Duke Magazine Special Issue 2019

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duke SPECIAL ISSUE 2019

M A G A Z I N E

Stamp of approval From this Durham-issued construction permit, a future campus would take shape.

the future...issue

set the stage The Rubenstein Arts Center and Duke Engineering Design Pod – a first-year design course funded by the Engineering Annual Fund – are bringing fresh energy to Duke. But what happens when both draw you in?

Campus transformation made possible by you.

Finish the story at giving.duke.edu/set-the-stage

Through gifts to the Annual Fund, planned giving and other contributions, the outrageously ambitious at Duke are forging an ever better world. What will you make possible?

October 11-13, 2019

.duke.edu

HOMECOMING

giving

Still speak CRAZIE? We know you do! And being crazy about your alma mater means there’s always a good excuse to come home. Don’t miss Homecoming Weekend 2019 with highlights such as Party on the Plaza, affinity gatherings and a Duke vs. Georgia Tech football match-up. Plus: Make plans now to stop by the new Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center!

Visit www.alumni.duke.edu/homecoming for more information and to register.

SPECIALISSUE

THEFUTURE A collection of essays and images from Duke faculty, students, staff, and alumni

C O N T R I B U T O R S

_2 < alumni.duke.edu/magazine > Visit our digital edition for additional essays by law professor Doriane Lambelet Coleman, doctoral student Everette Newton, alumni Andrew Rosen ’82 and Robb Chavis ’98, and Trinity senior Jake Chasan, plus some bonus Q&As.

:

ALUMNI: Andrew McCabe ’90 Drew Korschun ’16 Laura Knott ’76 David M. Rubenstein ’70 Marco Werman ’83 Mel Baars O’Malley ’05, M.Div. ’08 Rana DiOrio ’88 Sydney Roberts ’19 Shandiin Herrera ’19 Nick Martin ’16 Jane Terlesky ’82 Lucas Hubbard ’14 Adam Silver ’84

STUDENTS: Anthony Cardellini Madison Catrett Ken Chu

FACULTY: Dan Vermeer Stuart Pimm Drew Shindell Maurizio Forte Scott Huettel Felipe De Brigard Michael D’Alessandro

STAFF: Scott Huler Dean Smith Mary Pat McMahon Oluwadamilola “Lola” Fayanju

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ForeverDuke In Memoriam

DUKE MAGAZINE SPECIAL ISSUE 2019 | Vol. 105 | No. 2 | 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: Laura Meyer Wellman ’73, 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 • © 2019 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.

20 THE FUTURE ISSUE: FROM THE EDITOR

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f to be human is to be focused on the future, that’s an ever-present imperative of a research university.

Deploy the “FUTURE” keyword on Duke’s homepage and you’ll land on programs geared to preparing graduate students to be future faculty members and preparing librarians for the law library of the future. You’ll find the future is a big deal, as suggested by all the seminars,

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panels, publications, and ruminations: genomic modification and the future of humanity; the future of manufacturing; the future of warfare; the future of nuclear power; the future of politics; the future of Title IX; the future of artificial intelligence; even the future of spam, in its digital, non-edible version.

The future, naturally, is a curricular interest; this coming fall, it feeds into Focus, a program

1 9 02 0 1 22 3 that brings together first-year students in courses linked by a common theme. One longtime Focus cluster, “Explaining the Past/Predicting the Future,” leans on sociology, anthropology, statistics, and mathematics. Students explore natural-science and social-science models meant to help them process such questions as: When is the right time to bluff in poker and diplomacy? How does a dating site find our right match? What steps

can stop an infectious disease from becoming epidemic?

Those are future-driven questions, even as they’re rooted in the so-called “real world.” Likewise, in welcoming you to the future, this special issue of the magazine will introduce you to a range of thinkers striving to make the world as it is—and not just the world as it might become—more comprehensible. —Robert J. Bliwise, editor

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_01 THE DISCIPLINE OF ANALYSIS, THE NECESSITY OF FAITH

By Andrew McCabe

y

ou might think that someone who spent twenty-one years conducting and overseeing FBI investigations would be inclined to look at the world retrospectively. A lifetime of trying to figure out what happened, after it happened, might have you constantly looking backward. An organized-crime figure is discovered dead—who did it, and why? Somebody set off explosives at the Boston Marathon—how did they do it, and where did they go?

But I know the past is only part of the story.

It is crucial that we solve these mysteries not only to bring justice to victims and consequences to perpetrators, but also because the answers help us make the country safer in the future. In the days after the attacks on 9/11, President George W. Bush asked FBI Director Robert Mueller pointedly, “What are you doing to stop the next attack before it happens?” With that question came a new mission, and the necessity to transform the FBI into an organization focused on mitigating threats rather than simply working cases. We needed to learn how to predict the criminal activity, terrorist attacks and foreign spying that might take place in the future.

Reading the future is not a small or simple task. It requires an established process. You start with what you know. The FBI relies on analysts to know everything about our past work. They combine data from recent cases with reporting from informants, witness accounts, surveillance collection, intelligence from other agencies, and many other sources of information. Analysts digest that information with one eye on our reason for

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being: our mission to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution.

Next they consider recent trends like changes in terrorist tactics, newly developing criminal schemes, advances in technology, and demographic shifts. From this mix, they divine possible outcomes. For example, if our cases in the previous year saw an increasing number of Americans travelling to Syria, and we know how this experience might radicalize people, we can predict with fair confidence that the next year will see an increasing number of battle-trained, hardened extremists returning to live in the U.S. Finally, we rank these emerging threats in order of probability and impact. This process, completed in a consistent, disciplined way, gives us a rich picture of the challenges we will likely face in the years to come. With that picture of terrorist, criminal, and foreign-intelligence threats, we allocate investigative resources strategically, by moving agents and analysts among programs and field offices.

These days, as a concerned citizen, I try to apply that same process to understand the threats our country will face in the future. I don’t have access

Despite the indicators, to the same information I reviewed as a leader of the FBI, but there are still abundant sources to work with. I begin the process by trying to know as much as I can about our past—understanding the history and challenges that have shaped the pluralist democracy we enjoy today. I apply that to the core assumptions I believe all Americans share: that we are still “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”

The next step in the analysis calls for looking at current trends and recent developments. And that’s when things begin to look much darker. I see the malign actions of our foreign adversaries becoming fodder for political debate, rather than a rallying cry to protect our democracy. I consider how the bellicose positions we now take are straining relationships across the globe with our strategic partners. I see national leaders assailing the institutions that execute the rule of law with false stories about plotting coups and maneuvering against the president. I cringe when I hear those same politicians attack the men and women who protect us and demand their imprisonment to the gleeful cheers of onlooking supporters.

And I see people’s reflexive inclination to dismiss any inconvenient truth as fiction or fake news rather than engaging in dialogue. This analysis paints a dark picture of our future, one in which division and politics tear the country into warring tribes, unable to unite around issues necessary to protect our nation and advance the lives of all Americans.

And that is where the analytical process fails me.

I still believe that most people, regardless of political affiliation, want to live in a country that is free and fair and just.

Or, rather, I fail it by abandoning it for faith.

Despite the indicators, I still believe that most people, regardless of political affiliation, want to live in a country that is free and fair and just.

