequity. “There XX are so many other parts of Duke that could have been improved with the money we spent on this. It’s really nice, but it’s not something that any student actually needs.”

Forever Duke: When asked if they would like to share anything else with the Duke alumni community, Brigitte had one very important message—a heartfelt thank you. “Duke alumni are continuously the best network. As juniors, going through internship searches, sometimes we feel like we’re just a number to the recruiters.

Duke alumni are especially receptive to students and so helpful. Almost every alum I’ve reached out to has responded.

That’s just amazing.”

—Erin Brown '16, Photo by Jared Lazarus

THEQuad

Look at that Joe, ordering everybody around, sticking his chest out like some gorilla.

Yeah, Joe’s the man!

10

www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

THEQuad

Kindness for weakness

B

New research shows that even gentle bonobos prefer to align with dominators. rian Hare admits he was kind of rooting for the bonobos.

“You normally aren’t hoping for a result,” says Hare, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology, who with Chris Krupenye Ph.D. ’16 studied interactions preferred by bonobos at the Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “But I kind of hoped that maybe they would like the helper,” he admits. Bonobos—with chimps, the closest genetic relatives to humans— are famous for being our kinder, less-aggressive cousins.

“There’s this public perception of them as the hippie ape,” Krupenye says from his current position as Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow in the School of

winner support. In social conflicts where two individuals work against each other and a third joins the interaction, he says, “the third individual tends to join the one that’s winning.” In the study, “I think they’re seeing this guy is winning and that guy is losing, and ‘I like the guy who wins.’

“I think they view the exact same scene completely differently than we do.”

In fact, says Krupenye, bonobo viewing of the scene is an underreported aspect of the study. “The media is focusing on the nature of their choices, but another key finding is their attention in general and that they were able to extract social information from watching—social information that was important to them. When they were watching interaction between actual humans, when things got up, they would get really interest“I think they view the exact same scene heated ed. They would vocalize.” completely differently than we do.” The nature of that interest in social interaction opens the door to future research, Hare says. “We had artificial carPsychology and Neuroscience at the University of St. toon animation,” he says of the studies, “and we had Andrews in Scotland. “And that’s not true.” interactions between humans. But we didn’t have Evidently not. For a study published in Current anything between bonobos.” That is, if the bonobos Biology in January, Hare and Krupenye had the see interactions between conspecific individuals— bonobos watch animated videos in which a little those of their same species—they might react differently than they did to cartoon videos or interactions Pac-Man-type character can’t get up a slope. In one between members of other species. He’s heard from version a little triangle character comes and helps, colleagues making that point. “I have received faspushing it up; in another version a little square hinders it, pushing it back down. Then testers offered cinating and collegial but very critical e-mails from bonobos two treats, one beneath a little paper tricolleagues I respect saying, ‘I think you guys got it angle and the other beneath a square. The bonobos wrong.’ ” preferred the food beneath the unhelpful square. In a Just the same, if the bonobos preferred the helpers, similar trial, bonobos saw humans act out a situation that would be big news. “It would be fascinating— in which one person dropped a toy. In one version and a challenge to a number of hypotheses about another person helped retrieve the toy; in another human development and evolution,” Hare says. someone snatched it away. Then the people offered Humans seem to be unique in our preference for food to the bonobos, and again the apes preferred kindness over dominance, which Krupenye notes the hindering people. has been demonstrated in infants as young as three Try not to be too disappointed, though; Krupenye months old. That preference for helping seems to be doesn’t think meanness was the takeaway. “They saw part of how we can function in companies and other the hinderer as dominant,” he says of the bonobos. large groups. In our preference for kindness and “And they were attracted to that individual as a recooperation, humans seem to remain evolutionarily sult.” Hare explains it as an example of what is called unique. —Scott Huler

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THEQuad

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FROM THE PRESIDENT: A CAMPUS VIEW

Dancing at the Ruby

O

Jared Lazarus

ne evening this past winter at an event Wonder” Douthit, his quiet confines insulated celebrating the opening of the brand- with sliding walls from the burring drills and saws new Rubenstein Arts Center, I watched in the DukeCreate makerspace next door. In the from a few feet away as the dancers of new film studio off the main atrium, an M.F.A. the American Ballet Theater performed in the “jewel in documentary studies candidate was presenting box,” the center’s glass-enclosed second-floor dance her final project for critique, and in their new stustudio. The lights were low, but from my chair un- dio, WXDU’s on-air personalities were decorating der the towering windows, I was close enough to see with obscure album covers and vintage furniture of the sweat on the dancers’ brows and the intensity of questionable provenance, following the long traditheir muscular movement. I felt a sudden burst of tion of student DJs on campuses around the world.

We ended our tour in the von der Heyden Stuinspiration to join them, to get up and dance with dio Theater, watching singers rehearse blocking for the dancers. Thankfully, I resisted.

“The_Oper&, a world-preOn a follow-up visit to the miere opera created by fac“the Ruby”—as it has been ulty members John Supko affectionately dubbed—the and Bill Seaman and dijewel box was transformed. rected by Jim Findlay ’89.

I stopped in to see choreographer Nina Wheeler’s jazz The_Oper& uses projection, scrims, and computer dance class, her dozen undergraduate students moving to programming to create a the rhythms of a live percusdramatic combination of sionist with the same intenmotion and sound, unimagsity across the same floors as the American Ballet Theater At the Ruby, the arts are not only entertainment a few weeks before. Gone was the hushed reverence of the but also a full partner in academic inquiry. evening ballet performance, replaced by the joyful syncopation of jazz in mo- inable in a Duke facility before the Ruby. During tion. The gorgeous afternoon light poured through a break, Supko reminded us that though we think the windows, creating patterns on the floor through of opera as a singular word, it’s the Latin plural for which the dancers moved, and the studio seemed to “works,” combining song, choreography, literature, open to the treetops and the campus outside. and music.

As I walked through the building with Scott LinThat struck me as a perfect description of what droth, vice provost for the arts, it occurred to me I had seen at the Ruby. With open access to this that every space in the Ruby offered that limitless magnificent new studio space, students and faculcapacity for transformation. That was by design, ty will be able to make new connections in their said Lindroth; the building was intended to adapt practice, their teaching, and their research. In to the full diversity of the arts at Duke. Down the turn, the Ruby, like the glass-enclosed jewel box, hall from Wheeler’s class, we visited a multipurpose can open the arts at Duke to the campus outside, studio where junior Lexi Bateman, a visual arts ma- welcoming all members of the Duke community: a jor, was working with professor Raquel Salvatella team of biomedical engineers from Duke hospital de Prada on a multimedia exhibit that in October interested in aural pathways in classical music, for will pair with an exhibition about migration and instance; or kindergartners from a Durham public art in the Nasher across the street. Salvatella de Pra- school who are having their first experience with da told us she loved being able to make the space theater; or even a university president who might her own as her project evolves. be curious about ballet. With these magnificent reAnother room offered a class in in hip-hop pro- sources at his disposal, all he’ll have to do is get up duction taught by Grammy-winner Patrick “9th and dance. —Vincent E. Price

© Robert Benson Photography; inset, Jared Lazarus DUKE MAGAZINE

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Where the little things matter A campus lab sells, and sometimes custom-makes, molecules.

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ost research labs at Duke have clear markings. A framed sign on the wall with a professor’s name; his or her own separate space protected from peons. But on the bottom floor of the Levine Science Research Center, only a crinkled sheet of printer paper— hanging from another lab’s entrance—gives away the Small Molecule Synthesis Facility. To find the SMSF, the paper explains, you need to go “straight ahead through this door” and “follow the corridor down to the ice machine.” On the right is your destination.

“There’s a lot of symbolism in us being in the sub-basement; it’s hard for people to find us,” says David Gooden Ph.D. ’06, who directs the facility. The SMSF is available for use by all university investigators and fills an unglamorous but necessary niche: It provides researchers with the molecules they need for their cutting-edge work quickly and affordably. And sometimes, when a molecule isn’t available elsewhere, the facility figures out how to make it.

The service originated in 2003 as part of a chemical-biology initiative under former director of Duke’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative Eric Toone. After the main program faded, the SMSF “rose out of the ash-

out paperwork to get chemicals from an outside source, “what I can do is go down to an incredibly bright guy and say, ‘Could you make this for me?’ ” explains Donald McDonnell, Glaxo-Wellcome Professor of molecular cancer biology and professor of pharmacology and cancer biology, whose research centers on identifying drug targets in cancer cells.

The facility “really helps to get over inertia,” says McDonnell.

“I’ve got the attention span of a Drosophila. If I come up with an idea that I think is good, I want to work on it today or tomorrow.”

To do so he might call up Gooden; they’ll sketch out a few ideas.

Gooden will review the literature, and in a few days he’ll come back with a strategic approach. In a field where most ideas fail, the

“It’s like a game of double-dutch. There’s always something going on, so you have to figure out where you can jump in.” es,” its work attractive to researchers in a variety of fields across the medical center as well as engineering and environmental science departments. Gooden mentions that Duke was one of the first universities to build a custom, contract research organization like this, and perhaps the best proof of its importance is the constant demand. “In eleven years here,” he says, “I’ve had only one day where there wasn’t a project.”

The lab is busy because it has value. Private labs will sometimes charge as much as five times more for a molecule than the SMSF, which doesn’t have to make a profit. More important, instead of researchers wasting months filling

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lab’s responsiveness and flexibility is a resource. Without SMSF, McDonnell says, “iterative research would disappear.”

In early February, Gooden’s finalizing a project for researchers at the Duke VA Medical Center, who are looking at ways to kill cancer tumors. A purple hydrogen-filled balloon sits atop the flask in which the process’ final step is being completed; it’ll sit overnight. The following day, Gooden attaches the previous day’s flask to a rotary evaporator where, after spinning and whirring, the solvent is removed leaving behind the pure product. He’s in a per-

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LAB WORK: A molecule, highlighted in green, that was synthesized at the SMSF, interacting with a particular enzyme (CaMKK II, red, white, blue) in such a way as to keep that enzyme from performing its normal function. Inhibiting the normal function of this enzyme offers a therapeutic opportunity; there are a number of disease states (e.g., certain cancer types) that could be treated by silencing this enzyme. The image shows where the binding site is located on the enzyme, and it shows how the molecule is oriented in the binding site. From this information, molecules can be “built” in the computer and offer the chance to see how they likely fit in the binding site.

Courtesy David Gooden

petual power-walk between stations to check everything, evoking his explanation to student researchers who will on occasion join him. “It’s like a game of double-dutch,” Gooden tells them. “There’s always something going on, so you have to find out where you can jump in.”

The work can seem both hectic and monotonous: Gooden notes that, as his doctoral research took place in Toone’s lab and his postdoc was in the SMSF space, he’s

had the same desk and “the same squeaky chair” since 1999. But he enjoys the process, the problem-solving.

Each day, Gooden steps into a lab stocked with his 3,000 to 5,000-plus creations. Their absence once presented an obstacle to research. Now, his solutions fill two fridges. “At the end, I have this sample in a vial,” he says, “and I know the whole story that went into making that.”

—Lucas Hubbard

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Where idealism meets experience

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A house course allows boomers and millennials to share perspectives.

ophomore Deepti Agnihotri remembers a story one of her classmates told last year about finding her significant other, a tale that culminates in her classmate proposing over the phone. Her reactions?

“A: That was so gutsy. B: I can’t imagine anyone in my generation doing that, ever,” she says. “And C: It’s just so cool to hear people’s experiences from a different time that I wouldn’t usually get.

“And now they’ve been married for over thirty-five years,” she says.

Yes, that class—“The Millennial Perspective: Intergenerational Ethics”—isn’t the classic college seminar. The house course, co-taught by Agnihotri and senior Rachel Gallegos, links eight undergrads with eight students from the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke—or as Betsy Alden, the course’s faculty adviser for the past eighteen years, calls them, “overgrads.” It’s the only intergenerational course offered at Duke.

The idea originated soon after the Kenan Institute for Ethics sprang up in 1996. Alden ’64, who helped create the service-learning program there, says the then director wanted to design a class aimed at producing “people more intentional and reflective about making moral decisions in

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everyday life.” The course has steadily evolved, but it included area elders from the beginning.

Today, an undergrad and an overgrad pair up every week to lead the discussion on a hot-button issue (topics have included “Free Speech and Hate Speech,” “Womb to Tomb,” and “Technology and Privacy”).

The undergrads gain perspective from individuals who grew up in the shadow of Vietnam or protested segregation, for example.

“That Duke bubble is very real,” says Gallegos. Students primarily interact with their campus peers, so it’s a luxury to have such discussions with people from the community “who want to be here, who want to share.”

A large portion of overgrads have Duke connections—either as alumni, as former employees, or through family members—and while they don’t have to write final papers like the undergrads in the course, they’re engaged. “These are people who just a couple of years ago were CEOs of For-

“Seeing how kids think and how they address things is what keeps me optimistic.”

SHARING AND COMPARING: The class convenes at the home of Betsy Alden (right, wearing scarf).

tune 500 companies,” says Garry Crites Ph.D. ’05, director of Duke’s OLLI program. “They’re used to dealing with issues on a high intellectual level.”

What can they learn, then, from undergrads? First, there’s the general benefit: “Seeing how kids think and how they address things is what keeps me optimistic,” says Matt Epstein, an overgrad in the class who’s the former executive director of both the Triangle Global Health Consortium and the Center for Child and Family Health (both of which Duke helped found). “It’s what makes the world a good place.”

And the class also updates the overgrads on some specifics. “Most of the OLLI students have grandchildren who are about the ages of the Duke students,” says Alden. (Entry to Duke OLLI courses isn’t restricted, but they’re designed for individuals over the age of fifty.) “So they want to know what’s going on in the world of campus.

“Trigger warnings and safe spaces—they’ve never heard those expressions before!”

There’s a good-natured give-and-take between the two sides, but they’re not that far apart on issues. Alden explains that, perhaps surprisingly, the more idealistic students can be less progressive than the overgrads steeped in lived ex-

istock

perience. The class format varies, sometimes featuring student guest speakers—sharing and comparing tenets from their respective religions—or a potluck at Alden’s house, a favorite gathering. “I think this class highlights and expands upon not just having the undergrads and overgrads come together,” says first-year Wesley Pritzlaff, “but actually getting to know each other outside of the course as well.”

In a way, the potluck may be the closest thing to an exam that the course has. “I believe I remember some undergraduate saying that this is good rehearsal for next Thanksgiving,” says Alden.

The combined warmth of elders and youths necessitates a healthy dose of stubbornness. Epstein gets asked whether his opinions have changed throughout the class; he bristles.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘opinions,’ since my existing opinions are correct, so why would I change them?” he says, to the laughs of the undergrads. “But it’s broadening how I think about things.” —Lucas Hubbard

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The facts just keep on coming

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A truth-telling app developed at Duke gets a rigorous beta test.

few minutes into the 2018 State of the Union speech, the president makes his first factual claim: “Since the election we have created 2.4 million new jobs.” FactCheck.org is on the case immediately, offering a quick take. “In Trump’s first eleven months, employment increased by 1.84 million,” it notes, “12 percent lower than the 2 million jobs that were created in the previous eleven months.” That quick take moves out on FactStream, an automatic fact-checking app getting its first beta test.

“This has been the dream,” says Bill Adair, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy in the Sanford School of Public Policy. “To have instantaneous fact checks. When we started PolitiFact in 2007, we got calls: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could have instantaneous fact checks, and it would pop up on your TV?’ ” Wouldn’t it, though? FactStream is a step toward that fact-checking Holy Grail.

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Not its arrival, though—a step. The FactStream app, downloadable for your phone, is the first undertaking of the Duke Tech & Check Cooperative, started in late 2017 by the Duke Reporters’ Lab and funded by a $1.2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project, and the Craig Newmark Foundation. The Reporters’ Lab works on new forms of journalism, commonly enlisting students in its research and other enterprises. In its first incarnation, FactStream combines fact checks by PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and The Washington Post and pumps them out as the president speaks. Some thousand users have already downloaded the app.

To demonstrate where he hopes this will all lead, Adair earlier asked the Amazon Echo on his desk whether Donald Trump opposed the war in Iraq. “Washington Post rated it four Pinocchios when Donald Trump said that ‘I opposed the Iraq war,’ ” Alexa said.

Again, Alexa did not perform a natural-language search of the entire Internet. That’s eventual; this is now. What happened is that Alexa scoured an Internet fact-checking

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could have instantaneous fact checks, and it would pop up on your TV?”

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Scott Huler

all by itself. But “what you’re going to see tonight,” Adair says, “is human-powered. We’re using the fact checkers themselves to listen to the claims.” And they’ll access the same fact-checking database Alexa accessed, itself a major step toward that automatic future. Adair calls that cooperation among fact checkers to tag their checks the “secret sauce” that the Reporters’ Lab has introduced into the fact-checking ecosystem.