For everybody. I still believe that most people think the laws our elected representatives create should be applied equally and consistently to every citizen. I still believe that there are more things that bind us as Americans than divide us into political camps.

My former colleagues might be disappointed with my forsaking the discipline of analysis for optimism and faith in the American spirit. But if I were sitting at the conference table with them again, debating the pros and cons, I would argue that my faith and their analytic rigor both stand on the foundation of our past while looking into our future. I would point out that we have been through tougher challenges and darker times before, from which we emerged as a stronger, smarter nation, better equipped to embrace our destiny. I have no doubt we will again. n McCabe ’90, former deputy director of the FBI, is the author of The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.

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By Drew orschun

AN IMAGINATION OF LANGUAGE

Watashi wa watashi-tachi mo mata kõei aru Nihonjin de-aru koto wo akumade shinjite-iru mono de-arimasu.

“I am, and all of us are, glorious Japanese, and I will believe that until the end.”

t

hese words come from the police chief in Nakajima Atsushi’s 1929 short story “A Policeman’s Landscape,” one of the stories I translated in my master’s thesis this past year. At this point in the story, officers had gathered to elect new members for their prefectural council in Japaneseoccupied Korea. Of the many candidates, only one is Korean, and during his speech, an officer throws a slur at him. The hall erupts into discord, and the police chief shouts out that statement to put a lid on things. The racist remark is bad for the chief’s brand, but his way of downplaying it erases the Korean officer’s ethnic and cultural identity and coincides with Japan’s goal of assimilating Korea into its fold.

The police chief ’s problematic belief that all of the men in the room are “glorious Japanese” is expressed with the phrase shinjite-iru, a stative construction similar to “–ing” in English. I translate the verb with the future tense (“I will believe that until the end”), since its assertions reach forward without an end date. But this “future” projected by the police chief officially ended in 1945 with Japan’s defeat and the loss of its sprawling colonial possessions. With the ensuing American occupation, Japan immediately set out on a new course, its former trajectory diverted toward democratic practices, demilitarization, and increased civil liberties.

When I was a freshman at Duke learning Japanese for the first time, I was surprised to learn that the language doesn’t have a formal future tense: There’s simply a past form and a non-past form, which can be interpreted as present or future depending on the context. For example, tabemasu could mean “I eat” or “I will eat.” Instead of tense, which categorizes verbal action as falling on a linear timeline, Japanese relies on aspect, which tells whether an action is completed or not. Rather than conveying temporal information, the conjugated verb tabemasu encodes that the action has not yet been completed (corresponding to future tense) or will never truly be completed because it is a stative or habitual action (present tense).

Does this lack of future tense mean, as some linguistic determinists might insinuate, that the Japanese don’t conceptualize the future in the same way as speakers of other languages? As researchers have confirmed over the past decades, all languages can express the same concepts, but one might go about it in a different way than another. Further, this question is rooted in a false assumption. English, for its part, does not codify future tense into its verbs, but instead uses the addition of auxiliaries like “will” and “would” to make the timeframe understood.

Japanese uses similar non-tense factors to get the point across.

Recently, Japan enthroned a new emperor. For the three decades of the Heisei era, Akihito was Japan’s national symbol. Then, on May 1, 2019, tracks shifted, and suddenly Japan had a new figurehead.

On April 30, an article in the literary magazine Bunshun asked in its headline: Reiwa-jidai no kōshitsu wa Heisei kara dō kawaru? The verb “change” (kawaru) being unmarked for tense but implied as future, I translate the headline as: “How will the imperial family of the Reiwa era change from the Heisei?” Although the emperor has no formal political power, for most within Japan and without, there is hope for peace and prosperity. But for those affected by Japan’s role in World War II and their descendants, a simple date on the calendar does not erase generations of trauma and exploitation.

With every passing moment, people and nature interact in ways such that the future is always changing. In and of itself, the future is an imagination of language: a laying-out of one possibility for one particular world. Translating historical texts allows me to celebrate and protest various futures that have populated the literary imagination in the past. But futures continue to shift every day. Writers and executives and activists and scientists continue to put forth hypotheses that we will have a better world one day. No matter how our languages grapple with time, we can all construct better futures—and pursue them until they become history. n Korschun ’16 graduated with a major in linguistics and Asian and Middle Eastern studies and this past spring received his M.A. in Japanese literature from the University of Colorado-Boulder. A Fulbright U.S. Student Award grantee, he is teaching English at Law Enforcement University in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for the upcoming academic year.

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_03 HOW TO GROW

By Laura nott

e

leven years after I graduated from Duke, I completed a degree at MIT, where focusing on the future is so normal that few people at the institute question it. I was steeped in techno-futurism, in the belief that it’s often best to leave the past behind. But I’m a gardener. I dig. And I think about how living soil is made, and how plants have evolved to sustain themselves—and how, for millennia, growing food has been a political act.

The past is always stomping its muddy feet into my present. And, if you eat, yours, too.

Yale political scientist James C. Scott, preparing to deliver two lectures at Harvard, was surprised to learn that everything he thought he knew about the beginnings of alluvial civilizations was wrong.

Recent archaeological research has driven a stake into the idea that agriculture spawned the first towns. An abundance of wild and lightly managed food sources spawned towns.

Large, sedentary communities had been around for thousands of years before governments existed.

City-states—the first governments—were formed in areas of abundant food sources. As local political actors got strong enough to coerce people to abandon the light management of their landscape’s food resources and, instead, to grow specific crops in specific places, record-keeping, tax-collecting, and policymaking followed close behind.

In a large community, if you can command what grains will be grown, and where they’re

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sown, and then monitor the harvests and collect payments from the growers, you win.

I had a professor at Duke one summer who would

begin his lectures by saying something like, “Here in Book 9 of The Iliad, we see the beginnings of Western civilization.” I was nineteen and ignorant, so I didn’t interrupt him to ask what he meant by “Western” or “civilization.” And I didn’t ask, either, about how those words applied to ancient Greece, a society that ate because slaves farmed.

I didn’t know that those were questions to ask— even though, during that sticky semester when I was in thrall to Greek poetry, I was also studying the political lives of contemporary women and their relationships to land. It seemed obvious to me, even then, that the personal was political. But, stupidly, I hadn’t noticed how deeply the political was also personal, especially when land and food were involved.

At MIT, and elsewhere, students are learning how to grow food (lettuce and herbs, mostly) using hydroponic methods inside shipping containers and plexiglass crates. With a complement of sensors to adjust the cybernetics of living things, a shipping container is perfect for experimenting with food in ways that characterize “Western” and “civilization.” It seems like a logical thing to do.

Regimenting agriculture yielded governance.

Governance made data-tracking and record-keeping seem normal. And tracking data eventually made the scientific method seem normal, too.

But the histories of scientific methods and technological development are frequently in conflict with how the world is understood—still—by peoples outside of the dominant (winning) culture.

If you reduce a complex question to something measurable, if you isolate a living system from other living systems, and, then, if you speculate about how experimental data might be applied to messier situations, your “Western,” “civilized” past is in your present, too.

Will the future

of food trend toward lettuce grown hydroponically in shipping containers?

Probably. AI and machine-learning will spread anywhere they can, and they’ll re-enact the privatization of land within this new form of enclosures.