As the president speaks, the test goes well. A claim of “the biggest tax cuts” in American history is rated false (a link clicks you directly to an October fact check of that claim by PolitiFact); “that’s accurate” is the redatabase. Working with Jigsaw (a Google TRUTH: Bill Adair sponse to a claim that prescription drugs are cheaper subentity) and schema.org, which defines reviews the beta in other countries. There’s a hiccup with The Washington Post fact checker, whose fact check URLs somehow standards for the Web, the Reporters’ Lab has test for the Factcomplicated their absorption into FactStream (one alcreated a tag that identifies fact checks on- Stream app. line. “Even better,” says Reporters’ Lab codimost led, somehow, to a Gossip Cop post exposing a rector Mark Stencel, the tags carry metadata: “This is a fact false post about comedian Kevin Hart). Some users report check on this topic, carried out by this person, on this date, having trouble getting to the stream. Finding problems like that got this result.” So even the fact checks are checkable. that, says Stencel—seeing how the app works for both users and fact checkers—“is the purpose of this whole event.”

With further progress in natural-language processing and Adair rates himself “really happy with how the test went.” an ever-growing database of tagged fact checks, FactStream Sounds true. —Scott Huler will be able to hear the claim and find the tagged fact checks

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BookClub WE ASKED

Josh Spice

Ken Ilgunas A.M. ’11, a backcountry ranger and perpetual traveler, has a new book, This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back (Plume). The notion of private property seems ingrained in the American ethic; Ilgunas, however, discovers in his research that this wasn’t always the case. So, we asked him: What surprised you most about the history of property law in America?

I

originally thought my book was about bringing over this European idea, so I was really surprised to learn that the right to roam is actually quite American.

Up until the Civil War, Euro-Americans had been hunting and traversing each other’s lands since colonial times. People thought of land that was unimproved (no crops) and unenclosed (no fences) with a flexibility and nonchalance that many of us today would find unimaginable. In one revealing 1818 South Carolina court case, a landowner tried to shoo a hunter off his land, but because roaming

reau, in 1862, writing about “sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” You have anecdotes of pretty much all the Founding Fathers roaming over private woods, hills, and waters as boys. (There’s even evidence that suggests Ben Franklin conducted his famous kite experiment on someone else’s property.) In Virginia, you could mine for ores on other people’s property. In South Carolina, militias could train and cut down trees on private property. Pennsylvania’s delegation to the Constitutional Convention tried to get a right to roam inserted into the Bill of Rights.

We tend to think People thought of land that was unimproved (no crops) and unenclosed (no fences) that America has alwith a flexibility and nonchalance that many of us today would find unimaginable. ways had a strict understanding of private property (I certainly did), but when you look at was so entrenched in early American society, the the history, you see something very different. court said, “a civil war would have been the consequence of an attempt…to enforce a restraint on I’ve already had a few critics suggest that the this privilege.”

Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves You have people like John Muir, in 1867, taking if we opened up private land for public recreation, the “wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could but the truth is that the founders might be far more find” on a hike from Louisville, Kentucky, to the offended with our modern-day exclusionary and Gulf Coast of Florida. You have Henry David Thodespotic notion of land ownership. n

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Sneak Preview: Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) by Paul Auerbach ’73, M.D. ’77 and Jay Lemery. Auerbach, the Redlich Family Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Lemery, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, explore how climate change could affect our mental health, destabilize our food and water supplies, and further pollute our air. In the excerpt below, the authors highlight how the rapid extinction of species threatens our capacity to treat our existing ills.

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ver a time span of more than 3.5 billion years, the laboratory of nature has evolved a wondrous panoply of chemical compounds, such as enzymes and hormones, most of them presumably to defend certain species from external (e.g., thermal conditions, predators) and internal (e.g., infections) threats. The compounds presumably were derived to confer an evolutionary advantage, be it growth, longevity, or resistance to a specific harmful condition. In many cases, the activity and benefits of these compounds extended beyond the originating species to other plants and animals. Thus, poison from a tree frog might have benefit as a medicinal paralytic agent in humans. Whether an elm tree is fighting parasitic fungi or a cone snail is capturing its prey, opportunity exists for human benefit. If we eliminate the original species, all of this potential is lost. The South American cinchona tree and the Chinese sweet wormwood plant effectively treat and cure malaria. With only rudimentary refinement, quinine was used routinely hundreds of years ago to combat malaria.

Poppies produce analgesics to treat pain that once was unbearable and debilitating.

Some of the alkaloids from the Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus rosea) yielded essential compounds used in cancer chemotherapy. If we lose the plants we have yet to discover and analyze, we will not realize their benefits. n R E C O M M E N D AT I O N S from John Staddon, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of psychology and neuroscience and professor emeritus of biology In Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work, and Pretends to Work (Routledge Press), Staddon applies the same methodological standards to examples across disciplines, from physics and chemistry through social psychology, biomedicine, and economics. Here, he outlines some works that set—and have kept—him on his analytical path.

• My personal research methodology problem was solved when I began graduate school at Harvard. Methods devised by radical behaviorist B.F. Skinner allowed me to study animal learning using individual animals. The approach was described in detail in a book by one of Skinner’s disciples, Murray Sidman: Tactics of Scientific Research. Sidman’s book was groundbreaking, though. Following Skinner, he downplayed the role of theory in science.

• The best introduction to the mindset of a true scientist that I have found is physicist Richard Feynman’s “Surely

You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!” Feynman’s humor, openness, ingenuity, and sheer brilliance as a scientist are almost without equal.

• For readers who wish a critical take on the current state of science, especially biomedical science, I recommend Richard Harris’ Rigor Mortis. Harris deals with the causes and consequences of replication crisis (in which many results of scientific studies are impossible to replicate when re-tested), the dangers of blind faith in “animal models,” and the weakness of much apparently solid cell science. It’s not just social science that has suffered from the poor incentives under which many modern scientists must work.

BY DUKE ALUMNI & FACULTY

Getting to Us: How Great Coaches Make Great Teams (Penguin Press) Seth Davis ’92

Putting Wealth to Work: Philanthropy for Today or Investing for Tomorrow?

(PublicAffairs) Joel L. Fleishman, professor of law and public policy

Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism (Duke University Press) Raymond Knapp Ph.D. ’87

The Fountain: A Doctor’s Prescription to Make 60 the New 30 (Rodale) Rocco Monto H ’88, H ’92

Passionate and Pious: Religious Media and Black Women’s Sexuality (Duke University Press) Monique Moultrie ’99

Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (IVP Books) Jonathan WilsonHartgrove M.Div. ’06

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Problems, problems, problems

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Cascading global crises test students in the most recent Winter Forum.

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tending from what are, essentially, rocks in the sea. An outside expert, the U.S. Army’s deputy commanding general in the Pacific, Charles A. Flynn, defined what actions in the South China Sea would provoke a U.S. response—red lines not to be crossed. And how plausible, in real life, is a confrontation at sea? “This is not crazy as an exercise,” he said.

“It’s possible. Very possible.”

Back at the State Department, Jentleson and colleague Tana Johnson discussed possibilities around policymaking.

Referring to a New York Times headline, “U.S. Intelligence Failed to Foresee North Korea’s Nuclear Strides,” they said planners often rely on apparent facts on the ground that are incomplete, inaccurate, or intended to mislead. The students—just like their professional counterparts—had ongoing challenges around not only the facts or non-facts but also around the group dynamics. (“You sound like my neo-conservative uncle” was the sort of comment that sometimes was shouted out.)

Eventually they would agree on a narrative, with the starting point of a U.S. vessel sinking a Chinese ship as it was poised to make a first strike. From there they had to figure out the path to de-escalating without having the U.S. look weak.

Then they had to react to cascading crises. There were threatening actions from the Philippines and South Korea. Protests at the U.S. embassy in China. A North Korean missile test. Hints from Japan that it might abandon the U.S. nuclear umbrella in favor of arming itself. Threats from ISIS. And a couple of cyberattacks, one with the fatal consequences of actual fire and fury. What carrots-and-sticks combination would end the precipitating crisis agreeably?

A student’s comment that “I didn’t see this coming”—“this” referring to news flash after news flash—could have characterized the whole exercise. One student said she hadn’t checked her inbox so adamantly since awaiting word from Duke’s admissions office. And if there was one big lesson, it had to do with communication: As they became more avid about sharing and soliciting information, the students from State reveled in an e-mail from another team—a smiley-face emoticon and the message “Thanks for all your hard work.” —Robert J. Bliwise istock

icture the South China Sea, east of Vietnam and west of the Philippines, dotted with madein-China products. Those would be pseudo-islands—artificial islands or pumped-up natural islands, complete with military airstrips, seaports, and bases. Shots are fired, a vessel is sunk, and sailors are lost, near the ominously labeled Fiery Cross Reef. The picture becomes unstable.

The imagined incident sparked the January Winter Forum.

Over three days, ninety students broke the routine of their break, walked by a flag-bedecked corridor in the Fuqua School of Business, and attended to the business of saving the world.

At a Chinese-themed dinner, the students threw around expressions like “the Thucydides Trap” (referring to a rising power nudging a declining power to war). Many of them, like sophomore Yuuta Kendall, were trying out a career.

He’s an Air Force cadet who’s majoring in computer science and minoring in East Asian studies and who wants to be an Air Force intelligence officer. Other students were building on their globally flavored Duke doings. Senior Tierney Pretzer, a public policy and global health double-major, has studied in, done civic-engagement projects in, or traveled through Kenya, France, Vietnam, South Africa, Argentina, and Chile.

Then there were category-defying students, like senior Eidan Jacob, who said he was intrigued by artificial islands—in the South China Sea and elsewhere. A statistics major, he also liked the idea of an exercise in working with imperfect information.

The students were split into teams representing information-absorbing government agencies—the National Security Council, the CIA and NSA, the departments of Defense and State. It was a whack-a-mole crisis environment, one made all the more chaotic by the Twitter-happy fingers of an ever-posturing president. Bruce Jentleson, a public policy and political science professor, offered a policymaking credo: “Hope is not a strategy.”

Equipping the students with some real-world knowledge was a mission for Tim Nichols, with Marine Corps experience in intelligence and a teaching role at the Sanford School. He talked about China’s claim over large zones ex-

THE CURRENTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY

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MARTIN DOYLE, professor of river science and policy at the Nicholas School, is the author of The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers (W.W. Norton & Company).

What sparked your interest in rivers?

I went to college for physics.

One day my undergraduate adviser pulled me aside and told me I would not be a good physicist. I left college and meandered around the West for a while, and I got a job assisting a hydrologist at Mount Rainier National Park—basically schlepping water samples for the National Park Service. I discovered I loved hydrology, so I went back to college to finish my degree in physics and then became a hydrologist.

With more than 250,000 rivers, is the U.S. unique in how waterways shaped the national character?

Rivers have shaped where we live. Many cities of America’s

interior, for example, lie at important river confluences.

Rivers allowed movement between the different states, sixteen of which are named for rivers, and their borders are typically set by rivers.

The commercial trade rivers made possible helped bind the residents of those states.

Commerce on interstate rivers, then, would contribute to the idea of a single national economy rather than a collection of independent state economies.

What was it like, in researching the book, to join a towboat captain on the Mississippi?

One strong impression was the sheer industrial scale of the Lower Mississippi River and the fact that it’s still such a funnel point for international trade. It’s also a river with romantic associations: Think of Mark Twain, the steamboat pilot who tries to make his fortune on the river. Abraham Lincoln’s first trip was on a little flatboat all the way down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

It was the way people in the Midwest saw beyond their lit-

Q&A

tle part of the world. And for me, riding that tow down the river was a career highlight.

Part of what made America what it became was the presence of hydropower, right?

In building all those small dams in the mid-nineteenth century, New England stole the textile industry from England. Hydropower was really how the U.S. got its foothold into the international economy. That was especially in grinding grain. During World War II, we were able to refine aluminum on the Columbia River and uranium on the Tennessee. You could make the argument that our ability to ramp up as a wartime industrial power was related to the fact that we had hydropower coming out of our ears.

What does climate change portend for rivers and their impact?

It will cause droughts to get drier and floods to get wetter.

Climate change is primarily affecting the extremes, not necessarily the average. So the backbone infrastructure of the U.S. becomes critical.

In 2011, they had the flood of record on the Mississippi River. In 2012, they had the drought of record. And look at California: mega-drought in 2016, and mega-flood in 2017. I’ve called it “hydrologic whiplash.”

But we keep building on floodplains, don’t we?

We’ve allowed people to move into areas that we shouldn’t have allowed them to move into in the first place. Are we willing to spend the money to make the infrastructure that much more robust? Or do we spend the money to get people out of there?

Was there one sparking event behind the move to clean up our waterways?

Urban legend or not, the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland illustrated just how bad things were.

The environmental policies that followed in the 1970s were extraordinarily successful. Within weeks of the blaze on the Cuyahoga, the federal government threatened six industrial firms with prosecution if they did not reduce pollution. Over the next six months, another sixty-six federal prosecutions had targeted industrial water polluters. From there came the Clean Water Act, along with the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

On the other hand, there’s the unhappy example of Flint, Michigan.

Flint is an ultimate conundrum. What are we going to do with cities like Flint that don’t have a growing population with a generous tax base, but that do have these extremely expensive infrastructure problems?

—Robert J. Bliwise, Photo by Jared Lazarus

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To build Team One

ALL TOGETHER: A pre-practice teambuilding exercise ends in laughter.

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Putting together Duke’s first varsity women’s softball team took more than finding some players and coaches. By Lucas Hubbard | Photography by Chris Hildreth

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ob Weiseman stood in left field, waiting under a darkening sky. He looked worried, but that was typical: As associate director of athletics/ athletic facilities, game operations, and championships, Weiseman needs some degree of paranoia, a fussiness to drag the infield one more time, a critical eye to head off anything that could sully a playing surface. Even on the most tranquil afternoon, he has the quiet angst of someone who must ensure nothing under his control goes wrong—while having to pray that nothing does.

But today was far from tranquil: It was the home opener for Duke softball, a game 1,523 days in the making. And when the rain finally arrived less than two

hours before the first pitch, any long-held visions of a perfect start had disappeared.

Then came the news that more rain was expected during the game itself. As someone in the press box put it, “Bob’s gonna have a heart attack.”

And yet, two weeks before on this East Campus field, head coach Marissa Young’s team had drilled its ability to improvise under any circumstance. The infielders took in ground balls of every variety—fast, slow, bouncing, squibbing—and booted them on purpose. They fumbled the ball at their feet, and then further away when the coaches, bundled in puffer coats on the first of February, yelled for the errors to be sloppier, more

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realistic. The players, aided by their fellow infielders’ cries and armed with their regained composure, would scoop the ball and identify the proper adjustment: maybe holding the throw, sometimes slinging to first for an out—the softball meeting the mitt with a satisfying snap. Most often amid the chaos they’d catch a baserunner between bases in the most ragtag of plays, the rundown, the ball ping-ponging between fielders as they wore down the trapped player’s spirit.

The coaches emphasized, though, that even such a scramble has rules: Get the runner to turn her back and fully commit one way; make her, at least, return to her trailing base. And always plan for the unknown. “We really have tried to stress to this group that it’s not about being perfect,” says Young. “It’s about how we’re able to respond to situations when they don’t go our way.”

That attitude pays off outside the infield, especially given what the program has already endured. To build Team One has required a titanic effort from dozens if not hundreds of people. It’s featured a recruiting cycle where the now-stadium was all trees; a former infielder turned marketer; a year of practices on a turf baseball field with a mere third of a roster; and a lineup still add26 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

ing players a month before the READY: Left, teammates first game. “I wouldn’t say that loosen up with stretch bands at the ready; practice on there’s been an easy week here,” the field is divided between says Jill Ferraro, a graduate fast pitching and bunting; transfer from the University of top, Coach Marissa Young; North Carolina at Chapel Hill. fielding and base running.

“But honestly, every hard week has been worth it.”

Some rain for the home opener, then, seemed fitting: To get here, the program has had to persist in uncertain conditions. In a way, it was born because of them.

C

hris Kennedy Ph.D. ’79 speaks with the dry authority of a dad in charge of the grill. His logic reflects the earned calm of someone who has weighed the alternatives more than anyone else and selected the best course of action. Such care is practically a job requirement, though: As senior deputy director of athletics, Kennedy must ensure Duke’s compliance with Title IX.

But despite his four-plus decades in the athletics department, the task isn’t so straightforward. “You don’t know for sure if you’re in compliance with Title IX,” says Kennedy, “unless the Office of Civil Rights comes in and tells you you are or you aren’t.”

That’s exactly what happened in 1997. To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Title IX—the landmark portion of the

ticipation opportunities for both women and men must be proportional to their representation among the student body, and scholarship dollars must be awarded in proportion to each sex’s participation.)

Duke at the time was already in the early stages of women’s rowing—the only women’s sport, Kennedy says, that can come close to matching a sizable football roster. That progress toward compliance, along with a promise to scholarships in a few other “You don’t know for sure if you’re in compliance implement sports, allowed Duke to reach an agreewith Title IX unless the Office of Civil Rights ment with the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department comes in and tells you you are or you aren’t.” (aof sub-agency Education). But in the intervening years, spending on the men’s side crept Education Amendments of 1972 that guaranteed equal beneup. For example, based on the late-1990s operating plan, “men’s fits, at institutions receiving federal funding, for both sexes— track was not supposed to have any scholarships at all,” says the National Women’s Law Center filed a complaint against Kennedy. “And then I looked up one day, and they had ten…. twenty-five institutions, including Duke, to determine if they It’s hard to march that back.” were in violation. (Title IX compliance in athletics contains The school had to bolster its lineup of offerings to “feel safe numerous elements, but the clearest thresholds are these: Paragain”—bumping up the count of scholarships in rowing and DUKE MAGAZINE

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women’s track, adding them for swimming and fencing. To equate the numbers, though, Duke would need a new sport for women. But you “can’t just go out and add rodeo,” Kennedy explains. The standard of a “reasonable expectation of regional competition” rules out, yes, rodeo, as well as Ivy League fare like squash. Others, like bowling, involve too few participants to make a dent. “If you look at the roster of ACC sports,” Kennedy says, “there really wasn’t another candidate.” Duke’s twenty-seventh varsity sport would be softball.

Two big questions loomed.

“First, when are we gonna hire a head coach,” says Todd Mesibov, the associate director of athletics/compliance who’s also the softball team’s administrator. “And second, who are we gonna hire?” With games set for 2017-18, Duke had hoped to bring on a coach in the summer of 2016. But starting a program from nothing can mean lacking someone who innately knows the sport. “If we have a soccer coach leave, we have former student-athletes who are in collegiate soccer coaching, and other people we know who we trust, and we have a good sense of the soccer world and how it works,” says Mesibov. “Softball, we didn’t have that grounding.”

ly essential” role in planning the $8.8 million stadium with Weiseman—who still compliments you despite you messaging him “every other day” about upgrades. You help craft the field “down to the color and the brick type on the warning track material.” You even design the uniforms.

You also throw batting practice for an entire season when there are

“I looked around the circle, we all looked around the circle, and we knew we had something special.”

The biggest issue was recruiting. Football and basketball high-schoolers typically choose a college as juniors and seniors, but top softball prospects often do so in their freshman and sophomore years—meaning that giving the coach just one year to cobble together a team could result in a sad casting call. And Mesibov and Kennedy’s efforts as interim scouts were ill-fated. “We would laugh, because if we showed up [at a recruiting event], we’d have no idea—we’re not trained,” says Mesibov.

“We don’t know enough about softball to go evaluate at a tournament and decide who would be a good fit.”

The administrators realized they’d need a coach soon. Their savior was just eight miles down the road.

W

hat must the head coach of a new program do?

If you’re Marissa Young, the former three-time All-American pitcher at Michigan—and North Carolina assistant coach—who took over at Duke in July 2015, you simply figure things out.

Sure, being the founder has its perks. You play an “absolute28 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

GAME TIME: Above left, no other pitchers on your roster one of the first pitches or coaching staff. You build that during the first campus coaching staff, and then build it game; above, the view again the summer before your infrom above the left augural season after your first two center field post. assistants leave. You streamline and maximize every moment: In warm-ups, you catch the ball in the glove in your left hand, flip it to yourself, and swing the bat with just your right arm, just to give your infielders a few extra ground balls to field.

You oscillate between demanding and playful; you are the coach who tells the team to get “pep in our step” and minutes later jokes about how you “can’t jump over a credit card” after a throw from the outfield sails above your head. You mute your frustrations when your young team makes errors, knowing that “they’re gonna hit the panic button if [you’re] hitting the panic button.” You find the sweet spot of being, as Jill Ferraro says, “intense, but...not really a yeller.”

You’re constructing a culture where one hasn’t been before, so

you borrow from your peers. You enlist Coach K to talk to your team about the importance of standards. For three days, you have your players train with the on-campus ROTC. And above the team’s board of accolades like “Queen of Adjustments” and “Bullpen Beast,” you place a quote. The words come not from a luminary in Duke’s softball glory days; they cannot, of course.

Instead, you take an all-caps quote from football coach David Cutcliffe about timing and purpose: “Be where you need to be, doing what you need to be doing to the best of your ability.”

Maybe you are that luminary whose speeches will one day mark these walls. But to get there, you have to persuade others to believe in what you say. So, before anything else, you recruit.

Y

oung took over as the head coach on July 29, 2015, a Wednesday. The following week, she was already in California developing, as she said in her introductory press conference, “the bloodline” of the program. She had to go: It was the last tournament of the summer, one of her best chances to make an impression during that recruiting window.

For many prospective players, joining a team without any track record might instill anxiety about whether the team would be a laughingstock. Yet enough saw Duke’s new team as an opportunity: Its current members, without fail, mention their thrill in building something—as pitcher Peyton St. George, the team’s first-ever signee, says—“from the literal ground up.”

To craft a roster, Young searched for players like St. George and shortstop Jameson Kavel, who didn’t pick their next destination until their junior and senior years of high school, respectively. Others who had committed to different schools, like utility player Rachel Abboud and pitcher Katherine Huey, then pivoted to Duke after their initial universities’ head coaches departed. (They had passed up Duke before Young was named coach.) And Young sorted through the college players contacting her to find those who could thrive academically and athletically at the school: Transfers would account for five of the seventeen players on Duke’s opening-day roster.

For two transfers, the program boasted a natural connection.

Raine Wilson began at James Madison in the fall of 2016; by April, she was ready to be done with the sport. “There’s no way DUKE MAGAZINE

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I would play college softball again if it wasn’t the right fit,” she work: lifting, fundamentals. When the players did practice, it says, twenty feet from where her Duke teammates lay down was “on the baseball field, on turf,” recalls Hannah Pridemore. bunts after practice. Wilson had shared her frustrations with “So we didn’t get to see dirt ever.” high-school teammate and best friend St. George, who then beOn Fridays, they’d simulate games, writing different situations came her “liaison to Coach Young,” sending Young GoPro vidon pieces of paper—bases loaded, one out, etc.—and drawing eos of Wilson from their Mechanicsville, Virginia, playing days. them from a hat. Young would then pitch to her father, Robert Given that Wilson hadn’t yet secured her release from James Young, the volunteer assistant coach who represented the opposition, and the players would fill in a makeshift defense: a catcher, Madison, Young couldn’t contact Wilson directly; for a while, someone at third base, someone at first, a couple outfielders. “It “it was basically [St. George’s] word of mouth to Coach Young was difficult to visualize sometimes,” says Pridemore. that I was a good player,” says Wilson. She’s now a co-captain at Beyond barely resembling the sport, the season of pure trainthird base as well as a mainstay in the heart of the batting order. ing took a toll. “It was frustrating because you’re, like, ‘I want The other co-captain, Jill Ferraro, didn’t see the field at all to play,’ ” says Jazmine Moreno, who has shared time with Pridelast year. But she already knew Duke’s coach: She had played more at catcher this at UNC during the years year. “ ‘I want to play Young was an assistant “‘We signed up to play softball, not to run, a game. I want to be at there, and the bond practice with more than they built in Chapel bike, and swim in a triathlon!’ ” six people.’ ” Hill compelled Ferraro Young knew she had to swap shades of blue. to do something to focus “She really cares about the team, announcing her plan all of her players. And it’s really right at the start of winter break: evident,” says Ferraro, an outfielder. Maybe the best example a triathlon. It’s a day the Class of happened this January, when 2016 remembers less than fondly. “All of us texted each other in double-digit inches of snow left our group message immediately: Durham submerged. Ferraro, ‘We signed up to play softball, enrolled in the Markets and not to run, bike, and swim in a Management Studies program triathlon!’ ” says Pridemore. “So at Fuqua, was the only player I think that day we were like, ‘Is living off-campus—a concern this day ever gonna come where for Young. So after practice, we can actually step on a real Young “followed me home field and play?’ ” to make sure I didn’t get in a But they survived. Young, wreck on my way,” Ferraro says. who also participated, said that “That’s the kind of stuff—it’s training for the sprint race in genuine, it makes a difference.”

TEAMWORK: Sharing thoughts during practice Wilmington put them “all in By forging new connections, the best shapes of our lives.” and relying on a few old ones, Even better, they soon had an actual field to play on, and, fiYoung compiled the Class of 2017, the backbone of Duke’s nally, some company on the diamond when the Class of 2017 opening-day roster. A big hurdle would come, though, before joined. “The first practice we had in the summer…all the peoany of those players set foot on the field. ple last year were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what it feels like to Between May and December 2016, the northwest corner have a team again!’ ” says Pridemore, noting that, for example, of East Campus morphed from a lush glade to a construction it was great actually “having people to base run.” site. The future stadium location was a dusty canvas, save the Yet well into the fall, Duke softball remained in preseason gray husks of the dugouts and the first half of the outfield wall. form, losing its first four exhibition games. Many of the Blue Opening day remained far enough on the horizon that the only Devils—two-thirds of whom had never played in college— blue came from the perimeter fencing. understandably struggled adjusting to the faster-paced level.

In another timeline, perhaps the facility under construction “You’re trying to explain to somebody that they don’t know and the lack of actual games to provide motivation wouldn’t what they don’t know,” says Young of coaching freshmen. “And have mattered. But Young already had six players under her as a coach, usually you identify, ‘Okay, there’s four kids that rewing at Duke. “Last year was a fun challenge,” says Mesibov. ally need me this year, and I’m gonna home in on getting them “Nobody had ever had student-athletes here who were part of better.’ ” This year, she says, “it’s literally our whole roster.” our program but weren’t competing.”

“There’s really no way to comprehend what it’s like,” says FerAnd so the path to opening day began with one of the most raro. The team’s eldest player (“I always joke that I’ve lost a ludicrous seasons in Duke history. Young emphasized solo 30 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

few years of maturity being around them,” she says), Ferraro imparted the work ethic required to succeed at this level. Same thing with Wilson in her role as “servant leader,” compelling her fellow infielders to stay and take extra ground balls well after practice’s end.

The principles hit home over the holidays. “I think we really instilled in them the message, before they left, that this is crunch time,” says Lacey Waldrop, the former National Player of the Year who became the team’s pitching coach in July. The coaches set up “accountability groups” for the players to share their workouts, how much they hit, what they were doing each day to better their games. Come January, everyone was locked in, including center fielder Dominique Salinas, a transfer from Ole Miss who enrolled in classes the day before the spring semester started, and pitcher Brianna Butler, who finished high school early to join Team One, the transition so quick that she was playing for Duke before receiving her diploma. For returning players especially, a year had made quite a difference. “It was so much more like, ‘Can’t wait to get back this time!’ instead of last year,” Pridemore says, “when it was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to go back and train for a triathlon.’ ” Eleven months after the Wilmington race, and twenty-seven months since Peyton St. George and outfielder Makenna Lutterloh had a group chat consisting of just two players, Duke softball made history in its first-ever regular-season game. “I don’t think it was unexpected, but it was like, ‘It’s here,’ ” says Raine Wilson of the opening victory under the lights in Boca Raton. “I looked around the circle, we all looked around the circle, and we knew we had something special.”

B

uilding a team requires more than just players and coaches, though. Successful programs have an aura: A Duke men’s basketball game follows a dog-eared script.

In the opening weekend, the home softball production is ad hoc. The fill-in announcer clarifies on the fly whether in softball it’s proper to say “first baseman” or “first basewoman,” before defaulting to “playing at first base.” A dance-off on Saturday in dreary conditions gets scrapped because the fans who had agreed to it simply leave. It’s tricky to do any sort of contest without a video board, which the stadium lacks.

But there’s optimism. Jillian Nobles, a Fuqua classmate of Ferraro’s who played on the team through November, reached out to Young after winter break and learned of a marketing-assistant role to help Hunter Richardson, the team’s sports information director. Nobles still has “a bridge into the players”—she’s more willing than Richardson to play their music requests—and has thoughts on shaping a singular softball atmosphere: cheering sections behind home plate, competitions between fans from different graduate and professional schools to ramp up attendance, the right chants to intimidate the opposition. The duo are at the great stage in a project where every idea has potential.

For now, the mood at games stems from the team and Young, who describes her approach as “someone who’s going to set high

standards…but we’re gonna have fun in what we’re doing.”

From the ledge in the home dugout built for players to lean on (so that they always stand and support their teammates) to the team’s matching gloves with “WE ARE DUKE” stitched on the thumb, Young has cultivated a communal, laid-back atmosphere. The players embrace each other’s quirks, their various pregame rituals and esoteric walkup song choices, like Moreno’s “Imperial March” from Star Wars and Rachel Abboud’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Mulan. “We do what we do because we like to do it,” says Abboud, outlining the team’s ethos, “and we don’t care.”

On Saturday, as Duke heads out into the field during the sixth inning, “Everytime We Touch,” the de facto anthem for Blue Devil fans, comes over the speaker system. But it’s not just the crowd cheering: The whole team joins in, the substitutes in foul territory pumping their arms, the infielders bouncing around on the clay, smacking their gloves to the beat. Maybe the song’s old hat to some, but this is a new twist—the in-game mosh pit. And maybe the team’s initial aura is a cliché, with a changed inflection, viewed in a positive light: The players are just happy to be here.

There’s a way this kind of sports story ends. The first home game slogging through miserable conditions, fans’ umbrellas blooming every other inning. Duke, the motley group expected to limp to a cellar spot, falling far behind before its deliberate comeback. The team securing the game’s final out on a scramble play, a wink of a callback to the practice weeks before—Rachel Abboud scampering from first base across the infield diamond to tag out a Penn State player in a rundown, a split second before the runner advances to third. The full-circle pattern underscoring the program’s journey thus far.

But that’s a third-act, string-swelling ending. And Duke softball has barely made it past the opening credits.

Right now, Young knows that while victories are nice, growth is better. Her go-to phrase is “the process”—of learning, of improving each day—and the truth is that even when good things happen, her focus can’t waver. “It’s really rewarding to look back and see how far we’ve come,” Young says. And yet, “I spend most of my time thinking about what’s ahead of us.” She has to think about next year, which will bring a top-fifteen recruiting class to Durham, and beyond, when the novelty of both the program and Duke will have faded for her veteran players.

Following the game—the dramatic win, the team’s first-ever home triumph—Young emerges from the dugout with a stoic expression. A look at the replay makes clear why: Abboud chased the runner to the leading base, not the trailing base—a breach of the rundown code. The play succeeded, just not for the right reasons.

Young knows there will be many more scrambles in the years to come. There will be more rain, more dance contests gone awry, more rosters and staffs to replenish, more bobbles and crazy plays. Young’s goal, then, is simply ensuring the next try goes better than the last. “I don’t think she really cared, because I got the out,” says Abboud of Young’s reaction to the rundown.

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inconvenient

FAME

Kate Bowler is everywhere because of a best-selling book about life before and after her cancer diagnosis.

BY SCOTT HULER • PHOTOGRAPHY BY LISSA GOTWALS

K

ATE BOWLER IS TOLD that if she goes to Amazon.com, types in “ever,” and watches the autofill, of all the products in the entire world her best-selling new book, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, will come up second. The only thing more popular on Amazon is “everything bagel seasoning.”

In her office in Gray Building, Bowler Ph.D. ’10, assistant professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School, opens Amazon, types the word, and gazes at the screen above her desk with unabashed delight. “I feel honored,” she says. “It sounds delicious. That’s the bagel I want.”

And that’s the voice that people nationwide are hearing— in the pages of her book, in interviews all over public radio, and on her own podcast. Warm, self-deprecating, honest, a little overwhelmed. That’s the voice of someone trying to make sense of a world that entered permanent crisis two years ago when at age thirty-five she was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, the diagnosis a red line dividing her life into a clear before and after.

Before: Happily married to her high-school sweetheart. Besotted mom of a healthy two-year-old. Professor at her graduate alma mater. Author of a successful first book, Blessed, which came out in 2013; reviewers used phrases like “riveting,” “marvelous,” and “deeply human.” The first-ever deeply reported history of the American Prosperity Gospel, Blessed documents the uniquely American Christian belief system that Jesus wants to make you rich, healthy, and successful, and that if you’re not, it means you’re doing something to displease him. Or at the very least, as Bowler wryly says, it means that Jesus is “very disappointed in you.”

As for the after, it’s complicated. Not just because she has what she calls “the seventy-year-old man’s disease”—colon

cancer, and again, Stage IV, which means it has spread, and it means business. And not just because her health plan initially refused to pay for her participation in the clinical trials that are currently keeping her alive. Complicated in a way she expressed when she faced the fact that if the cancer didn’t kill her its treatment would likely bankrupt her and her whole family, and she shouted: “I am not a normal person!”

In Everything Happens for a Reason she admits she’s not quite sure what she meant. Looking back now from her cheerful, book-lined office, she says she felt like explaining directly to the cancer that its timing wasn’t good: “Look around!” she wanted to say. “These people need me!”