Will the future of food include organic produce grown mostly in California and Mexico? Probably, at least for a while longer. But maybe it will include more organic produce grown and distributed regionally. Unless all the new farmers go broke—which, without a radical restructuring of the cobbled-together provisions of the Farm Bill, they may well do.

Will we see the end of feedlots and the largescale production of cattle, pigs, and chickens?

I doubt it. Not as long as government policies support them. Plant-based meat will make a dent,

but without structural changes to the government and the Farm Bill, there will still be a lot of money to be made by producing cheap calories.

Will farmers figure out how to grow perennial grains, and overturn thousands of years of governmental control of annual grain crops? Maybe.

If they do, it will be despite opposition from the seed and fertilizer producers and with little-to-zero research support from federal tax dollars. Progress is likely to be slow, and results too late.

I like to imagine

that being muddy is a form of resistance to the industrial food system.

Yet I don’t do much more than grow treats in my backyard garden, and my muddy clothes don’t do much more than worry a few germophobes when I wear them to the local Whole Foods. I know how much time and labor it takes to grow enough food to feed a family. I live in a real world of real constraints, and I can’t do it, even if my cousins did call me Smudge.

And yet I cook. I garden. I teach students how to grow things. I tell them what I know about the industrial food system and about how it might— it must—be challenged. I hope that some of what I show them sticks.

A lot of people, soon, will need to grow food that is decoupled from the petroleum economy. And do it under dangerous and urgent and erratic climate conditions. As we enter the climate crisis—against which no human civilization will be able to claim victory (winning being unattainable and, anyway, exactly the wrong goal in this situation)—it is a question of understanding what forms of knowledge will endure, and what practices are worth learning.

Mud knows. n Knott ’76 is an artist and curator, and an alumna of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, where she studied environmental art.

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_04 TO CREATE SOMETHING BETTER

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By Dan Vermeer

recently attended a panel discussion with three scholars debating life in the “Anthropocene era,” the idea that humans are now the dominant force in shaping the ecological and even geological fate of our planet. With talk about the destructive consequences of our carbon emissions, the devastation of industrial food systems, and the depletion of our natural resources, the discussion was pretty bleak.

Afterward, I joined the panelists for dinner at a local Italian restaurant. As I began to describe my work with companies on climate change and ocean sustainability, the mood at the table grew even darker. One of the scholars put down his fork and scolded me: “Why bother? We have missed the window of opportunity to solve these problems. You need to wake up to the crisis we are in and face that we can’t do anything about it.”

I understood what he meant. We have a future problem. As we create more powerful methods of predicting the future, we seem to be losing the ability to choose the futures we want.

It’s not hard to find reasons for pessimism. A tide of recent reports by international agencies warns of inevitable climate change and mounting species extinctions. But rather than sparking action, this flood of dire predictions threatens to depress citizens so much that they give up on finding solutions and simply brace themselves for disaster.

Yet I can’t sit in that helplessness. I am

How might we approach the future as a

committed to fight for the future we desire, and the way out is to begin asking different questions: How might we create more space for agency and positive change in our thinking about the future? How do we make the future work for us, not against us?

First, I think we must recognize the future in the present. The science-fiction writer William Gibson once noted that “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” While we can’t know for certain how the future will unfold, we can become more skilled at recognizing possible futures by tracking the early signals and creative experiments happening in our current environment. Gibson encourages us to pay more attention to positive developments, people, and movements that are emerging, and assess how they might be scaled and accelerated.

Young leaders like Greta Thunberg from Sweden are challenging politicians to take urgent action on climate change. Her bold speeches at the UN and other venues have been a catalyst for a worldwide wave of climate protests in recent months, with tens of thousands of students participating in school strikes. An energized global youth climate movement is demanding very different cultural priorities and new kinds of politics.

Second, let’s reframe our priorities. It’s likely that the future will be less comfortable and more chaotic than the world we’re used to. I mourn the coral reefs our kids may not see, the increasingly fierce storms that threaten our homes and communities, the growing instability of our food systems.

These threats are even more unsettling because we have placed comfort and stability above almost every other cultural value. But a chaotic future need not threaten our ability to have a meaningful life. In fact, the world will need compassionate, creative, and resilient people more than ever. We can’t promise our kids stability, but we can prepare them to care for the planet and their communities, and to be everyday heroes in addressing the needs of a turbulent world. To do this work, we can’t

waste time and energy on despair.

Finally, we can work to design a better world. Real change starts with the recognition that we don’t live in an ideal world now—far from it. While many people experience a higher quality of life than previous generations, we have achieved these gains at great social and environmental cost and have failed to distribute these benefits equitably. We need to challenge ourselves to let go of our current reality in order to create something better.

Is it possible that we could create a less consumptive, more equitable society? Could the inevitable changes driven by climate change help create space for a healthier and more resilient society? How might we approach the future as a design problem rather than a final verdict? One example is the Transition Movement, which helps communities learn to grow their own food, build more resilient homes and neighborhoods, and prepare for the predicted shocks of climate change. Transition Towns are proactively developing the resources and institutions we will need to flourish in a climate-changed world.

At our dinner table recently, my normally upbeat fifteen-year-old daughter was unusually quiet.

After some prodding, she shared that she and her friends had been discussing climate change, and had concluded that they probably wouldn’t have children—and may not live longer than four more decades because the world would be too broken to support them.

My heart crumbled, knowing that she had now experienced the anguish of our ecological crisis, not only intellectually but also viscerally. I don’t have any easy answers to assure her, but I am more committed than ever to claiming our agency and actively building a world where our children can thrive. n

design problem

rather than a final verdict?

Vermeer is executive director of EDGE (the Center for Energy, Development, and the Global Environment) and associate professor of the practice at the Fuqua School of Business.

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_?

David M. Rubenstein ‘70

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, philanthropist and

What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self?

That anyone at Duke would still be interested in my views on any matter.

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What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist?

_03

What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see around philanthropy in America?

Learn how to read books regularly; learn how to write clearly and persuasively; learn how to speak effectively; learn how to take the initiative but to share the credit— these skills will always be in demand.

Philanthropy will be seen as a moral imperative for all individuals at all levels of society.

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Getty Images

_04

What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see around philanthropy in America?

Philanthropy to be seen as the ancient Greeks originally saw it—as a way to show a love of humanity. This can be done as much with your energy, time, and ideas as with your checkbook.

_05

What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why?

Martin Luther King Jr.—his leadership of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement ultimately led the way for people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, capabilities, and sexual preferences around the world to pursue equal rights and opportunities, and to bring life to the once-revolutionary idea that all people are equal.

cofounder of The Carlyle Group

_06

What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity?

The failure to recognize that the planet is evolving because of climate change (whatever the cause), and the consequential failure to make the requisite adjustments in our lives to ensure Homo sapiens can survive for at least a few more millennia.

_07

In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why?

Optimistic that the problem has been recognized, but pessimistic that enough will be done in the near term to avert bigger problems in the lifetimes of those currently alive.

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What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219?

Pictures of Coach K and his five men’s basketball championship banners and teams, and Coach Brooks and his seven women’s golf championship banners and teams—all to show the personification of leadership, excellence, and teamwork.

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SHORT

STORY

THE LIGHTED CAFÉS OF THE BOULEVARD

By Anthony Cardellini

ESCAPE amantha works on the third floor of the nursing home, where the residents with dementia and Alzheimer’s live. She holds my hand as the elevator rises slowly, like a battered propeller plane climbing in the midst of a storm. Neither of us says a word. I wonder if any of the elderly here once knew how to fly, or even how long it’s been since they’ve been on an airplane. Sam always talks of the residents’ desire to escape—their inability to grasp the permanence of their situation. She says that one of the men, Tom, arrives at breakfast some mornings dragging an old brown suitcase behind him, convinced that once he finishes his runny eggs and pulp-free orange juice, he’ll take the elevator downstairs and hail a taxi to catch his transatlantic flight that doesn’t exist.

I’ve heard a good number of these stories from Sam—Kay thinks she’s a college student back in her small Southern hometown, Marty talks to every female like she’s his wife, one woman (whose name the agency doesn’t actually know, so everyone just calls her “The Woman”) tries to force-feed her meals to a stuffed cat—such that visiting these people for the first time makes me feel anxious, as if I’m seeing a play I know the plot of, wondering how the actors will choose to perform it.

When the elevator opens, Sam leads me to a living room with a dark brown carpet and blue pais-

S

ley curtains. I move from armchair to armchair, shaking hands with musty old men, with stringy women who appear boneless, women with milky blue eyes. Most of the people I’m introduced to can’t remember who Sam is. Tom rambles about his upcoming trip to Europe. Kay asks if I’m a professor at the university. I meet The Woman— she thinks Sam and I are her grandchildren, asks us what we want for Christmas. Some of the other women latch on to my hand and don’t let go until I pry them off. We walk through four identical living rooms, with identical paisley curtains and identical fireplaces filled with fires made of papier-mâché. Sam is looking for a woman, Gloria, about whom I have heard many stories. Gloria has tried to force her way out of the home on multiple occasions: Sam says that once she elbowed a caretaker in the nose and actually made him bleed a little. Sam finds Gloria sitting alone at a table near a small kitchen, chewing on her fingernails.

When she sees me, her eyes light up, and she reads my oversized name tag loudly: “Jason!”

Her nose has a slight dent in it, and she still has a few brown freckles, mostly on her left cheek. It reminds me, her face, of the face of a schoolteacher I once had in elementary school, old Ms. Davis.

God. The resemblance is really strong.

As if on cue, Sam says: “Ms. Gloria used to teach third-graders in Chandler!”

Now I’m beginning to think we’re on the edge of discovering a great coincidence. Gloria says, in

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THE

LIGHTED

CAFES

that sing-song voice of my old, freckled teacher: “Jason, can you do me a favor?”

“Sam,” I say. “What’s Ms. Gloria’s last name?”

She thinks a minute. Gloria is leaning forward looking at me, mouth open. A string of saliva from her bottom lip hangs in midair and then catches to the lacing of her pink bib.

“I think it’s Davis?” Sam says.

“No way,” I say, in disbelief. “Sam, I’m pretty sure Gloria was my third-grade teacher.”

“What?” says Sam. Gloria grabs onto my wrist and her hands are freezing cold.

“Jason, Jason, I need a favor.”

“Ms. Gloria—Ms. Davis—do you remember me? You taught me in third grade! At Davidson Elementary? Something like twelve years ago?”

Her grip on my wrist tightens. Desperation, not recognition, is in her eyes.

“Jason, a favor! Please, dear, help me to the elevator so I can go downstairs. I need to get out of this shithole place.”

a

REUNION

fter the nursing home, Sam and I drove to Old Town Scottsdale, to eat and browse through the art galleries. We split a pesto pasta dish outside a small restaurant on Main Street. When we finished we watched an old black man play the accordion. Sam searched through her wallet and dropped a crumpled five into his case.

“God bless ya!” he shouted after us.

By this time the sun had gone down. The air was warm and the Scottsdale sky was a hazy purple.

Owls called to each other from lofty Palo Verde branches. Sam and I started going in and out of different galleries. In one of them—a gorgeous space with dark green paint on the walls and dark brown furniture throughout—we chatted with the owner, who bore a strong resemblance to Mark Ruffalo. His paintings were set in thick frames made of golden swirls that looked like braided

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OF

THE

BOULEVARD

blonde Rapunzel hair. Almost all of them were landscapes: a bridge in Venice, the Tokyo skyline, Patagonia, the Milky Way above an empty desert.

The necessity of printing one word after the other on the page makes it difficult to depict what happened next, when Sam and I stepped out of the gallery and onto the street. At the exact same time, we both looked at each other and spoke. I said: “Did that guy look like Mark Ruffalo?”

And Sam said: “What a nice man.”

And then after a brief moment of disorientation she asked: “Who in the world is Mark Buffalo?”

We crossed the street and went into a small gallery with Jackson Pollack-esque paintings hanging in the windows. Inside were more spattered canvases and several white dresses decorated with large pink and purple swirls. Sam and I stood looking around the gallery, alone except for a blonde, middle-aged woman behind a white folding table.

There were beaded mobiles hanging from the ceiling and strings of lights shaped like unicorns along the walls. It looked like a palm-reading sorceress was squatting on a seven-year-old girl’s bedroom.

“Welcome in,” the woman said, in a highpitched, unnatural, breathy voice. “What brings you to the Wonder Gallery?”

This seemed like the kind of question that begged for conversation, so I said, “Just browsing.”

“Are you the owner?” Sam asked.

“I am! Well, actually”—here we go—“my mother and I own it together! She got it twenty-or-so years ago when I was finishing high school here, at St. Michael’s! So, I went to ASU and studied art history, and when I graduated she wanted me to go in with her on it!” Oh, here we really go. Sam went to St. Michael’s.

“I went to St. Michael’s!” Sam said. “Did you like it there?”

“No way! Umm, it was kind of hard for me to vibe there, you know. With the nuns.

There was lots of negative energy. I don’t think I was very happy there. I don’t think I had much peace. But look at me now!” She spread her hands outward and smiled.

Sam started: “Yeah, I understand—”

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“Oh! By the way!” the woman said, “I’m in charge of all the reunions for St. Michael’s High!

Give me your number, and I’ll add you to the group! I organize events and get people together to reminiscence about the good old days.”

“How fun!” Sam said, but I could tell she was growing tired of the woman’s squeaky voice, and all its unnatural enthusiasm. Sam and I, at this point, had been together for five months, and I was beginning to learn these things about her: how she stood on her tiptoes when excited, twirled her hair when nervous, rubbed her forehead when sleepy. I suppose I should describe her now, as she was back then, so you can picture her doing these things: she was slender, four or five inches shy of my six feet, with deep green eyes and small features, and long, oak-brown hair.

“Did you grow up here?” Sam asked the woman.

“Yes! On Sixteenth Street and Missouri. I went to Springer for elementary school and then—” “I went to Springer!” Sam said. The words sounded almost more disappointed than excited.

She rubbed her forehead.

“Oh! Well I’m in charge of the reunions for Springer, too! I’ll add you to the group!”

I felt like we had better get out of there before Sam and this lady realized they were long-lost sisters. I squeezed Sam’s hand, out of nothing but impatience.