“Also,” she says, as though cancer were an inconvenient phone call, “I’m in the middle of something.” She meant she was special—not because she had cancer but because she wasn’t supposed to.

We associate the “Do you know who I am?” moment with B-list celebrities and insufficiently cowed maître d’s; Bowler had hers with cancer. “I thought, ‘I’m not just anybody.’ I think it was the randomness of cancer that I took personally,” she says. “Cancer didn’t think I was special.

Cancer didn’t care what I loved. Cancer didn’t think about what I was working on or how old my son was. I took that personally. I think everybody feels like that.”

That quality draws people to Bowler. Books about evangelical history line her bookshelves, but so does a light-up sign saying “#BLESSED” and a bobblehead pope. She will share her barbecued potato chips if you are in her office while she eats lunch WISDOM: Bowler at her desk. A petite woman with says these days brown hair and a treble voice that she’s working on seems freighted with irony, whether surrendering to she wants it or not, Bowler might the unknown.

“I’M IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING.”

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remind you of performer Julia Sweeney, radiating a sarcastic, brash good humor. If cancer is going to be importunate, if it’s going to call at an inconvenient time, Bowler will hang up on it.

Regrettably, cancer calls back until you pick up, so cancer is currently one of the defining elements of Bowler’s life. She’s quick to reassure you that she doesn’t plan to die anytime soon. She’s part of an extremely small cohort of patients receiving an experimental immunotherapy treatment, which seems to be working. She has a CT scan every ninety days, and if nothing has spread, nothing looks worse, she

She’s been on podcasts, and her own podcast, “Everything Happens with Kate Bowler,” on which she interviews people who have themselves faced dark times and can share what they’ve learned, is in the iTunes top 100. Her book is on The New York Times best-seller list. “You want to play this game?” she asks, almost conspiratorially, again spinning in her chair to her computer and going to Amazon to check her position on its own best-seller list. “It’s number four still,” she says, both astonished at its success and a little embarrassed about the joy of constantly checking on it.

gets another three-month reprieve. She describes her life now as “vine to vine.” She chooses the best vine available, hopes there’ll be another one after that one, and gives her best swing, over and over and over.

Right now, Bowler is more famous than anyone on the Duke campus outside of Cameron Indoor—because of cancer. “There is a profound irony,” she says, “in being famous at anything not shiny.” She calls herself “a celebrity of terrible,” famous for facing some of the worst things imaginable—cancer, possibly dying, leaving her husband and her little boy. Her fierce, funny approach to that reality has made her, for a moment at least, one of the country’s most listened-to voices. She’s been in The New York Times as an opinion writer and as the subject of an enormous outpouring of letters in response to that writing.

She’s been a subject of stories in Time and on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” She has been interviewed by no less than Terry Gross.

“This is what my friends do,” she says. “Then they text me. Because they’re wonderful.”

Everything Happens is labeled a memoir, and it tells the story not just of Bowler’s cancer diagnosis and her struggle to get and afford treatment but also of her life beforehand. She talks about her Canadian childhood, her love for her husband, her struggles to get pregnant and with a joint problem that, at one point, caused her significant trouble using her arms. “The arc of my life has been toward drama,” she admits. Everything Happens resulted from her attempts to make sense of that drama. And, especially, of the irony of writing Blessed, a book about people who believe that your health, your financial status, everything about your life is an outward expression of your relationship with God—and then getting cancer.

She chose the title Blessed for her book on the prosperity gospel, she said in the piece she wrote for the Times in 2016, be-

“IT WILL GIVE YOU THE INDICTMENT, BUT IT ALSO GIVES YOU THE SOLUTION.”

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cause it is the “perfect word for an American society that says it believes the American dream is based on hard work, not luck.”

She admits the prosperity gospel is easy to caricature: “The preacher with the beautiful hair and the jawline you could cut carrots with,” adherent beliefs just as easy to target: “Do they really believe their children will be smarter? That this year their New Year’s resolutions will come true?” Yet her deeply reported history of the movement never stoops to sarcasm or scorn. “I held hands with people in wheelchairs being prayed for by celebrities known for their miracle touch,” she wrote in the Times.

“I sat in people’s living rooms and heard about how they never would have dreamed of owning this home without the encouragement they heard on Sundays.” She calls the prosperity

to be a doctor if health-care premiums are too much? They’re teaching us about the resiliency of hope. It is hard work to hope that big. And there is a courage to it that I admire.”

Bowler is not an adherent of the prosperity gospel (though she admits that she likes to believe her successes demonstrate her value and virtue). But the prosperity gospel-style explanations others offered for her complicity in her cancer drove Bowler to write the 2016 Times piece. That piece and its enormous reaction then led to Everything Happens for a Reason. “Because I spend most of my time processing other people’s reactions to my pain,” she says, “and then trying not to feel so resentful and sad about it.” Like that guy who wrote her to say that God was just to let her die because the wages of sin is death. “He’s

gospel “the great American civil religion”—a way of reassuring ourselves that if we’re doing well it’s because we’ve pleased God, and if others aren’t, well, they obviously have work to do. This brings with it that intrinsic criticism: Your own failures cause your problems; every scratch-off lottery ticket that doesn’t win is an indictment. Any philosophy requires a theodicy: an explanation of the existence of evil. The prosperity gospel basically says the cause of evil is you. “In a spiritual world in which healing is a divine right,” she writes in Everything Happens, “illness is a symptom of unconfessed sin.”

And yet “the cruelty of it is its saving grace,” Bowler says. “It will give you the indictment, but it also gives you the solution.”

Just pray a little harder, get a little closer to God, and it will all work out. And if that’s not an easy worldview to love, she says, “they are teaching us something, teaching about very reasonable responses to a lack of social services. Wouldn’t you go to God

seventy-something. Good for you, Joe in Albuquerque. I’m so happy you came to that conclusion—at seventy. Thanks for writing a thirty-fiveyear-old, weeping over her kid, to let her know that somehow she can take great comfort in the mercy of a just and impassive God.” She has received so many thousands of e-mails and suggestions and ideas of how to make sense of her life that she ends her book with an appendix of things never to say to people suffering. For example, don’t say, “Well, at least...” As Bowler points out, “At least it’s not…what? Stage V cancer? Don’t minimize.” Don’t tell them your life lessons. Don’t promise things will get better. Don’t tell them “God needed an angel.” In the first place, Bowler is a religious scholar and knows better than you do how angels are supposedly made; in the second place, FAMILY: Bowler enjoys dinosaur time with her husband, Toband Penner, and their son, Zach.

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she writes, “You see how confusing it is when we just pretend that the deceased return to help you find your car keys or make pottery?”

She understands why people are driven to explain her cancer to her—they’re reassuring themselves that somehow this all is as it should be, that they can make sense of their unpredictable world. They explain it to her so they can convince themselves.

But “I’m genuinely sick of it,” she says. “You don’t have to use someone else’s pain to solve your problems. There’s a real cruelty to that. The suffering people? I get it—great. They can say, ‘Well, [Bowler’s cancer] didn’t happen to me,’ and all I want to say is, ‘Yes, and like I am sending you so much love right now.”

“But for all the joyous, happy, lucky people in the world to solve their theological problems through me? I’m resentful of that impulse.”

Her colleague and friend Ray Barfield understands Bowler’s point. The pediatric oncologist at Duke Hospital and professor of pediatrics and Christian philosophy says he accepts the denial Bowler contends with as a natural human reaction to reality that is too big to swallow: “We modulate the dose of reality just to make it bite-size,” he says.

Bowler, too, sometimes needs a moment before she can absorb a worrying test result or scary scan image. Yet “Kate finds a way to reality pretty quickly,” Barfield says, “because she lives fiercely. Her natural response is not retreat. It’s more like, ‘Who are you to show up, cancer? Bring it on.’ ” He sees her book and her podcast (on one episode of which he is a guest) as practice for “those of us who can’t make a run for the truth as Kate does.” Showing us her own honest reactions, her terror, her sadness, her pain, and her capacity to regroup “allows us a chance to practice, and to prepare ourselves, and maybe to grow into the kinds of people who can more embrace the truth.”

Bowler’s own theological problems remain unresolved. She possesses a solid belief in God, though she doesn’t call that faith.

“I don’t know what faith is,” she says. “I really don’t. I just don’t know what it means right now. Like I think I’ve just spent too long with the people who think faith is a spiritual power, and I know it’s not that.” Her father, she says, has a certainty that she will be okay, and she finds that comforting. “He has almost the gift of faith,” she says—if, that is, you think of faith as “a kind of spiritual stubbornness.” But her own post-diagnosis world has brought her a different relationship to God. “I gave up certainties and timelines as quickly as I had to,” she says, and she now talks about experiencing God in the very brokenness of life.

As her life has felt shattered, she has fewer answers than ever.

Work, family, health, finance—every category of her life is less certain. Yet in the midst of that heartbreak she has been surprised to feel only more powerfully the presence of God. “The only category I understand more is the love of God,” she says. “Both the experience of wanting to be close to God and the surprise of the feeling that God LESSONS: “Every day is close to me.” Her eyes grow moist is full of possibilities as she describes it. “The sense that all and inevitabilities,” the gaps are being filled in. That was Bowler says. intense.”

Now, she’s working on surrender. Surrender to uncertainty; surrender to a reality that is mostly unknown. Of course, surrender, she notes, is quite the opposite of what prosperity gospel preaches, though for most Christians it’s a central virtue. “All of American culture and pop psychology scream against that,” she writes in Everything Happens. So, trained by the harsh reality of cancer, she screams back.

What she’s trying to express returns ultimately, she says over and over, to that randomness. “I’m just pointing out an obvious thing,” she says. “Which is that we all hope for more and yet find ourselves picking up pieces of so much less. Every day is full of possibilities and inevitabilities.” And we all face that terrible, constant conundrum: “How are we supposed to know which one is which?”

The love of an embracing God; learning to find if not meaning then at least acceptance of tragedy and sadness; willingness to accept and even embrace an uncertain future.

If it sounds like Bowler’s story begins to stray from memoir toward ministry, she shakes that off; she works in a building full of ministers, she says, who all can do that job better.

“We historians like to stay in our lane. My lane is the past. Unfortunately,” she goes on, “my suffering is the present.”

Barfield characterizes Bowler’s book as “a teaching tool,” a characterization that squares with her hopes for it. “The number-one hope was that if this gives people who are suffering either a little more language or a slightly more-gentle mental and spiritual world to live in,” she says, “then that is everything I could hope for.” Amidst the sadness and pain, there is beauty and love and wonder. “When you get to the beautiful stuff, the gifts, the gorgeous things,” she asks, “does it really need to devolve into an argument about whether I deserve the present?... We go to war against ourselves about what we deserve.

But some of the only things we can recognize are usually the gorgeous love of the people who surround us. That to me is always the bottom line.”

She’s taking things as they come now, learning what she must and sharing what she can. She doesn’t see herself as an expert in the wisdom of suffering; she’s just suffering and willing to admit it. She likens herself to a friend who is a widow. When an acquaintance of that friend lost a spouse, the widow had to Google how to write a condolence card. “Just because I know how it feels doesn’t mean I know what to do,” Bowler says. “So, part of it is, like, transforming experience into wisdom. That’s tough work. But I like to learn.” n

“WE HISTORIANS LIKE TO STAY IN OUR LANE. MY LANE IS THE PAST. UNFORTUNATELY, MY SUFFERING IS THE PRESENT.”

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s a h C Landing The Class of 2009 entered the workplace during the Great Recession, and that’s made a lasting impact on their lives and careers.

By Drew Adamek • Photography by Yunghi Kim

H

elin Gai ’09 ate the most memorable burger of his life at West Union’s Loop Pizza Grill on September 14, 2008.

The economics and math double-major was just starting his senior year and had already secured an offer for a great job after graduation. The foreseeable future seemed assured as he settled in to enjoy a warm Sunday afternoon on campus.

Wall Street wasn’t on his radar before college. But by the end of his sophomore year, he had discovered an aptitude and love for the mathematical problem-solving of financial services. By his junior year, he decided to pursue a job in finance. He had taken, first, a summer internship and, then, earned a full-time job offer with investment bank Lehman Brothers in New York that was slated to start in 2009.

“At that age, you tend to think of the world as your oyster,” says Gai now. “At the time, nothing seemed out of reach.”

fate. A financial crisis that had been quietly unfolding for years suddenly appeared bottomless and breakneck as the rot of bad debt spread to banks, insurers, and mortgage companies.

No one anywhere knew what was happening. Not in Washington, not in New York, and most definitely not in The Loop Pizza Grill.

One certainty was that Gai was officially, and abruptly, out of a job.

By the time the dust settled, the global economy was in its worst condition since the Great Depression. That 2008 collapse was followed by the Great Recession— millions of manufacturing jobs were gone, automation and technology were displacing millions more across multiple fields, and the career plans many in the Class of 2009 had worked so hard to realize vanished.

“When they entered college in 2005, the economy was going very well, unemployment was low. Most people were getting

“ It was probably one of the best things that happened to me.

That is, until he got halfway through that burger.

On the overhead television that afternoon was breaking news that sucker-punched him into an entirely different future. Lehman Brothers was declaring bankruptcy and going out of business. At the same time, another venerable investment bank, Merrill Lynch, was selling itself to avoid Lehman Brothers’

jobs,” says Ryan C. McDevitt, associate professor of economics at the Fuqua School of Business. “By 2009, the bottom had completely fallen out of that. The unemployment rate went to a twenty-six-year high, there were more than six job seekers for every job opening, and hiring for new college grads dropped 35 to 40 percent.”

UNEXPECTED TURN: Helin Gai thought he’d be starting a finance job with Lehman Brothers after graduation.

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hat had started off as a challenging but surmounttional comparative studies and earned a certificate in global able career trajectory had turned into something health. She became a Baldwin Scholar and was involved with else entirely for the Class of 2009. Those graduates the WISER program, which works with girls in Kenya “to transcend poverty, HIV/AIDS, and gender-based violence.” She suddenly faced a world that would test not only planned to continue that work after graduating by landing a their professional skills but also their coping and survival skills. job in the nonprofit world.

“There were students for whom it was a momentary shock, Fowler wasn’t greatly concerned about the economic collapse. and they adjusted on the fly,” says William Wright-Swadel, director of career services at Duke, who started the job in August It felt distant, and a solid self-confidence buffered her against of 2008, right before the crash. “The kids for whom it was a catworry. astrophic event are those who believed that they did everything “I still thought maybe the rules didn’t apply to me,” says right. Now none of the strategies they bought into worked.”

Fowler. “I thought: I am so special, I am never going to be That massive shift in the employment picture in such a drastiwithout, even though I only have a very, very vague idea of what cally short period—and the broader macroeconomic malaise that I want to do.” resulted—produced a deep-seated worry in graduates. It wasn’t By graduation, she didn’t have a job but was optimistic. just jobs at stake: Self-image Fowler moved to New York and sense of worth began to and lived with a boyfriend entangle with the economic who did have a job. She challenges of the time, acinterned at three nonThe pressure for me was within had cording to McDevitt, who profits the summer before entered graduate school in the internship. It was making sure and knew that the city was 2005 and graduated into the where she wanted to be. same tough job market in She still felt certain in her I nailed the opportunity.

2010. “Initially, you put the ability to find a job. However, that confidence soon blame on yourself. You start met with the realities of a shattered economy, and Fowler startthinking that you’re falling short, that you didn’t prepare the ed looking inward for answers. right way, or that you didn’t live up to expectations.”

“I’ve always been told that you can do and be whatever you There hasn’t been enough time to collect and assess the longwant to do and be,” she says. “I never stopped to consider that term economic data that will measure the true economic effect there might not be room for me in that market.” of the recession on the Class of 2009. But economic indicators Yet, there were far too many qualified people looking for aren’t the only way to measure the recession’s impact. What Gai, far too few jobs, and she wasn’t making any headway. Weeks along with the rest of his class, didn’t know then was that the stretched into months. Fowler kept her options open and pureconomic collapse that started their senior year and became the sued multiple interests. She continued looking for work in the Great Recession would ripple throughout their lives, shaping nonprofit world, but a food-focused writing class during her their careers, finances, and relationships in ways subtle and obvious, and forcing them to radically reassess the values and assenior year had sparked an interest in food journalism. So she sumptions on which they had based their futures. also applied for magazine writing jobs.

“This felt from the get-go that it was going to be very serious Both paths proved difficult. The nonprofit world saw a steep because it was pervasive,” says Wright-Swadel. “What students decline in donations and grants after the economic collapse, and were facing was not where do I go instead, but much more a media companies, particularly print, had their budgets slashed case of how do I deal with this?” because of a plunge in readership and advertising revenue. She While it officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009 began taking full-time temporary jobs without benefits and based on successive quarterly declines in Gross Domestic Prodwriting for free as an editorial assistant for various food publiuct, the Great Recession’s impact on 2009 graduates is still cations. She created a personal blog to keep her writing current. manifesting itself. Like a natural disaster, it affected everyone in The fruitless searching began taking an emotional toll. Fowler its path but not all in the same way. had grown up in a family with economic challenges, and she had hoped her future would be less insecure. It didn’t seem to be turning out that way. hile the start of the Great Recession had immedi“My parents filed for bankruptcy twice in my lifetime, and ate repercussions for Gai, for others the recession I grew up with a scarcity mentality,” says Fowler. “It was a big acted less like a volcanic eruption and more like a reality check to realize that the scarcity I had pushed against by sustained drought. going to Duke was still present Tyla Fowler ’09 had come to Duke, like Gai, without a disin the world.” tinct career path in mind, but over the course of her studies FOCUS: Aaron Glover says Finally, she found a temporary the recession has shaped she found she wanted to do work involving girls’ education in job as a communications associhis approach to his job. ate at a nonprofit, and she was Africa. After a period of exploration, she majored in interna-

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40 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

told it would eventually turn into a permanent position. It didn’t.

“They finally turned it into a real job, and after I had been doing it brilliantly for a year, they hired a girl who had a master’s degree and offered her so much less than I would have accepted for that job,” Fowler says.

She took a series of unpaid internships at magazines in the hopes of landing a paying job. Nothing stuck. Fowler was sinking into a cycle of underemployment and calling many of her assumptions about life into question.

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eanwhile, Aaron Glover ’09 was in New York, too. He was a fourth-year senior when the economy tanked. He had come to Duke from Georgia and spent five years on the wrestling team.

After attending a Black Wall Street event hosted by Kappa Alpha Psi in Durham, Glover knew early on that he wanted to work on Wall Street. But a cloud of uncertainty hovered over him as the economy tanked.

“I didn’t know how to weigh the gravity of that,” says Glover.

“You knew that people weren’t going to be hiring very much, certain places weren’t going to be in existence.”

He’d spent two summers interning at JP Morgan before the collapse and had been offered a full-time position. As economic conditions worsened and the job market began constricting, he realized jobs were far from guaranteed, especially as his classmates started to see offers disappear or not materialize.

“The hard part was competing in a funnel that started to close,” says Glover. “Even the invite to return as an intern didn’t feel as certain as it once did.”

The stark employment situation forced many of his classmates to pivot to more immediate, short-term solutions. “It was people who, the majority of the time, were able to execute plan A and now have to execute plan B or C,” says Glover. “The fact that it was plan C made it short term, because they had to find what the new plan A was in the new environment.”

Some of his peers enrolled in business school as a way of postponing entrance into the brutal job market, but Glover resolved to push through with the opportunity that was in front of him.

“The pressure for me was within the internship,” he says. “It was making sure I nailed the opportunity.”

42 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Glover stuck to his plan. He had always had a clear vision of what he wanted to do and redoubled his efforts to stay on course. JP Morgan weathered the initial economic collapse of late 2008 and, after several months of uncertainty, the investment bank hired him.

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or Gai, playing catch-up after losing his job offer at Lehman Brothers, the funnel to Wall Street seemed closed. He turned to Duke’s career services and talked daily to Emma Rasiel, professor of the practice of economics, for guidance. For Rasiel, Gai’s situation was becoming commonplace.

“There was enormous uncertainty among dozens of undergrads who had summer internships, got full-time offers, and now suddenly the firm withdraws the full-time offer,” says Rasiel. “The job prospects for people who were in finance and people who were looking at jobs in finance were really, really sour.”

Across campus, professors, counselors, and career-services staff helped students expand their possibilities by vigorously tapping the alumni network for job leads and connections, encouraging students to think outside of their original plans and to accept different outcomes. The university also created the Master’s of Management Studies program at the Fuqua School in 2009. It gave liberal-arts students additional educational opportunities, a chance to enhance their résumés, and frankly, a little time. In its

first year, 50 percent of the students enrolled in the program were from Duke, according to Wright-Swadel.

Rasiel, along with counselors in career services, urged Gai to take the time to reassess his values and career goals. They emphasized looking at what was most meaningful to him and what parts of the work were most rewarding, and to look for opportunities that matched his principles. He immediately set to work expanding his “pool of opportunities,” he says.

“It became a matter of reaching out to all of the resources on campus and figuring out what they thought might be suitable for me,” says Gai, “and talking to all of these people to get a sense of what opportunities they

two and a half years on an emotional and spiritual pilgrimage of self-examination.

She supported herself with “a lot of credit-card debt.” In the end, she discovered her true calling. She cohosts a podcast, “A Year Ago Today,” and is a life coach who helps others unlock their creative potential, a path that feels true to her in way that nothing else has.

“I think that the recession was an incredible gift for me, because had the economy been better and had I landed a job right away, my path would have been totally different, and I am grateful for what it was,” says Fowler. “I would have gotten to where I am anyway. But maybe it would have taken me longer or been more traumatic.”

“ I still thought maybe the rules didn’t apply to me. [were] seeing out there.”

Gai knew he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of finance and that he wanted to work in a friendly, supportive work environment. Rasiel connected him with a new investment firm in Charlotte called Global Endowment Management. The firm was small compared to the major Wall Street banks and far from the prestige lent by New York. But Gai felt an instant kinship with the staff of around twenty during his interview process.

“I had the opportunity to meet with every person at the company, and there wasn’t a single person I didn’t feel comfortable talking to,” says Gai. “That was what drove my decision to join them.”

He joined the firm in July 2009 as an investment analyst and immediately saw the advantages. Far removed from the uncertainty the major banks were still undergoing and deeply enmeshed in the company’s mission, Gai found himself growing in a way he never would had he been pigeonholed into a specific role at a massive company.

“I could see how a company is built from the ground,” says Gai. “The great thing about joining this small company [was] that it actually has very broad coverage in terms of projects. As a young analyst, I got to work on pretty much everything.”

For Fowler, things started shifting when she also found a job that required her to multitask across a wide range of responsibilities. In 2011, she landed a job with Gabrielle Hamilton, a best-selling author and owner of the acclaimed Prune restaurant in New York. There, as Hamilton’s personal assistant and the restaurant’s manager, Fowler handled varied responsibilities.

“It was the biggest learning curve of my life,” says Fowler. “I think that I grew more in that four years probably than I had the whole time I was at Duke.”

She worked with Chef Hamilton for four years but struck out on her own in 2015. This time, she turned inward and spent CERTAINTY: After years of instability, Tyla Fowler has found her path.

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ettled in on Wall Street, Glover is working his way up at JP Morgan. Although he has a secure position with the bank and has become an executive director in equity sales, he finds that the recession is still affecting his work.

“It shaped my approach to my job. It made me more competitive,” says Glover. “It made me appreciate the seat that I had, and that’s never gone away.”

Gai also found an appreciation for his work stemming from the challenges of the recession. The security of a small firm and the immersion in business fundamentals shaped his decisions in novel ways. From that, he’s created an opportunity that melds his interests with his skills.

“It was probably one of the best things that happened to me,” says Gai. “I got to discover what I truly wanted to do within financial services and outside of financial services.”

After working in Charlotte for nearly two years, he moved to New York for a three-year stint with another securities firm.

In 2013, he cofounded Stockfuse, a virtual stock-trading game that helps companies find and recruit talent outside the traditional Ivy League business schools.

The Class of 2009 experienced an upheaval in the country’s social and economic fabric not seen in decades, and it made them more introspective, more values-driven, more competitive than they would have imagined themselves ever becoming. Large swathes of their generation may never recover the promise of pre-recession America. But for some, the Great Recession shifted the measures with which they gauge their lives and spurred them into a deeper awareness of their place in the world.

For Gai, the realizations and changes that started that September afternoon over a simple burger are still unfolding.

“The experience of 2009 taught me that things can unravel, for lack of a better word, in a very rapid fashion,” he says.

“It’s much better to be super-flexible and be very open-minded about other opportunities.” n Adamek is a writer who lives and works in Durham.

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ForeverDuke

On the inside looking out

With its voyeuristic theme, Dan Mallory’s first novel is a best seller, making him a sudden celebrity by another name.

BY ROBERT J. BLIWISE

FDCONNECTIONS

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rom a curious interplay between an imagined window and a real window, Dan Mallory ’01 conceived The Woman in the Window.

The debut novel, he’s happy to point out, is the first in twelve years to enter The New York Times best-seller list at number one. There are deals with publishers in forty countries, along with a movie deal. There are quotes from celebrity authors (Stephen King among them): “a noir for the new millennium”; “totally original”; “a dark, twisty confection.”

But there’s the reluctant embrace of his own celebrity, as with the blandly simple, gender-neutral, and conveniently invented name on the book, A.J. Finn. That’s A.J. Finn, and not Dan Mallory, who’s posing for a selfie alongside a London Tube promotional poster, who’s on Facebook and Twitter showing off the cover in its international representations: Dutch. French.

Icelandic. Serbian.

“This just seems to be the way I’m wired,” Mallory says. “I couldn’t be happier not to see my name written all over this book. An Australian paper recently wrote something like, ‘Daniel Mallory’s debut thriller is the hottest book in the world.’

And I thought, ‘Ugh, it’s not mine. It’s A.J. Finn’s. Leave my name out of it.’ ”

Jimmy Stewart: ‘I can smell trouble. You look out the window. You see things you shouldn’t.’ ” Which brings up a question Mallory gets a lot.

“Do New Yorkers really leave their blinds up, leave their curtains unclosed?” He says yes. “I think it’s because we live in one of the world’s most populous and densely compacted cities. So in order to get by every day, in order to ford these vast streams of human traffic, we switch into ‘oblivious mode.’ I don’t expect people on the sidewalk to look at me any more than I find myself looking at them.”

Unexpectedly or not, the central figure in Rear Window, who is confined by a broken leg, is checking out his neighbors. So is Anna Fox, in the book, who is confined by a broken psyche. She’s agoraphobic, a housebound recluse consumed with self-medicating, drinking, tuning in to old movies, and watching, always watching. Mallory mentions another cinematic inspiration, Gaslight, in which a woman is slowly manipulated by her husband into believing she’s going insane. An apparently unreliable narrator, then, drives Mallory’s story: Did Anna see what she thought she saw? Does she even have a grasp on reality?

Particularly at this cultural moment, having a woman as his lead character, a profoundly complicated character at that, seems auspicious. “Hitchcock in movies like North by Northwest

The Woman in the Window is built on a hundred easily chewable chapters, with rapid-fire, taut, jittery sentences seeming to race to some deadly finish. One chapter’s opening: “Down in the kitchen, drops of rain popping against the window, I pour more merlot into a tumbler. A long swig. I needed that.”

Every story needs an origin, and here it’s pure voyeurism. As Mallory recalls, one night, from his living-room sofa, he was watching the classic Hitchcock film Rear Window. Then, “I caught this light in my peripheral vision.” It was his neighbor turning on a lamp. She was settling herself into an armchair and aiming the remote at a TV. MYSTERIES UPON MYSTERIES: Meanwhile the cinematic Did the book’s main character action was picking up: “I see what she thought she saw? hear Thelma Ritter chiding

Some in Mallory’s cohort in student theater have used that experience as a professional platform. Among them:

and The Man Who Knew Too Much placed men into situations where no one believed them and their lives were on the line,” Mallory says. “But women, in general, have a much harder time being taken seriously. One of the abiding frustrations for me about this genre is that women are portrayed as weak, or passive, or reactive. They fret about men. They rely upon men.

They orbit men. That’s not how most women are. Not the women I know anyway.”

As for Anna: She’s “a mess.” But she’s also self-reliant—“not a damsel in distress.”

From his apartment in Lower Manhattan, Mallory spent a year writing the novel, toggling between “my writer brain and my editor brain,” as he puts it. His day job was vice president and executive editor with William Morrow, the publishing

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Yunghi Kim

“A writer’s job is, aptly enough, bipolar.”

Milly Sanders ’99, writer and actor: Inconceivable, Death Factory, The Removals DUKE MAGAZINE

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Charles Aitken ’01, actor: The Knick, Sleepy Hollow, Madam Secretary 46 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

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plays. He also started his own theater company and directed a production that included Paul Aronson ’00, now a pediatric-emergency medicine specialist at Yale. “While Dan certainly wanted the end product to be a success—it was, because of his leadership and directing—he also prioritized making the experience special for each of us,” Aronson says. “It is the same principle he carries in the social environment. Whenever we were together at Duke, Dan made each of us feel like the most important person.”

Arcadia, the mind-bending and time-traveling work by Tom Stoppard, provided Mallory’s favorite acting role. Jeffery West, a former theater instructor who directed Arcadia, recalls him as a student who loved wrestling with ideas, and for whom a play that presented complex theme after complex theme, from landscape gardening to Romantic poetry to computer algorithms, seemed “perfect.”

In a year-in-review assessment, The Chronicle declared that as a student actor, Mallory was in a class by himself: “As the brilliant mathematician Valentine, Mallory’s performance was nothing short of astonishing. Why? Because he played an extremely difficult role with wit, ferocity, and passion. Because he could deliver a dazzling monologue, fire off clever one-liners, and cry all in the same scene. Because he looks like a cross between [onetime James Bond actor] Pierce Brosnan and Hugh Grant, only taller.”

Mallory majored in English, and he recalls a class taught by Tom Ferraro, who delighted in obliterating the distinctions between high and low literature. “To be able to enroll in a class in which an esteemed professor places The Godfather on the syllabus—indeed, it enjoyed a privileged place on the syllabus—was a pretty formative experience for me.”

Under English professor Buford Jones, both Mallory and Eva Sayre ’01 worked on senior theses; Mallory’s project was a long work of fiction. The two would push each other via Instant Messenger through late nights of writing, “fueled on my side by techno music and on his side by a steady diet of gummy worms,” says Sayre, now a Berlin-based executive with an “adtech” company. “As his unofficial editor, I spilled plenty of red ink for unimportant grammar edits, but I could never write anything other than ‘!’ for content. Even then, he had an extraordinary ability to create an immersive scene with a tinge of melancholy, to sketch deep captivating characters, and to sprinCourtesy @AJFinnbooks/@misterglister

house that would take on the book—though, initially, with no clue about the real identity of the writer. (He’s given up the editorial position and is now pretty much writing and speaking about writing.)

His personal story can’t be separated from books and more books. One of his earliest memories is reading the Hardy Boys, Agatha Christie, and Sherlock Holmes. (Above his writing desk, which was once his parents’ dining-room table, is a print of Holmes by Sidney Paget, taken from The Strand Magazine.) “I started reading at a very young age, although I didn’t start speaking until a worryingly late age,” he says.

He spent summers in East Hampton at a twelve-bedroom Victorian house—he calls it a “borderline” candidate for condemnation—that went back generations in his mother’s family. It was filled with books by mystery writers.

A key feature of his current Chelsea quarters is the built-in bookshelves. Now those shelves house an “eclectic” assortment of genres and authors: Maritime histories. Books about dogs. A Charles Dickens assortment. Sherlock Holmes.

Works by Andrea Camilleri, a Sicilian detective writer. “And lots of books about poisoning.”

A SELFIE MOMENT: Before his college years, the family Checking out the moved to Charlotte, and it was there promotional poster that movies entered Mallory’s creative in the London Tube consciousness. He lived down the block from a theater that, on weekends, would present film-noir retrospectives, classic-movie nights, and Hitchcock marathons. He would plant himself in the front row.

Eventually he would come to admire older movies for their stylistic and sophisticated look and tone. He also discerned a narrative power that allowed them to establish characters and build suspense. “It was a way for me to feel sort of cultured, I guess.”

At Duke, he found culture as a film reviewer for The Chronicle.

He showed the depth of a thinker, even as he spun out sentences far removed from the propulsive language of his novel. His take on Shadow of the Vampire, for example, was that deploying “diabolical wit,” the script “equates the monstrous narcissism of the vampire—who saps the life of others to sustain his own existence beyond the boundaries of reason and necessity, and whose rotting exterior fails to incriminate him in mirrors—with the storied arrogance of movie divas.”

Theater was the other important involvement; he acted in six

Liz Simons ’01, comedian, writer, actor: Broad City

Paul Downs ’04, actor: Broad City, Time Traveling Bong, Rough Night

kle wit like a wink on the page.”

Mallory landed the role of student speaker at graduation; sprinkled throughout his remarks were thoughts on “attitude.” Today he says he doesn’t do well around “colorless” people; he saw his mission at graduation to, in a sense, shock his fellow students out of any colorlessness. “I was exhorting my peers, so many of whom I still remember very vividly as vibrant personalities, to take their zest and their idiosyncrasies into the real world. I didn’t want to see them, or indeed myself, whitewashed by life outside the ivory tower.”

But his own ivory tower stint coincided with what was first diagnosed as depression and then, just three years ago, as bipolar disorder-type 2. (He says a new medication regimen has “significantly improved” his well-being.) On the bipolar scale, that means the emotional highs are not so high, even as the lows are very low. In his view, illness has deepened his empathy and his self-discipline—traits that “turn out to be very useful for a writer.” He practices yoga, structures a reading routine divided between fiction and nonfiction, and, he says, never even considered smoking or drinking. He talks about identifying with individuals who in some sense are marginalized—who feel physically imperfect, maladroit, hapless, or hopeless. He has been all of those things, he says.