“Thank you!” Sam said. “Well, I think we’d better get going now, but thanks for being so welcoming!”

“Okay! But first, come over here,” the woman said, wagging a finger to Sam. “I’ve got some special lady wisdom I want to share with you.”

Now Sam looked visibly uncomfortable. She said, “Okay,” and glanced at me, twirling her hair.

I shrugged and gave her hand another squeeze.

What was the worst that could happen? I figured this strange sorceress woman probably had some oddball secret to share from her old school days, something I couldn’t understand. Sam let go of my hand and walked over to the woman. They stood together behind the white table. I could hear the woman whispering: “I’m just not so sure about your guy friend

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there. I don’t know about his energy…”

“Oh, come on, Sam,” I said, “you guys can gossip at your reunion.”.

t

WORK

hat summer I worked at Herbert’s Books, in Tempe. I was just gearing up to go to college, far from the sweltering heat of the parched Phoenix desert, all the way out in North Carolina. Sam was staying in Arizona—something I was just beginning to worry about, around the time we met the weird sorceress energy gallery lady. Sam and I had had a nice laugh over that whole conversation on the way back to the car.

Herbert’s is an old bookshop on Mill—right in the middle of all the bars and restaurants near Arizona State University. I was excited to work there. I knew, even then, that I wanted to be a writer, that I wanted to live and work in the literary world. I couldn’t wait to write lots of those little recommendation notecards that are hung on the shelves, to show everyone that I had a sophisticated literary taste. I pictured myself having literary discussions with customers as I checked them out. But it turns out most everyone buying a book hasn’t read that book yet, and therefore, doesn’t really want to hear too much of what you have to say about it. And most of the customers were just college kids getting required reading texts, anyways.

One day in late July—that time of year when the temperature doesn’t dip below one hundred, not even in the early morning—Herbert’s hosted a book event with a pretty well-known writer, probably the most famous writer to do a signing at our store. I won’t say his name, but he’s won a National Book Award this century. Everyone was pretty nervous in the buildup. It wasn’t uncommon for university professors to read their work, but this guy was big. All twelve or so of us employees had to attend—half of us to help run the event, and the other half to bulk up the size of the crowd.

I was a crowd guy: They put me in the front row.

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THE

LIGHTED

CAFES

The author was smartly dressed, in a navy blazer and tight-fitting khaki pants rolled up at the ankles. There were maybe fifty people there, all told.

The book shop owner, Herbert’s son, gave a little introduction and read out a list of the author’s accomplishments: In addition to his National Book Award, he’d won a Guggenheim fellowship, received an honorary degree from Georgetown, and written a book that was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. After the intro there were thirty seconds of polite applause. I was buzzing—this author was living the life I wanted so badly, the life I dreamed of for myself. I watched him walk to the front of the room, set his hands on the sides of the little wooden lectern, unfold a piece of copy paper from his jacket pocket, and begin to speak.

I don’t remember any of it verbatim, but the first few sentences went something like this: “Well, thank you all for having me here, folks.

I’d say the pleasure is all mine, but events like these are always strange because they mean I have to crawl out of the basement where I write and actually put on pants.”

Muted laughter. Anxious rustling. Was this what we’d come to see? The author continued: “See, the life of a writer is nowhere near as noble or glamorous or mysterious as the DeLillos or Pynchons of the world would have you believe.

You follow the trends, find the formulas. Like, first and foremost, you’ve got to hook the reader in the first paragraph. If you’ve read my novels, you know I start off with something to grab your attention—conflict, maybe, or humor. Then it’s just a matter of keeping that attention, of giving the reader what he wants. So, I sit in my basement and type words onto a screen and call up to my wife and tell her to read what I’ve written and stop me the moment she gets bored or uninterested.”

Well, stop there then, Mr. Writer, I wanted to say. The rest of the speech was a smattering of continued self-deprecation, jokes at the expense of the writing profession, jokes at the expense of academia, jokes at the expense of independent bookshops and invested readers, who are “enablers of this basement-dwelling life I somehow get to lead.” That line I actually remember—that’s verba-

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OF

THE

BOULEVARD

tim. In fact, during the course of his speech, this man said the word “basement” twenty-two times after I started counting. When he finally finished speaking, and the stunned bookshop owner waved a microphone in the air and asked for questions, it took five minutes before someone could come up with something to say.

It was me, of course. I was the someone. And the reason it took five minutes is because I was hell-bent on finding the best possible way—the rudest possible way—to put the anger I was feeling into words, all my young, angsty, aspiring-writer anger.

God, it was an awful question, but it was awfully good. I can’t bring myself to type it. I don’t even think it could be printed if I did. But let my refusal to reveal to you my terribly offending question be a form of rebellion in itself, a sign of my flouting the golden rule this writer laid down that sweltering day at Herbert’s Books in Tempe, the rule of always giving your reader what he or she wants. You don’t always get what you want.

w

Café /Terrace

hen I was young, I was afflicted by powerful daydreams. They crawled their way into my mind during class, on long car rides, in church—even as I stood in center field, as a Little Leaguer. Huge, sweeping daydreams that could make me cry, and did. I remember having to leave a school rally in tears after my mind transported my fragile body to a dark forest rife with monsters, eight-armed beasts that chased me through the trees. I related this daydream to the principal, a bleak man in his upper sixties who told me that monsters weren’t real and that, by failing to scream the name of my school’s mascot during my grade’s allotted time slot, I had lost our class the chance to win a pizza party. Actually, now that I think about it, Ms. Davis had been at that rally, her nose dent deepened by the sun.

As I got older, the daydreams became less

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fantastical, and more emotional. Once, as I sat in the front seat of our blue Subaru on the way to the doctor’s office, I daydreamed my mother in a hospital bed, dying of cancer. But my daydreams were good as well as bad—I saw myself winning admission to excellent universities, becoming a Rhodes Scholar, accepting a Booker Prize. The daydreams came maybe once a month during high school, and would last up to two hours. To this day, I’m still not sure if I fell asleep during these episodes, or if I just sat staring at a single point on the wall as my imagination stormed the cockpit of my mind.

The daydreams reached their highest intensity right after I met Sam. She became the recurring main character, the star of each and every daydream. I dreamt of her driving across the country with me, of her falling on a hike and getting hurt, of her receiving the medical-school acceptance she so desperately wished for.

I had my most powerful daydream at eighteen, two weeks after I listened to the worst speech I’d ever heard at Herbert’s bookstore, and two months after I ran into my old teacher at the nursing home and met that crazy woman in the art gallery.

The circumstances for the dream were this: I was in the backseat of a car in central California, with my parents in the front, on the way from Phoenix to visit my grandmother in the Bay Area. What’s surprising about the dream, especially given that it’s the most powerful I’ve had, is that nothing out of the ordinary happens in it. It just stirred within me the strongest feeling of fulfillment I’d ever felt.

Maybe the strongest I’ve ever felt.