The experience of writing the book was “purgative” and “reassuring,” in his words. As the action in the book gets under way, Anna is “not in such a great place,” he says. “I wanted to help her improve herself.”

In conversation, Mallory is comfortably discursive; on the author’s circuit, he’s fine even around giddy questioning about, say, which A-List actors might vie for the movie lead. Still he’s “constitutionally an intensely private and introverted person,” in his self-description. “That will never change. But I’ve come to appreciate that in order to get more out of life, I need to put myself out there more.

“A writer’s job is, aptly enough, bipolar. Some days you’re shackled to your desk in your pajamas, rummaging around inside your own brain. Other days you dress up, speak in front of crowds, and make small talk whilst signing autographs. It’s

Julie Foh ’02, assistant professor, voice and speech: Penn State School of Theater

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t

“A. J. Finn is outgoing and sociable in a way that Dan Mallory isn’t.”

highly performative. So I simply shift myself into performance mode. This is where my alter ego proves so helpful: A.J. Finn is outgoing and sociable in a way that Dan Mallory isn’t.”

Right after Duke, Mallory remained in education mode rather than performance mode. He headed off to Oxford to earn a Ph.D. in English. (His British fixation began when he was a Duke junior in an Oxford study-abroad program; today in his living room he displays a map of London in 1880 and a drawing of New College, Oxford.) His dissertation was on Patricia Highsmith, best known for The Talented Mr. Ripley. Tom Ripley is fueled by resentment and rule-breaking; as a child, he steals a loaf of bread and devours it greedily, “feeling that the world owed a loaf of bread to him, and more.”

The dependably disciplined Mallory considers himself “very rules-conscious and law-abiding,” and so, for him, Highsmith’s Ripley is “thrilling and disturbing in equal measure.” He says, “When you read a Sherlock Holmes story, you know that by the end, the innocent will be redeemed or rewarded, the guilty will be punished, and justice will be upheld or restored. Highsmith subverts all that. Through some alchemy, she persuades us to root for sociopaths. Tom Ripley is a bad guy. He’s a murderer.

He commits the ultimate transgression over and over. And yet, we root for him. We want him to get away with it.”

For four years post-Oxford, Mallory spearheaded a crimeand-thriller publishing division at Sphere, a British mass-market imprint; Agatha Christie is among its published authors. With his multiple avenues into the genre, he thought it “might be quite fun” to write a novel. “Authors seem to enjoy their lives.”

His next novel—and he’s already hard at work at it—is set in San Francisco. It features three female narrators. There are curious doings in an old Victorian mansion, again with colliding psyches, perceptions, and pathologies. “A writer is a voyeur,” he says. “But so is a reader. That’s why we read, presumably—to commune with others, even if they’re fictional. To experience their lives, to enjoy vicariously their adventures. And not only is that an act of voyeurism. It’s an act of empathy.”

With his love of a gripping mystery, Mallory can sound a lot like the character he played, back at Duke, in Arcadia. Valentine, the philosopher-mathematician, reflects on what’s unknowable through science, though not through art: “The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about— clouds, daffodils, waterfalls, and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.”

As Valentine might have said, and as Dan Mallory—or A.J. Finn—would surely say, the human mind is the greatest mystery.

Then a window appears and a story emerges from the shadows. n

Talya Klein ’02, director, writer, producer: Duke theater studies visiting artist DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke Newsmakers Jennifer Baltimore J.D. ’92, senior vice president at Universal Music Group, was named to Billboard’s 2017 Women in Music, a list of the most powerful executives in the industry.

Emily Vuxton M.E.M. ’11 has been named policy director at the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana in New Orleans.

Courtesy Universal Music Group

Troye Fox

Sarah Mustillo A.M. ’99, Ph.D. ’01 was appointed the dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters.

Internationally recognized zoologist Gay Reinartz ’75, M.S. ’81 is working to promote the conservation of bonobos and their habitat through the Bonobo & Congo Biodiversity Initiative.

Classic Film Flickr CC

Suhani Jalota ’16 was named to the inaugural classes of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, which will provide funding for her Ph.D. in health policy at the Stanford School of Medicine.

Allison Shelley for The Texas Tribune

Getty Images

The late chemist Joseph Shivers Jr. ’42, A.M. ’43, Ph.D. ’46, who invented spandex, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Former Duke basketball player Gerald Henderson ’15 collaborates with former UNC-CH rival Tyler Hansbrough on a new podcast, “Tobacco Road.”

Comedian and actor Ken Jeong ’90 has joined the ensemble of Goosebumps 2, based on R.L. Stine’s popular book series.

Actress Retta Sirleaf ’92, left, has a leading role in NBC’s new series Good Girls.

48 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Rahil Briggs ’97 is the new national director of the HealthySteps program at Zero to Three, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring babies and toddlers have a strong start in life.

Courtesy Jacksonville Jaguars

Josh Stringer/NBC

Nan Palmero

Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett J.D. ’92, A.M. ’92, LL.M. ’16 was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Former Duke golfer Julian Suri ’13 partnered with the Jacksonville Jaguars as the NFL team’s official ambassador.

1.2.3.

QUESTIONS FOR...

Chris Hildreth

Bob Shepard

Stelfanie Williams ’98 was named Community College President of the Year by the North Carolina State Board of Community Colleges.

Jon Enberg ’02 is the general manager of the real-estate start-up Opendoor.

Kara Medoff Barnett ’00, executive director of the American Ballet Theatre, and Duke announced a three-year partnership that will bring professional dancers to campus for residencies beginning in 2019. —Sarah Haas ’15

7

Have news to share about your achievements and milestones? Submit a class note and read your classmates’ latest news by logging into alumni.duke.edu.

I usually interview alumni for this column, but you’re a special exception. You certainly have shown a loyalty, pride, and energy that might even rival mine.

What has been the most rewarding part of your job?

It’s actually connecting alumni back to the university in ways that I think are mutually beneficial. That can be key volunteer roles; it can be investing, as in donating money. One of the things I like about the fundraising aspect of my job is the bottom-line measurability.

Last year, having raised about $580 million in cash and comparing that to the annual cash amount at the beginning of the [Duke Forward] campaign—the bottom-line increase in philanthropic dollars and in involvement is what I’m most proud of. It’s been a wonderful growth, and it’s been great to be a part of that.

You’ve raised an impressive amount of money to benefit Duke students and alumni. What motivates you as you lead these fundraising efforts?

Jim Wallace

Kimberly Hoover J.D. ’83 has been appointed to the board of directors for Lambda Literary, the global leader advancing LGBTQ literature.

Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, talks with Bob Shepard, her longtime colleague and Duke’s vice president for alumni affairs and development since 2004. Shepard, who is set to retire this summer, arrived at the university in 1995 as executive director of development; he was instrumental both in the Campaign for Duke that wrapped up in 2004 and the Duke Forward campaign that ended in 2017.

If you’re here as long as I have, you can really see the

positive impact of the dollars over time. That has everything to do with financial aid and how meaningful it is for students. It brings students from diverse backgrounds to Duke. There is also a direct impact on the student body from new and renovated buildings and other programmatic support. You really can see, over time, the rewards— the immense benefit—that philanthropy brings to this place, and that keeps you going.

What kind of qualities are needed to be successful in this role?

And what are your final thoughts as you get ready to leave?

A deft touch across campus.

A love of building relationships, not only across campus but with alumni of all backgrounds. A keen appreciation of Duke’s history and trajectory.

No university is without its warts or its challenges. But Duke is a very special place.

If you have the job that I’ve had, you’re working at the best university in the country because of the loyalty and passion alumni have for Duke and the outstanding students who want to matriculate here. It’s a privilege.

And that’s why I don’t worry about finding a great successor. This is, in many ways, a plum job, and it’s because of the university.

—Edited by Lucas Hubbard

DUKE MAGAZINE

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Courtesy Mississippi Export Railroad

ForeverDuke

Putting it on the line

ON TRACK: Luce believes that through technology, railroads can innovate and lead.

At just twenty-nine, Kate Luce is conducting business at the top of her family’s railroad.

A

s the youngest CEO in railroad history, Kate Luce M.B.A. ’15 has big dreams for her short line: rebranding the way railroads are perceived by the public—often as “providing poor customer service and not being reliable”—and becoming a leader in experimenting with new technology.

And she thinks she can get there.

As what is known as a “short line” in railroad terms, the Mississippi Export Railroad is a family business. Luce’s great-great grandfather purchased the railroad—formerly named A&M—in 1922, saving it from bankruptcy and preserving it as one of the 500 lines that are part of the original U.S. railroad network.

Based in Moss Point, Mississippi, it stretches forty-two miles north to south across the state and connects to larger railways.

Luce had long dreamed of leading the railroad but didn’t think her opportunity would come so soon. Shortly after Luce graduated from Fuqua, a family illness shifted priorities for Luce’s father—then the railroad’s CEO—and he decided to step down.

“He told me, ‘If you want to come do this, the time is now.

Otherwise, I have someone else in mind to hire,’ ” Luce says.

“So, the time is now. I’m excited to be here.”

She began in customer service at MSE; before long, she was 50 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

behind the wheel as a conductor, dispatching trains as a trainmaster, and working as the manager of transportation, all before becoming the president and CEO when many of her peers would have been in the early stage of a career.

Being privately owned and operated gives the railroad the freedom to experiment and innovate.

On her list? Deploying the self-driving train.

The first fully autonomous train run was completed this past summer by the Australian line Rio Tinto, and Luce wants to see a similar movement in the U.S. “A truck on the road—it can go forward, it can go backward, it can go side to side. A train can only go where its track will take it,” she says. “I believe that our industry needs to get up and be on the forefront of testing autonomous vehicles.”

Her vision doesn’t end there. Luce is looking for new ways to use technology to track deliveries for customers, expand business via the kinds of cargo her trains carry, and better steward the environment. (Trucks account for 23 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, while trains account for only 2 percent, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.)

“I’m learning every day—and that is what I love to do,” Luce says. “I’ve been given a great opportunity. Now the question is—what can I do with it?” —Christina Holder

A creative spirit

Pamela Green’s love of the arts has led to a lifetime of supporting artists.

A

s she received a national industry award naming her Agent-Manager of the Year, Pamela Green ’85 listed three gestures that came from others and that aided her journey to becoming president and CEO of her own agency, Durham-based PMG Arts Management. She asked her colleagues to be mindful of those gestures as they work with others: affirmation (for those with potential), she said, the benefit of the

Christina Holder

that have real impact and importance.”

Green’s art fervor developed as a youth growing up in the Boston area. She loved attending concerts, and on the radio, she’d constantly hear the name of Al Haymon, a black promoter, associated with the shows. “I was always really curious about how that worked,” she says. “I’d think, ‘How do you put someone on a stage, and sell tickets and make money?’ ” At Duke, she fed that interest. She did “everything but appear onstage,” including lighting for the Dance Black company; helping to mount shows for Karamu, the black theater company; and collaborating with Hoof ‘N’ Horn on The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Yet though she added theater to her studies, her focus was public policy—which had an arts-administration track—and becoming a child psychologist.

Until her then-boyfriend, now husband, Isaac Green ’83, in hopes of keeping her in North Carolina for the summer, told her about the American Dance Festival and encouraged her to apply for a job.

She worked with the festival two summers. She was on her way.

REPRESENT: Green has run PMG Arts Management for twenty-five years.

The ADF relationship continues; Green also works doubt (teach what they need to know), and second with Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, Philadanco, and chances (hire them again).

Camille A. Brown & Dancers, and she proudly developed The Clothesline Muse, a theatrical production That acknowledgement of grace, a desire to pass it with jazz artist Nnenna Freelon. At its core, her job on, and a commitment to pulling others up, are, in is marketing, but in full, she’s about supporting her part, what earned Green the honor. Those qualities artists’ ideas and bodies of work and helping them are also reflective of her unyielding support of meaningful art and diversity, according to Aaron Greenget more work. wald, director of Duke Performances. “She’s very de“I represent artists—what they want and what voted to her artists, but she’s not precious,” he says. people bringing them in want—so there’s compromise. There’s a lot of care and compassion in the way “That’s the bad rap art can get, that it can be kind of I do business.” —Adrienne Johnson Martin rarified. Pamela tries to support and work on things

DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke

#TheDoersProfile

These Blue Devil alumni go green when it comes to infusing environmental, social, and financial responsibility into their work.

Robert Bonnie M.E.M.F. ’94,

former undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rubenstein Fellow exploring conservation in rural America

Muhammad Shehryar A.M. ’12, founder of Harness Energy, a renewable energy start-up

Carla Norwood ’97, M.E.M. ’01

, executive director of Working Landscapes, a non-profit that works to create more sustainable livelihoods for rural North Carolinians 52 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Courtney Lareau M.B.A. ’12, M.E.M. ’12, global

sustainable sourcing insights manager, Mars Petcare

Anuj Rakyan ’98, founder of Raw Pressery, India’s largest cold-pressed juice brand, which recycles bottles into uniforms for underprivileged schoolchildren

John Miller ’05

, owner of Flywheel Development, a realestate company that follows the latest sustainable practices

Stephen Hawthornthwaite ’92

, cofounder and CEO of Rothy’s, a footwear brand that uses fibers made from recycled plastic water bottles

Emma Loewe ’15

, sustainability editor at mindbodygreen.com

Ben Abram ’07

, cofounder of Modern Energy, an investment company that invests in green projects

Shelly Li ’15 and Arun Karottu ’15, cofounders of Smart Metals, an electronic waste-recycling company

DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke

THENNOW

Retro ““There’s always that question, when people see women climbing. Is she neglecting the other areas in life she should be or is responsible for?”

—Tamara Kissane ’95, discussing her adaptation of an Ibsen play

“You’re smart enough to raise a human being so you can figure out how to look good with limited time and money.”

—Sheon Wilson ’86, on why busy moms shouldn’t give up on style

“And so, as I raised my right hand to take the oath of office as lieutenant governor of Virginia, I had in my breast pocket the papers that freed my threegreats-ago grandfather.”

—Justin Fairfax ’00, on learning history as he made history

54 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

History on the radio

The campus station broadcast the Silent Vigil from start to finish. | By Amy McDonald

F

ifty years ago, on Sunday, April 7, erage was the most comprehensive, the most 1968, a recording of Martin Luther objective, and—at times—the only coverKing Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” age of what Paul R. Conroy ’68, A.M. ’70, speech played over loudspeakers to WDBS’s program director for 1967-68, called 500 Duke students assembled on what is now the “most far reaching event in Duke history.”

One month later, WDBS’s station manager Abele Quad. This was the first day of the Silent Vigil, organized in response to the assas- gave copies of the broadcasts to the Duke Unisination of King a few days before. The stu- versity Libraries, knowing that the tapes would dents had decamped from President Douglas be essential to any future research on the vigil.

M. Knight’s house in Duke Forest, which they These recordings, now part of the Duke University Archives Collections, have recently been had occupied since the evening of April 5.

This local response to a national tragedy was digitized and made available online.

This aural history of the vigil begins on April recorded and broadcast, too, by then-campus radio station WDBS. The station broadcast 5. As students and faculty begin to respond live and around the clock starting with King’s to King’s assassination, the recordings reveal assassination on April 4 and ending on April differing courses of action and differing opin10, the final day on the quad. The staff of SOLIDARITY: Students, administrators, and others—including trustee WDBS were acutely Wright Tisdale J.D. ’71, behind and to left of woman in the front row— sing “We Shall Overcome” after addressing student demands. aware that their cov-

Duke University Archives

ions resolving into one action: a since the students were boycotting Duke’s dining halls in supmarch, on a rainy, cold evening, port of the striking workers. The to Knight’s house with a list of demands and a commitment to stay crowd grew from around 500 on until those demands were met.

April 7 to 1,046 on April 8 to WDBS carried political science 1,427 on April 9. professor John Strange’s plea “that Speakers—among them political science professor Samuel we remain together, and that we DuBois Cook, Duke’s first (and, stand and let this moment be at the time, only) African-Ameria witness to the fact that we are can faculty member—visited the concerned, that we take every step quad to bolster the demonstrapossible to end discrimination at tors’ spirits. When Cook spoke this university, and in this town, on April 10, he had just returned and in this country.” from representing Duke at King’s The discipline and organization were intentional: These funeral. His speech, recorded by were tips passed on by Duke’s WDBS, was one of the vigil’s Afro-American Society, whose high points: “I was uplifted by carefully executed study-in at the fact that you had made his LIVE EVENT: On the scene with protestors Knight’s office had taken place in mission your very own, and I’m November 1967. They showed a sure that Martin Luther King body of activists who were seriwould be proud, mighty proud ous, respectful, and determined. of you. Your vigil here wiped my The station broadcast On that first day, protesters tears and helped to sustain me live and around the clock refined and tightened their deand provided even at a tragic mostarting with King’s mands (including an upgraded ment roses for my soul.” minimum raise for Duke emThe WDBS broadcast features assassination on April 4 ployees and Knight’s resignation singing and music. The students and ending on April 10, from the segregated Hope Valley sang “We Shall Not Be Moved” Country Club), and requestat Knight’s house. On the quad, the final day on the quad. ed critical support for campus daily rallies before negotiations workers, who were planning to with the administration resumed strike. Between 200 and 300 students marched to and enincluded “Kumbaya” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Even tered Knight’s house. The first night of negotiations with singer Joan Baez—scheduled for a concert in Baldwin Auditorium—stopped by to take questions from the demonKnight ended around 1 a.m., without much progress. A strators. Toward the end of the day on April 10, Wright WDBS reporter described the scene: “Although this is a Tisdale J.D. ’71, chair of the board of trustees, shared a very, very large house, last night when people finally went statement addressing the vigil’s two labor-related demands to sleep, they were sleeping everywhere, sleeping on the and then joined hands with the students to sing “We Shall stairs, sleeping on the hard rock, and everything else.”

Overcome.” The next day, the demonstrators voted to end The following day, Knight spoke at a memorial service their vigil on the quad, though with a promise and a plan for King at Duke Chapel—and returned home with an to ensure that Duke would, in the words of religion proescort of 350 more students ready to join the cause. With fessor John D. Sullivan, not go “back to the university that overwhelming numbers of supporters (Knight’s house was was on April 3.” n full) and Knight nearing a health crisis and unable to negotiate, the students reconsidered their strategy and moved— Listen to WDBS’s recordings of the 1968 Silent Vigil at with some dissent—to the West Campus quad. https://repository.duke.edu/dc/silabt.

On the quad, students studied or read silently for fifty minutes of each hour, followed by a ten-minute break; a McDonald is assistant university archivist. class boycott was called. Food was provided by committee,

DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke In Memoriam

1930s

Kathryn Kiker Harris ’35 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Dec. 8, 2017.

Patricia Beall ’38 of Indianapolis, on Nov. 11, 2017.

1940s

Helen Whisnant Martin ’40 of Macon, Ga., on Nov. 23, 2017.

Laban T. Betty ’41 of Asheville, N.C., on Jan. 13, 2018.

Lucy Slade Libby B.S.N. ’42, R.N. ’42 of Annapolis, Md., on Jan. 15, 2018.

Alice Letherman Short R.N. ’42 of Pawley’s Island, S.C., on Dec. 31, 2017.

Louise Reichert Earnhardt ’43 of Fredericksburg, Va., on Jan. 3, 2018.

Helen A. Greenlee Haberneck B.S.N. ’43, R.N. ’43 of Spruce Pine, N.C., on Nov. 17, 2017.

David S. Hubbell ’43, M.D. ’46, H ’47 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on Jan. 11, 2018.

Nancy V. Wrenn ’43 of Asheville, N.C., on Dec. 21, 2017.

Verne F. Bliss ’44, M.F. ’49 of Atlanta, on Dec. 8, 2017.

Walter L. Brown ’45 of Basking Ridge, N.J., on Oct. 29, 2017.

Alan D. Clark ’45 of Vienna, Va., on Dec. 1, 2017.

Willis H. Hodges Jr. M.D. ’45 of Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 23, 2017.

Elizabeth Marks Jennette ’45 of Raleigh, on Nov. 1, 2017.

Gerald W. Lynes ’45 of Rock Hill, S.C., on Dec. 24, 2016.

Mary Super Slovic ’45 of Virginia Beach, Va., on Jan. 5, 2018.

Flora Kurz Ayala B.S.N. ’47 of Lawrenceville, Ga., on Nov. 8, 2017.

Beatrice Mertz Coxey ’47 of Charlotte, on Nov. 20, 2017.

Robert J. Friauf ’47 of Lawrence, Kan., on Dec. 3, 2017.

Bruce K. Goodman ’47 of Arlington Heights, Ill., on Dec. 12, 2017.

Margaret Seay Guistwhite R.N. ’47 of Boca Raton, Fla., on Nov. 18, 2017.

Charlotte Fariss Hartlaub ’47 of Pompton Plains, N.J., on Jan. 1, 2018.

“My hope for Duke is that we never stray from our ethos, our pursuit of excellence or from having outrageous ambitions.”

MANLIO VALDES B.S.E.’88 Bequest to establish a family scholarship for engineering students

GP-2018 Half-page Ad-Spring_F.indd 1

56 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Donald H. Millenson B.S.M.E. ’47 of Garden Grove, Calif., on Nov. 1, 2017.

Frances Airheart Terry ’47 of Bahama, N.C., on Jan. 20, 2018.

Henry R. McKelvie ’48 of Kings Mountain, N.C., on Dec. 24, 2016.

Robert H. Parrish ’48 of Willoughby, Ohio, on Nov. 14, 2017.

Mehrtens G. Chillingworth ’49 of Honolulu, on Nov. 29, 2017.

Robert E. Haines B.S.C.E. ’49 of Crystal Lake, Ill., on Dec. 26, 2017.

George P. Jones III ’49 of Albuquerque, N.M., on Oct. 26, 2017.

Fred Rosen Ph.D. ’49 of La Jolla, Calif., on Oct. 31, 2015.

1950s

William M. Batchelor ’50, B.S.C.E. ’55 of Winston-Salem, on Nov. 5, 2017.

William L. Bennett A.M. ’50, M.Div. ’53 of Wilmington, N.C., on Jan. 11, 2018.

Donald B. Capwell B.S.M.E. ’50 of Tunkhannock, Pa., on Nov. 15, 2017.

James W. Davis ’50 of Wilson, N.C., on Dec. 24, 2017.

Alexander B. McFadden ’50 of Valdosta, Ga., on Nov. 24, 2017.

Barbara Van Houten Pitt ’50 of Blacksburg, Va., on Jan. 9, 2018.

Richard S. Smith ’50 of West Hartford, Conn., on Dec. 18, 2017.

John W. Worthington M.D. ’50 of Rochester, Minn., on Jan. 24, 2018.

Robert M. Borst B.S.C.E. ’51 of Berwyn, Pa., on Nov. 26, 2017.

Robert D. Cook ’51 of Rancho Mirage, Calif., on Nov. 12, 2017.

Lee Johnson ’51 of Wilmington, N.C., on Jan. 21, 2018.

James A. Kennedy ’51 of San Jose, Calif., on Oct. 11, 2017.

Leroy L. McLeod ’51 of Staunton, Va., on Jan. 12, 2018.

Dale D. Pullen ’51 of Naples, Fla., on Nov. 1, 2017.

Ray Graves J.D. ’52 of Lakewood, Wash., on Nov. 21, 2017.

Is your Duke reunion year coming up?

In honor of your reunion, you can make a lasting impact on the people and places you love at Duke through an estate gift.

Estate gifts count in your class’s reunion total and can be a simple and powerful way to support Duke over the long term.

And, you can still access your assets in case you need them.

Create your legacy. giftplanning@duke.edu giving.duke.edu/giftplanning (919) 681-0464

12/14/17 3:22 PM

On view February 22 – July 15, 2018

2001 Campus Drive, Durham

nasher.duke.edu/solidary RIGHT: Sam Gilliam (born 1933). After Glow (detail), 1972. Acrylic and dye pigments on canvas; 6 ft. 2 1⁄4 in. x 8 ft. 4 1⁄4 x 2 inches (188.6 x 254.6 x 5.1 cm). © Sam Gilliam. Courtesy of the artist.

Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection is presented

by The Helis Foundation and organized by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and The Baltimore Museum of Art. Contributing sponsorship is provided by The Lambent Foundation and The Holt Family Foundation.

At the Nasher Museum, this exhibition is made possible by the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions; Ann Chanler and Andrew Scheman; Katie Thorpe Kerr and Terrance I. R. Kerr; and Lisa Lowenthal Pruzan and Jonathan Pruzan.

Virginia A. Courtney Hartley ’52 of Lenoir, N.C., on Nov. 12, 2017.

Sara Sutton Madison ’52 of Sylva, N.C., on Nov. 16, 2017.

Mary Patelidas Mann M.R.E. ’52 of Candler, N.C., on Jan. 3, 2018.

Leonard V. Cherry Ph.D. ’53 of Reno, Nev., on March 19, 2017.

Janet Klostermann Grove A.M. ’53 of Port Washington, N.Y., on Sept. 15, 2017.

David E. Hurst ’53 of Lexington, Ky., on Jan. 13, 2018.

Charles B. Looper ’53 of Selma, Ala., on Jan. 8, 2018.

F. Joseph Mitchell M.Div. ’53, Ph.D. ’62 of Durham, on July 25, 2017.

Mary Jacobs Northrop ’53 of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., on Nov. 25, 2017.

Walter I. Bates ’54 of Wilmington, N.C., on Oct. 14, 2017.

James P. Brown ’54 of Manteo, N.C., on Dec. 23, 2017.

Andrew N. Harper Jr. ’54 of Asheville, N.C., on Jan. 5, 2018.

Joe R. Hipp ’54 of Vilas, N.C., on Nov. 28, 2017.

Donald F. Hunt ’54 of Owls Head, Maine, on Nov. 28, 2017.

George H. Porter III ’54, M.D. ’58, H ’59 of New Orleans, on Nov. 17, 2017.

Fred W. Shaffer ’54 of Philadelphia, on Jan. 1, 2018.

Charles P. Shaw Jr. B.S.M.E. ’54 of Newark, Del., on Nov. 14, 2017.

Samuel B. Thompson ’54 of Wilmington, N.C., on Dec. 11, 2017.

William R. Barnard ’55 of Greensboro, N.C., on Nov. 5, 2017.

Kendall M. Beckman Jr. ’55 of Melbourne, Fla., on Dec. 10, 2017.

Sadie Foy Albert Brooks ’55 of Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Dec. 21, 2017.

G. Sidney Callahan Jr. ’55 of Orlando, Fla., on Nov. 30, 2017.

Cater Snow Clay ’55 of Macon, Ga., on Dec. 27, 2017.

Beverley Furlow-Cleary ’55 of Chattanooga, Tenn., on Dec. 24, 2017.

Norlen Asbury Holliday ’55 of Sarasota, Fla., on Dec. 29, 2017.

Elizabeth Romanstine Howard Div. ’55 of Clarksville, Tenn., on Aug. 11, 2016.

The Iron Dukes is known for building champions in athletic competition, in the classroom, and in the community. To continue our trajectory of excellence, we must continue to provide the necessary support for the future successes of our su world class student-athletes.

Now is the time to make investments that will build champions. @theirondukes The Iron Dukes The Iron Dukes theirondukes Daniel Jones ´20, Football, Redshirt Sophomore

Mia Gyau´21, Women’s Soccer, Sophomore

The Iron Dukes Office, 367 Scott Family Athletics Performance Center, Box 90542, Durham, NC 27708-0542 (919) 613-7575

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YOUTH PROGRAMS @DukeYouthPrograms @DukeYouthPrograms We provide open enrollment with no application requirement. Just head to: LEARNMORE.DUKE.EDU\YOUTH2018 Youth@Duke.EDU • (919) 684–6259 DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke Betty Kelly Sterling Cert. P.T. ’55 of Twin Falls, Idaho, on Nov. 24, 2017.

R. Bain Alexander Jr. ’56 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 11, 2018.

H. Dillard Bass ’56 of Bremerton, Wash., on Sept. 4, 2017.

Charles N. Griffin Jr. ’56 of Mount Pleasant, S.C., on Jan. 12, 2018.

Albert W. Hughes Jr. ’56 of Sandy Springs, Ga., on Jan. 5, 2018.

Susan A. Strader McCutcheon ’56 of Columbia, S.C., on Nov. 9, 2017.

William R. McLean B.S.M.E. ’56 of Marietta, Ga., on Jan. 6, 2018.

Donald W. Rooker ’56, M.D. ’59 of Atlanta, on Jan. 11, 2018.

Harold E. Turner ’56 of Tryon, N.C., on Jan. 3, 2018.

Shirley Howe Adams B.S.N. ’57 of Tampa, Fla., on Dec. 24, 2017.

Nicholas M. Kredich ’57, H ’64 of Durham, on Nov. 7, 2017.

Robert T. McGaughey ’57 of Farmville, N.C., on Nov. 9, 2017.

Virginia Atkinson Stevens ’57 of Blowing Rock, N.C., on Dec. 6, 2017.

Robert P. Stewart ’57 of Pittsburgh, on Nov. 13, 2017.

Wayne Woodlief ’57 of Boston, on Aug. 12, 2017.

Polly Price Yarnall ’57 of Hillsboro, Ore., on Dec. 24, 2017.

Paul W. Bollman Jr. ’58 of Lake Kiowa, Texas, on Aug. 27, 2016.

Arlick L. Brockwell Jr. ’58 of Petersburg, Va., on Dec. 18, 2017.

J. Rex Davis ’58, M.F. ’59 of Asheville, N.C., on Nov. 16, 2017.

Phil J. Dupler ’58 of Naples, Fla., on Oct. 5, 2017.

George E. Maha H ’58 of Bradenton, Fla., on Nov. 18, 2017.

David W. Austin B.S.M.E. ’59 of Raleigh, on Dec. 11, 2017.

Milton P. Brown Jr. Ph.D. ’59 of Memphis, Tenn., on Nov. 10, 2017.

Peter J. Denker B.S.E.E. ’59 of Dallas, on Oct. 27, 2017.

Virginia L. Ferguson McDaniel B.S.N. ’59 of Richmond, Va., on Nov. 15, 2017.

Richard V. Shanklin III B.S.M.E. ’59 of McLean, Va., on Jan. 17, 2018.

Richard L. Weed ’59 of Charlotte, Vt., on Dec. 17, 2017.

1960s

Marcia Dunning Greene ’60 of Princeton, Mass., on Nov. 25, 2017.

John W. Holt E ’60 of Oxford, Miss., on May 3, 2017.

Tory B. Horton ’60 of Southington, Conn., on Nov. 28, 2017.

James W. McElhaney ’60, LL.B. ’62 of Albuquerque, N.M., on Oct. 20, 2017.

Robert F. Moates ’60 of Julian, N.C., on Dec. 31, 2017.

George W. Sims Cert. P.T. ’60 of Naples, Fla., on Dec. 19, 2017.

William F. Torrey M.F. ’60 of St. Simons Island, Ga., on Jan. 14, 2018.

Elizabeth Wheeler Allen B.S.N. ’61 of Lakeland, Fla., on Nov. 27, 2017.

William C. Butterfield H ’61, H ’66 of Portland, Ore., on Oct. 8, 2017.

David A. Giordano H ’61 of Sarasota, Fla., on Nov. 30, 2017.

Eugene R. Kelly H ’61 of Boynton Beach, Fla., on Sept. 19, 2017.

Ruth E. Shogren A.M. ’61 of Sterling Heights, Mich., on Nov. 17, 2015.

Louise Winget Simons ’61 of Yellow Springs, Ohio, on Oct. 8, 2017.

Suzanne Porter Burow ’62 of Kingsport, Tenn., on Dec. 22, 2017.

Louis E. Pease ’62 of Hiawassee, Ga., on Dec. 8, 2017.

Carrie N. Smith M.Ed. ’62 of Martinsville, Va., on Dec. 20, 2017.

Harry M. Deal Jr. ’63 of Taylorsville, N.C., on Dec. 16, 2017.

Graham C. Huston ’63 of Pinehurst, N.C., on Jan. 10, 2018.

Ronald W. Jokerst M.F. ’63 of Pardeeville, Wis., on Jan. 4, 2018.

May White Moore ’63 of Oak Island, N.C., on Nov. 28, 2017.

William H. Vogel B.Div. ’63 of Louisville, Ky., on Jan. 4, 2018.

Keith W. Geiger ’64 of Montgomery, Ala., on Nov. 9, 2017.

Philip R. Palisoul ’65 of Carlsbad, Calif., on Aug. 11, 2016.

Fred A. Windover II J.D. ’65 of Boston, on Dec. 4, 2017.

Phil C. Woolwine M.F. ’65 of Seattle, on March 24, 2017.

Clelmer K. Bartell Ph.D. ’66 of New Orleans, on Nov. 6, 2017.

Jump-Start College Admissions

Alumni Admissions Forum

JUNE JUN J JU UN UNE U NE E2 2121-2 21 21-22, 1-2 -22 -22, 22, 2 2 201 2018 20 018 18 8

Information sessions, panel discussions, and a chance to compare notes with other families

Join our on-campus conference for parents and children with college in their futures. Hear a panel of admissions experts discuss: • searching for the right school • setting your timetable • the applications process • essays and interviews • financial aid • testing Our in-depth format presents the admissions process in two sessions: JUNE 21: Explore Duke – Optional Information Sessions JUNE 22: Jump-Start the Admissions Process

More information and registration:

alumni.duke.edu/admissions-forum 60 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Lynn Bloemeke Foltz ’66 of San Marcos, Calif., on Nov. 28, 2017.