Here is the dream. Sam and I are sitting on the balcony of a restaurant at night, bathed in yellow light. I am lean, light, balanced—somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. I know, without a trace of doubt, that we are in Colmar, in France, a place we’ve spoken about visiting. I am in a gray T-shirt and maroon shorts. Sam is wearing a white sweater. Age has made her even more lovely; her green eyes sparkle as she looks at me, intently, intentionally, with love. In front of us is a woven basket of soft, smooth bread. I feel a trace of butter linger on my tongue. It is gloriously humid—the kind of cozy evening humidity that

STORY

makes you feel as though you’re in a warm pool, and your skin is sparkling, and you can breathe underwater. Above us, the moon sits like the spot of a flashlight on a black ceiling, yellow and round and luminous. Sam and I eat slowly, talk a bit, invent different lives for the people strolling past us. Everyone is holding hands, walking in twos and threes—no one is alone. The street beside us is made of cobblestone; the buildings across the way are brightly colored, red and green and blue, with brown beams woven onto their surfaces. Halfway through the meal, I feel a light tap on my shoulder, and turn. It is a young man, perhaps twenty, holding a white book, with my name on it. In his other hand is a pen. I greet him graciously, scribble my signature onto the page in the front flap, and wish him well. I turn back to Sam. She is smiling.

Another remarkable thing about this dream is that I remember, in great detail, not just its contents, but also how I felt afterward. The best way of putting it is “ready.” What a wonderful, soul-warming thing, to be ready. I felt ready for college, for a world away from Sam, a world away from the city I had grown to love, a world away from the people who raised me. All my questions—what would happen to our relationship?

Would I ever get published? Would I even live to see adulthood?—receded away from me in the moments after the daydream, as if their answers didn’t matter.

I know the answers now. It wouldn’t be right for me to put them here—they’re too heartwarming, and too heartbreaking. But just knowing how things turned out is overwhelming, like being hit with a wave before you get the chance to pull in your breath. Now I feel as though I have more answers than questions. Some days I sit on café terraces in this city where I’m living, pull a pen from my pocket, and turn over a napkin. I search my mind for questions and write them down when I find them. n Cardellini is a rising junior majoring in English. He is the recipient of the 2019 William M. Blackburn Scholarship, which recognizes outstanding achievement in creative writing.

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_06 A TOAST AT THE FRONTLINE

i

By Stuart Pimm

stand on a small tributary of the Irrawaddy River. Across it is Myanmar—formerly Burma: I’m about as far west in the Chinese province of Yunnan as I can be. Borders between countries fascinate, for they illuminate different experiments in how we manage our natural world.

Across the river, the land is going up in smoke. There’s a dense blue haze. At night, I see dozens of small fires, while overhead a satellite maps them from their thermal infrared radiation.

On returning to Duke, I look at what those maps show. China’s border is obvious. For a thousand miles along its southern and southwestern frontier, it has very few fires, while thousands carpet the land of its immediate neighbors.

Across the river unfolds a human tragedy, repeated across the developing world. Poor farmers burn the land each year to clear forests and brush and to enrich the poor soils with the nutrients the burning releases. On steep slopes, the inevitable heavy rains will wash away those nutrients, the soils, and often people’s homes too. The land’s fertility degrades each burning season.

“Green is the Globally, burning tropical forests adds 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year, almost as much as all the emissions in the U.S. and more than those from the European Union.

On the China side, there are no fires. There are fields, already planted with corn and other crops.

Between them are lots of forests that are just leafing out; they cover the mountains with a soft green on this lovely spring morning. An odd analogy strikes me: They are like a school class, all the same size and age, all dressed in their identical, green uniforms, their shining faces full of hope. The trees’ age is not an accident, and the trees are full of promise.

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In the early 1960s, China learned the hard way that when we harm Mother Nature, she bites back.

Massive, country-wide deforestation cleared forests off steep slopes leading to massive erosion and catastrophic flooding. Those young trees are the result of recent country-wide policies to restore the land.

Why am I here in a remote part of China?

My fieldwork involves watching wildlife, usually endangered species, and often birds and mammals.

The mountains that stretch from western Yunnan across northern Myanmar to India, just 200 miles away, and then to Bhutan, are one of the most biologically diverse parts of the planet. new gold.” This is a frontline for saving biodiversity.

It’s not just the number of species. Many of the species of animals here—and plants, too—live only in these mountains. That restriction means the species are especially vulnerable to the loss of their forest habitats. This area has unusually many species at risk of extinction.

I love the peace of fieldwork. Alas, no chance of a good night’s sleep, for while I am here, the United Nations released an international assessment of the status of the world’s biodiversity.

Reporters’ deadlines were in the very early hours of my morning. “Yes, the world is losing species a thousand times faster than it should,” I tell them.

“And, yes, biodiversity matters to all of us, as the report makes clear.” (I would tell them this; after all, the report was quoting my research.)

That’s not lost on the local communities here in Yingjiang. Within a few years, they have built hotels and thriving businesses of showing mostly Chinese wildlife photographers the area’s exceptional species. Far better than eking out a desperate living growing subsistence crops on land where that cannot be sustained. Signs near our hotel proclaim President Xi’s vision of “ecological civilization” and that “green is the new gold.”

Governments can set the tone of a nation’s environmental choices. Just how much is nature

parks must heed the needs of the poor outside the expensive lodges where we sip our gin and tonics.

That park may have lions that can eat your wealth in cattle in a night. I’m not always in a lodge.

Sleeping in a small tent with lions sniffing around just outside always takes practice—the first time I lay awake terrified. For villagers nearby, the threat is always there.

Here, at Yingjiang, there are no lions—or the tigers that were once here—but the question remains of what use is biodiversity? How to convert that green to gold? Local resourcefulness and vision, plus national government policies, admit a more promising future than on the opposing

China

Myanmar

Global Forest Watch

Vietnam

Laos

HOT RESEARCH: worth? The Great Smoky Data provided by Mountains and the Blue Ridge Parkway get 30 mil- Global Forest Watch, from this past April lion visits a year, the Cape and May, showing Hatteras National Seashore satellite images of adds another 2.5 million individual fires and North Carolina state parks another 20 million.

Is trashing national monuments and parks in the U.S. really our nation’s best strategy economically, given the hundreds of billions of dollars visitors spend?

Protecting biodiversity must benefit the people who live next to it. Outside the U.S., that’s not always easy. We rich visitors to Africa’s national

banks of the Irrawaddy.

The wildlife blinds in which the wildlife photographers and I sit testify to local initiative. The blinds are simple cloth structures with crudely crafted log benches. Village women ensure that an irresistible drip, drip, drip of water through a bamboo pipe attracts thirsty laughing thrushes, quail, and sunbirds. That evening, the photographers show me what they captured with delight, and we toast each other with beer. n Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of conservation ecology in the Nicholas School and an expert on biodiversity and species loss, received this year’s International Cosmos Prize for contributions to his field.

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_?

Marco Werman ‘83

_01

, host of the Public Radio

What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self?

That I’d still be consuming marijuana, and that it would be endorsed for medical reasons by the state of Massachusetts.

_02

What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist?

Follow your curiosity and fuse that with work that leaves the planet a better place than how you entered it.

_03

What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see in the field of journalism?

The age of the Deep Fake, video and audio that can be manipulated to imitate the voice of whomever the creator chooses.

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Courtesy PRI.org

_04

What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see in the field of journalism?

Exchanging social media for the morning and evening newspaper.

_05

What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why?

Donald Trump. He didn’t happen overnight. He just spotlighted the ills that have been there all along— racial tension, economic injustice, questionable global alliances—and now there’s really no excuse for ignoring them.