Spence W. Perry J.D. ’66 of McConnellsburg, Pa., on Nov. 11, 2017.

Roy V. Bolyard Jr. B.Div. ’67, Th.M. ’68 of Summerfield, N.C., on Nov. 13, 2017.

Sam D. Dewar Jr. ’67 of Bethel, N.C., on Dec. 30, 2017.

William C. Sanderson Ed.D. ’67 of Greenville, N.C., on Jan. 21, 2017.

George W. Brannen J.D. ’68 of Arlington Heights, Ill., on Dec. 1, 2017.

William M. Garrett Jr. ’68 of Laurel, Md., on Dec. 20, 2017.

Michael Jones Davi ’69 of Monterey, Calif., on Nov. 20, 2017.

Jane Sexton Stevens ’69, Ph.D. ’75 of Durham, on Jan. 4, 2018.

Continued from the inside cover.

1970s

Joel P. Caplan ’70 of Wilmington, N.C., on March 15, 2017.

Jens B. Edwards Jr. ’70 of Southern Shores, N.C., on Dec. 12, 2017.

Alexander J. Susskind Ph.D. ’70 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on May 19, 2017.

Roger G. Thurston III J.D. ’70 of Washington, on Dec. 15, 2017.

James L. Clark M.Div. ’71 of Greensboro, N.C., on Oct. 30, 2017.

Joel A. Kostyu A.M. ’71 of Durham, on Dec. 8, 2017.

Rachel Weinbaum Schanberg M.Ed. ’71 of Durham, on Jan. 5, 2018.

William New Jr. M.D. ’72 of San Francisco, on Dec. 21, 2017.

Kathleen Marjorie Bailey ’73, M.D. ’77 of Arlington, Va., on Oct. 26, 2017.

Donald E. Ferguson Ed.D. ’73 of Raleigh, on Jan. 6, 2018.

Carolyn Tidler Robertson M.Ed. ’74 of Wilmington, N.C., on Nov. 15, 2017.

John B. Thorn Jr. M.A.T. ’74 of High Point, N.C., on Nov. 18, 2017.

Elisabeth Wells-Parker A.M. ’74, Ph.D. ’81 of West Point, Miss., on Dec. 18, 2017.

Gene E. Keyser ’75 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Dec. 29, 2017.

Jerold Brown Ph.D. ’77 of Leavenworth, Kan., on Jan. 14, 2018.

Julia A. Capps Ed.D. ’77 of Black Mountain, N.C., on Nov. 16, 2017.

Kenneth F. Antley J.D. ’78 of Atlanta, on Nov. 19, 2017.

Jeffrey P. Davis H ’78 of Madison, Wis., on Jan. 16, 2018.

Virginia Wickerham Noble ’78, A.M. ’79 of Tallassee, Ala., on Nov. 7, 2017.

William W. Ritchie G. ’78 of Austin, Texas, on Dec. 6, 2017.

Emory R. Sourbeer III ’79 of Atlanta, on Dec. 12, 2017.

1980s

James R. Wilson M.B.A. ’80 of Chapel Hill, on July 17, 2017.

Karla M. Jacobus B.S.N. ’81 of Cary, N.C., on Jan. 6, 2018.

Jennifer Tindall Lewelling ’81 of Third Lake, Ill., on Feb. 20, 2015.

William K. Richardson J.D. ’81 of Honolulu, on Nov. 10, 2017.

Heidi F. Wolfe B.S.M.E. ’81 of Coconut Creek, Fla., on Dec. 15, 2017.

Lisa Catt Heydinger J.D. ’85 of Summerville, S.C., on Nov. 7, 2017.

Julia Sutton Rauckman ’85 of Olathe, Kan., on Jan. 10, 2018.

Perry G. McLimore H ’86 of Owensboro, Ky., on Dec. 13, 2017.

Lisa Toyama Woodard ’86 of Cary, N.C., on Nov. 21, 2017.

1990s

As assistant provost and dean of minority affairs, and later associate dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Caroline Lattimore Ph.D.’78 had a storied career fostering inclusivity for Duke students of all backgrounds. After retirement, she established an endowment, funded in part with a charitable IRA rollover gift, to support a fellowship at The Graduate School.

“Without the support that I received from The Graduate School, I wouldn’t have been as successful,” said Lattimore. “That’s why I decided to leave my legacy with graduate students who could have the same opportunity.”

Gregory M. Underwood ’93 of Charlotte, on Dec. 29, 2017.

Phillip W. Gurkin A.M. ’95 of Sanford, N.C., on Jan. 9, 2018.

Samantha A. Adams ’98 of Tilburg, Netherlands, on Dec. 13, 2017.

Devon Draffen Plumer M.S.N. ’98 of Wilmington, N.C., on Nov. 25, 2017.

2000s

Brian D. Duncan ’01 of Portland, Ore., on Oct. 16, 2017.

Michael K. Lyons M.B.A. ’01 of Katy, Texas, on Dec. 16, 2017.

Christine B. Muhlhammer M.S.N. ’09 of Raleigh, on Jan. 2, 2018.

2010s

Christopher T. Roberts M.B.A. ’14 of New York, on Dec. 26, 2017.

Alexander M. McIlvaine ’18 of Darien, Conn., on Dec. 24, 2017.

giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | #GivingtoDuke (919) 681-0464 | giftplanning@duke.edu

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Travel with Duke Your family. Your friends. Your faculty.

Your dream destinations.

Where do you want to go in 2019? #DukeIsEverywhere

www.dukealumnitravels.com

Land of the Ice Bears, June 2-12, 2019 Š Robert Lee Hopkins

2019 TRAVEL DESTINATIONS Dutch Dutch Waterways: Waterways: Holland Holland && Belgium, Belgium, Apr. Apr. 22-30 22-30 Pearls Pearls of of Dalmatia, Dalmatia, May May 2-16 2-16 El El Camino: Camino: The The Way Way to to Santiago, Santiago, May May 10-23 10-23 Scottish Scottish Isles Isles and and Norway’s Norway’s Fjords, Fjords, May May 19-27 19-27 Rivieras Rivieras of of Italy, Italy, France France && Spain, Spain, May May 29-June 29-June 66 Celtic Celtic Lands Lands -- D-Day D-Day 75th 75th Anniversary, Anniversary, June June 4-14 4-14 Changing Changing Tides: Tides: The The Baltic Baltic Sea Sea Countries, Countries, June June 23-July 23-July 22 Grand Grand Seine Seine River River && Normandy, Normandy, June June 30-July 30-July 88 Alpine Alpine Splendors: Splendors: Austria Austria && Switzerland, Switzerland, July July 25-Aug. 25-Aug. 77 Waterways Waterways of of Russia, Russia, Aug. Aug. 2-13 2-13 Edinburgh Edinburgh -- Art, Art, Culture, Culture, People, People, Aug. Aug. 5-13 5-13 A A Cruise Cruise of of Ancient Ancient Greece, Greece, Sept.

Sept. 12-20 12-20 Coastal Coastal Life Life Adriatic Adriatic and and the the Aegean, Aegean, Sept.

Sept. 15-23 15-23 Ancient Ancient Empires: Empires: Rome Rome to to Malta, Malta, Sept.

Sept. 26-Oct. 26-Oct. 44 Grand Grand Danube Danube Passage, Passage, Sept.

Sept. 29-Oct. 29-Oct. 14 14 Flavors Flavors of of Chianti, Chianti, October October Exploring Exploring Iceland, Iceland, Oct. Oct. 3-13 3-13 Paradores Paradores && Pousadas Pousadas of of Spain Spain && Portugal, Portugal, Oct. Oct. 5-19 5-19

© ©iS iStto occk k

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Baja: Baja: Among Among the the Whales, Whales, February February Sailing Sailing the the Caribbean, Caribbean, Mar. Mar. 7-14 7-14 Belize Belize to to Tikal, Tikal, Mar. Mar. 11-18 11-18 Alaska’s Alaska’s Glaciers Glaciers && Inside Inside Passage, Passage, July July 13-20 13-20 Canadian Canadian Rockies, Rockies, July July 17-27 17-27 The The Majestic Majestic Great Great Lakes, Lakes, Aug. Aug. 2-11 2-11 Cuba, Cuba, Oct. Oct. 5-12 5-12

Morrocan Morrocan Discovery, Discovery, Feb. Feb. 15-28 15-28 Southern Southern Africa Africa with with Rovos Rovos Rail, Rail, March March Egypt Egypt && the the Eternal Eternal Nile, Nile, Mar. Mar. 4-18 4-18 Magical Magical Madagascar, Madagascar, June June Classic Classic Safari, Safari, July July 27-Aug. 27-Aug. 1111

NEW! NEW!

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Journey Journey through through Vietnam, Vietnam, Feb. Feb. 28-Mar. 28-Mar. 15 15 SE SE Asia Asia with with Eastern Eastern && Orient Orient Express, Express, Mar. Mar. 6-19 6-19 Insider’s Insider’s Japan, Japan, Apr. Apr. 8-20 8-20 China, China, Tibet Tibet && the the Yangtze Yangtze River, River, Oct. Oct. 12-26 12-26 Mystical Mystical India, India, Nov. Nov. 5-23 5-23

© ©iS iStto occk k

Patagonian Patagonian Frontiers, Frontiers, Feb. Feb. 21-Mar. 21-Mar. 99 Galapagos Galapagos Family Family (with (with Machu Machu Picchu), Picchu), Aug. Aug. 2-11 2-11 The The Wonders Wonders of of Peru Peru featuring featuring Amazon, Amazon, Oct. Oct. 10-21 10-21

DUKE DUKE

PRIVATE JOURNEYS

Your Way in the World

oon naan nttSh Ship Co ipC o

Antarctica, Antarctica, Jan. Jan. 26-Feb. 26-Feb. 88 Land Land of of the the Ice Ice Bears, Bears, June June 2-12 2-12

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Or Or call call us us at at (919) (919) 684-2988.

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DEVILIST

SINGALONG For the coming season of beach trips and camping trips and, well, many hours behind the wheel, Grammy-winner Eric Oberstein ’07 shares his top road-trip tunes.

“Aguanile”

“The Only Living Boy in New York”

by Marc Anthony

This 2007 remake of the 1972 hit opens up as a rumba and heads into a hard-hitting salsa groove. It’s an infectious track that will have you dancing in your seat—perfect for kicking off your journey.

by Simon & Garfunkel

On this classic tune about being left behind, Paul Simon’s warm delivery and the light strum of his acoustic guitar will comfort you in the quieter moments of your road trip (or while your travel companion is sleeping beside you).

“Dance With Me”

by Laura Mvula

This track employs synths, a killer bass line, and drums to give it an ’80s dance-party quality and a pulse you’ll feel in your heart. Crack the windows and sing along with the volume at full blast during a stretch of open road!

Oberstein is the associate director of Duke Performances. This spring he’s teaching a new course, “Introduction to Performing Arts Management & Entrepreneurship.” A Grammy and Latin Grammy-winning

64 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

“Make Me Lovely”

by Ra Ra Riot

This song by the British singer has a cinematic quality with a beautiful orchestral arrangement and a heavy beat.

You’ll feel empowered listening to this one, ideal for taking in breathtaking vistas along your route.

“Come Down”

by Sylvan Esso

Singer Amelia Meath of Durham-based Sylvan Esso shines on this track; the emotion and intimacy of her vocals encourage introspection. Save this tune for the final leg of your day as the sun sets.

producer, he has a new project, the debut album of the Dafnis Prieto Big Band, Back to the Sunset, out this spring on Dafnison Music.

Learn more: ericoberstein.com

Astounding artistic aspirations

Pushing boundaries. Elevating artistic expression. Exploring educational frontiers. Thanks to planned gifts supporting fellowship endowments at The Graduate School, Duke graduate students like Quran Karriem have the support they need for academic research, professional development and the advancement of arts and sciences.

Made possible by you.

Quran Karriem is a Ph.D. student in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures at The Graduate School.

Working with Thomas F. DeFrantz, professor of African and African American studies and of dance, Karriem creates hardware and software interfaces that blur the line between physical and virtual experiences.

Read about alumna and Duke Dean Emerita Caroline Lattimore’s planned gift to benefit graduate students on page 61.

April 13-15, 2018 Time changes everything, except true Blue friendships. Come back to reconnect, recapture, and recreate all of your special moments at your 2018 Duke reunion.

Your reunion begins online at:

www.DukeReunions.com CELEBRATING THE CLASSES OF: 1958, 1963, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993,

1998, 2003, 2008, 2013 and the Half Century Club

Go online to register today!

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for the next generation of Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | (919) 681-0464

www.DukeReunions.com Duke Alumni Association Reunions Office • Box 90572 • Durham, NC 27708-0572

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Diagnosis & Discussion

48

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Renewal time for the chapel—along with a lot more of the historic campus

What if there was a way for everyone

Familiar but now more audience-friendly—the renovated Page Auditorium

in the Duke community to stay connected to each other and to Duke?

DON’T MISS IT!

eunions 2016 ays a Devilishly Good Time.

year ends in a 1 or 6, start planning now for your Duke Reunion: April Go to DukeReunions.com for more information.

It never gets old

The chapel’s many roles p.24

Five views of a fifth title p.20

15-17, 2016.

The new DukeAlumni.com

All for One

An alumnus rejects his fear

p.34

| The meaning of eating

SPECIAL ISSUE

Coming Fall 2014

First-generation students—10 percent of undergraduates—are finding their voice on campus. p.28

A student works for justice p.36

POWER

Learn more: www.dukealumni.com/connect/

STORIES OF STRUGGLE, HUMILITY, AND TRIUMPH

Exploring the opportunities (and limits) of MOOCs

24

p.38

C. Ray Walker

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Every Annual Fund gift adds up to the collective experience our students and faculty enjoy today.

And it’s all

How Duke learned to be a better neighbor p.30 Chasing the next autism breakthroughs p.42

possible by you.

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TH ES EC

At the Marine Lab, and other labs

For students, missing out isn’t an option. p. 28

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SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.

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Always Be Choosing

Make your tax-deductible Annual Fund gift before December 31 and have an immediate impact on the Duke way of life. dukeforward.duke.edu/dec31

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Shaped by the Duke Coffeehouse: Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson ’93 p. 42

DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2017

es made in drones and robots, are people still necessary? ssue and more in our cover story. Here, graduate student right, launches a copter-style drone while fellow student Wilson, Elizabeth Mason, Julian Dale, and Nick Alcaraz look agazine.duke.edu to watch senior writer Scott Huler’s short at the Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C. Photo by Chris Hildreth

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How Coach John Danowski led his team toward a new tradition. p.22

Coastal Iberia Oct. 23-31

E

SUMMER 2016

REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER WORK A 9 —5?

G E T H ELP W IT H YO U R N E X T C A R EER M OV E .

made

Full Strength

dukealumnitravel.com Wai-O-Tapu geothermal pool, NZ Australia & New Zealand Oct. 28-Nov. 18

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It’s the little things and the big things, the day-to-day and the momentous. It’s the individual moments that all add up to an experience like no other. As lifelong members of the Duke community, these are the things we remember that make Duke so special. And you can help them endure.

Weathering the rankings storm

p.24

Columbia & Snake Rivers Journey Oct. 27-Nov. 2

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F I N D A LU M N I A N D S TA R T YO U R N E X T A DVEN T U R E .

e do you want to go in 2015?

DUKE

Paul Modrich thinks winning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is great.

YOU CONQUERED THE QUAD. NOW, THE UNIVERSE .

riends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

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Go out there and learn

A student experience like no other

A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.

10 Years of DukeEngage p.26

“We just love it there!”

Made possible by you.

across campus,

DRONES and ROBOTS are taking research to new heights.

In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.

BEHINDTHESCENES What’s going on up there?

Our cover story shoot came at the end of a long day for Vince Price, and yet, accompanied by associate university secretary Maggie Epps, right, he came in game for all Duke Photography director Chris Hildreth and Duke Magazine art director Lacey Chylack, left, asked of him. He agreed to a wardrobe change without a blink, and even jokingly offered a few theatrical poses. Photo by Bill Snead

Whose home is this?

Vince Price

For the Duke graduate who lived here, it was a place where all that was collected served as inspiration and homage, and perhaps for visitors, as revelation.

Learn the answer and see more, beginning on page 38.

Photos by Alex Harris

Epworth Forever

A New President Takes Center Stage

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with Why it’s Duke’s most beloved dorm p.24

Jared Lazarus

an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

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Pride. Nostalgia. Storytelling.

Issue after issue, Duke Magazine brings you insight into cutting-edge research, illuminating profiles of alumni, smiles drawn from campus memories, wonderment inspired by campus change, and the chance to engage with your alumni community.

Please support Duke Magazine. Checks payable to Duke Magazine (in the amount of your choice) can be sent to 312 Blackwell Street, Suite 101, Durham, N.C. 27701.

Or donate online.

Go to gifts.duke.edu, type Duke Magazine in the search box, and select it in the drop-down menu

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Game on!

Inside the making of the first women’s varsity softball team p.24