International show The World

_06

What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity?

Climate change and the inability to swim.

_07

In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why?

I’ll be an optimist until I’m dead. Thailand, I hear, is instituting swimming lessons as part of its national school curriculum, so they get it.

_08

What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219?

A teaspoon. Think about it.

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_07 UNCERTAINTY IS WHAT COMES NEXT

By Mel Baars O’Malley

W

hen I approached the Army ROTC offices in the basement of the West Duke Building in 2002, my sophomore year, I had one purpose in mind—finding a way to stay in college.

9-11 was a fresh memory, but the prospect of war seemed distant and unlikely. I wanted to secure my future, and a degree from Duke was a major part of my plan. I needed a scholarship, and the Army seemed like my best bet. None of my immediate family had served in the military, so I didn’t really have a clue what I was joining.

Seventeen years later, I counsel and minister to young soldiers who are in a similar boat. My soldiers come from diverse backgrounds. Some are deeply patriotic. Others are looking for a way to pay for college and join the ranks of professional America. No matter what motivates a person to serve, once in uniform, certain truths become apparent.

The first truth is deployment. Whether it is to a combat zone, to a disaster area, or to any other mission, deploying, often to harm’s way, is our purpose. Though many soldiers initially join to secure a better future for themselves, those plans are put on hold, at least for a while. Soldiers don’t get to choose where they will go, what their mission will be, or who will be working on their team. Instead, soldiers trust that the work they do safeguards the future for everyone.

As a chaplain, part of my job is to help them make sense of what they encounter—extreme poverty, injustice, oppression, and violence. While I was deployed in Afghanistan, I worked with service members in an outreach project called Operation Pencil. During our time off, we would organize school supplies and books sent by churches and other nonprofit organizations and deliver them to school-aged Afghan children. In the midst of war, these soldiers found ways to cultivate hope.

The second truth is about loss. Being in an Army at war has a high cost. I didn’t understand

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that when I joined. Watching Saving Private Ryan, or any other war movie, doesn’t prepare any of us for what might happen when we deploy. Certainly, soldiers miss out on a lot—families, anniversaries, the births of children, and more. Loss isn’t only about bodily death. It is also about losing who one was before war or who one thought he or she might become. After deployment, there is no going back. There is only figuring out what comes next, scars and all.

Despite loss, love—the final truth—is powerful.

The love that binds soldiers gives them the strength they need to do what has to be done. Loving someone more than you love yourself has a way of dispelling fear, even fear of what might be lost.

This past Memorial Day, my Facebook page was flooded with pictures and memories posted by my soldiers, remembering those whose young lives were cut short, who never had a chance to see their future. Guilt for surviving is common among those who return home. The future is complicated for soldiers who carry the realities of deployment, loss, and love with them. Yet, part of the work of the living is to look toward the future with hope, energy, and determination. When we live well, and cherish every opportunity, we honor them. n O’Malley ’05, M.Div. ’08 is a chaplain in the U.S. Army. Her current assignment is at Arlington National Cemetery.

Watching Saving Private Ryan,

or any other war movie, doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t prepare any of us

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when we deploy.

1.5°C

CO2

_08 THOUGHTS FROM AN OPTIMIST

By Scott Huler

f

or a guy who spends his time studying climate change, facing down the future of an Earth warming at an astonishing rate, under the management of a population that commonly resists even admitting its problems, Drew Shindell seems surprisingly optimistic.

Shindell, Nicholas Professor of earth science, has drawn recent attention as a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C,” released this past fall. The report addressed the terrifying climate challenge humanity faces as it moves into an uncertain future.

Shindell’s chapter is the cheerful one, focusing on climate mitigation in the context of sustainable development. That is, Shindell has been studying win-wins: ways people can simultaneously work toward a low-carbon, clean-energy planet; continue to develop economic activity; and create other positive outcomes, like cleaner air and a healthier population. “Society as a whole clearly comes out ahead, with all the sustainable-development benefits,” he says. For example, renewable energies don’t burn fuel, so they don’t require cooling towers, so they don’t increase stress on water supplies.

“Healthier planet, healthier people,” to say nothing of forestalling the end of the world.

Optimism! For the future! Of the climate!

Add in that renewable energy keeps getting cheaper as the science advances and the industry grows. “We’ve spent trillions” in a century and more of industrial fossil fuel use, Shindell says, “with essentially no decrease in cost and no improvement in efficiency.” Coal and oil still cost a lot to extract, and they burn at pretty much the same efficiency they always have. “It’s a kind of depressing history from an economic point of view.”

Renewables like wind and solar generators, on the other hand, constantly improve in efficiency and have “prices dropping so much that some of the new utility-scale solar plants have come in at less than half of fossil fuel plants. It’s astonishing.”

And as it continues to get cheaper, renewable energy yields further economic benefits along

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”It turned out the reason I was invited was the young professionals association with the company said, ’We don’t want to work at this company…if this company’s not on the

with helping the climate. “All our manufacturing gets cheaper, because electricity gets cheaper,” he says. After centuries of energy use, people finally can apply a technology that decreases in costs as it improves over time.

“This is actually a great opportunity.”

Hence, cheerful. And once again, climate mitigation policies, though undertaken to prevent the planet from frying in its own petrochemical oils, yield more than merely economic ancillary benefits. Meat production, for example, has a significant carbon footprint, so climate scientists urge people to produce less meat. That’s fine as far as doctors are concerned; they, as it happens, urge people to eat less meat. “If you just eat what is considered healthy amounts of beef but no more than that,” Shindell says, “that’s 80 percent of the problem with cows right there. And it’s good for you, anyway.

“I tell people that the nice thing about these transitions is not only do you get public health and water and all these other things, but prices are dropping so much that clean energy is actually really a boon.” We save the planet, as it were, as a side effect.

Yet, naturally, citizens are not skipping to their polling places to elect candidates who aggressively address the climate crisis. “I see generally not the most positive future one would hope for,” Shindell admits. Standing in the way of this shiny future are companies that perceive that their very survival depends on that future not coming. All the various climatic, economic, and health improvements he studies come from changes supported by comparatively small companies and industries, whether companies developing renewable energy, new agricultural practices, or alternative transit options.

Meanwhile, keeping things just the same—with no change in transit, energy, or consumption

right side of history.‘ “

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habits—means businesses that have done very well as things are will continue to do well. Those businesses work hard toward that end.

“Truth be told,” Shindell says, “we do really want to put out of business the biggest industry in the world: fossil fuels. So they’re naturally not going to be happy about that.” The small number of people in the industries creating the climate problem we face are making enormous amounts of money doing so and thus have a lot of power to control whether and how things change.

“There’s a misalignment between a small section, with very clear financial interest in the status quo, and the huge benefits to everybody, a much larger segment,” he says. But those benefits are “more diffuse in space and time,” and, because they don’t have the money, “they don’t get the lobbying.”

Putting fossil fuels out of business is a pretty tall order, yet Shindell sees progress. “I do see us moving in the right direction,” he says, “albeit too slowly.” Though U.S. national policy and many regional and state policies focus on retaining a fossil-fuel past, “I see a lot of subnational efforts

that are really quite impressive,” from cities to corporations to states. Almost “half the states in the United States are aiming for zero carbon already.”

And utility companies may resist change, but they feel pressure like anybody else. “I gave a talk at a big symposium put on by a big power company,” he recalls. “It turned out the reason I was invited was the young professionals association with the company said, ‘We don’t want to work at this company…if this company’s not on the right side of history.’ That’s where young people speaking out and finding their voice and speaking out about saving their future is really exciting to me.”

He sees countries talking about banning internal combustion engines, cities and states committing to the cause. He knows we’re late: “We have waited so long I think we are going to miss the goals described in the UN report,” he says flatly, “but I think we have started the turn.”

So maybe there is space for a little optimism in Shindell’s futurecasting. Which, by the way, didn’t start with climate science. For Shindell, the future started with physics.

“It was all physics,” says Shindell. “All growing up was physics. I loved physics in high school, got my undergraduate degree in physics, went to graduate school in physics.” Physics is, after all, the science of telling the future. You do that by understanding the present. You derive the underlying physical laws, he says, that allow you to then forecast exactly what’s going to happen. You learn to understand gravity and inertia, then you roll the steel ball down the ramp and—you’ve predicted the future! It lands just where you expected it would.

It grows more complicated, of course, and Shindell found himself at the Brookhaven National Lab doing graduate research with a particle collider. He found the work intellectually satisfying, but it seemed almost selfish. “It was good for me, but not necessarily good for anybody else.” He switched to a physics-related field, where he saw “a clear societal impact”: He studied ozone depletion.

Which is, of course, one of humankind’s great environmental success stories. Scientists discovered chemicals causing a hole in the ozone layer; within a few years, the world adopted a protocol to counter the use of those chemicals; and the hole stopped growing and is even projected to eventually heal. “Amazing!” Shindell says. “People did it!

The whole world got together! It was astonishing.”

So you can understand his hopefulness.

Again: Don’t get crazy. The IPCC report contains scary news for the future, basically admitting that the goal of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius is probably impossible. But still, Shindell retains that optimism.

“One of the most hopeful and encouraging things about transitioning to a low-carbon economy is that it really does align with all kinds of other things we want to do anyway,” Shindell says.

“Improve public health, improve water quality.

And improve economic equality.”

A low-carbon economy will by necessity, as new technologies spawn new businesses, manage resources for the benefit of more than just a few energy companies. To say nothing of the many less-skilled jobs for people doing things like retrofitting buildings to improve their energy efficiency.

“We’re going to spend trillions on energy one way or the other,” Shindell says. “It’s just kind of ‘Where are we spending it?’ ” Deep-water drilling platforms, or wind farms and retrofitting?

Fracking for increasingly expensive natural gas or research into improved solar and wave energy?

With investment in addressing the climate crisis, “the people tend to come out ahead just on the standard market economics.”

But, he adds, “when you count avoided climate damages, for the costs of hurricanes and floods,” the solution seems evident.

“I think you get this idea that transitioning to a zero-carbon economy eventually means, ‘Oh, we’re all going to turn off lights and sit in the dark and have no modern goods.’ When in fact, we want to have better things than we have now.” n

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_09

ALWAYS READY TO BECOME

By Rana DiOrio

i

was two months away from getting married to the father of my girls when the tech bubble burst, and I was laid off. I had a bull-market contract in a bear market, so my firm chose to pay my golden parachute and take the loss. I was utterly devastated. My solar plexus crumpled as if into a tight ball of aluminum foil. Despite the sizable amount of money in my bank account and imminence of the wedding of my dreams, all I could focus on was the loss. My reaction surprised me.

Books can challenge us to stretch outside our comfort zones, reconsider our assumptions, and inspire us to choose alternate paths. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck did all that for me. One passage in particular really resonated with me: “Becoming is better than being.” Why? I rarely sit still, and when I do it’s because I am meditating and creating what’s next for me.

Several years after the publication of her watershed book, she wrote an article for Education Week titled “Carol Dweck Revisits the ‘Growth Mindset’ ” in which she offers that she and her colleagues take a growth-mindset approach to their research and findings and admitted, “Maybe we talked too much about people having one mindset or the other, rather than portraying people as mixtures.” That, too, resonated with me. I strongly identify as a growth-mindset person, yet when I feel insecure or trepidatious, I hear fixed-mindset messages in my head. Those with a growth mindset believe that the more you try, the more you expand your capacity to learn and that making mistakes is the best way to learn. Conversely, those with a fixed mindset believe that effort is pointless as intelligence is static, and making mistakes is to be avoided at all costs.

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In my youth, the “becoming” manifested as my overt and external journey—learning, doing, and achieving. As a student, I was taking the hardest classes and excelling in them, practicing hard at basketball, practicing harder as a pianist and vocalist, being a student leader, accepting philanthropic roles and responsibilities, reading for pleasure late into most evenings, maintaining a part-time job, and sleeping very little.

As a young professional, I was working long hours, seeking out mentors and learning from them, changing firms, and even careers, to attain a better position for advancement and more remuneration. I was also sleeping very little. In a twelve-year span, I worked as a corporate securities associate in two law firms and then as an associate, vice president, director, and ultimately a managing director—co-running a department—across three technology investment banks.

And then the tech bubble burst, and I had no job for the first time since I was ten years old.

In the days and weeks following my dismissal, my fixed-mindset reaction to this professional setback cast its shadow on me as fear and shame. Maybe I wasn’t good enough to maintain my place in the big league of technology investment banking. Maybe I’d never find another opportunity that lucrative again.

Maybe people I cared about, including my fiancé, would think less of me because I was unemployed.

The downward spiral of negative thoughts pulled me into a vortex of darkness and despair.

During a yoga practice, I forced myself to focus on one positive thing in my life. And in the practices that followed, another and then another.

There were so many, of course. I had lost sight of them during my freefall. I vibrated with gratitude.

I told myself to enjoy getting married. And I gave

And then the tech bubble burst, and I had no job for the first time since I was ten years old. myself permission, for the first time in my life, to not know what was next.

With new respect for this part of myself, I charged forward again. I bought several buildings in San Francisco with a silent partner, took them down to the studs, and managed the renovations (while pregnant and wearing a hard hat). After the birth of my second child, I got divorced and sought the security and stability of a job. I joined one of my former colleagues as he launched his boutique M&A firm, and a few years later, I jumped at an offer to start an early-stage fund for conscientious retail brands—newly re-married and pregnant with my third child at the time.

In the wake of the rush of getting our first deal closed in record time, my business partner and I met to discuss terms. Unfortunately, we were many miles apart on our comparative equity participation in the fund. And so I left. Having lived through a few recessions, I could feel the capital markets shifting, so I began to sell my real-estate holdings— closing on the last one the month before the start of the Great Recession. Was history repeating itself? If so, I was prepared, embracing the experience of not knowing what was to come.

This time, the specter of my fixed mindset didn’t overshadow my growth mindset. Likewise, the “becoming” manifested as my covert and internal

journey—synthesizing my insights and reconciling them with my experience, reflecting on my many mistakes and learning from them, listening to my inner voice, and aligning my thoughts and actions with my purpose.

I focused on my blessings and turned my attention to my children, my pregnancy, my yoga practice, and my creative writing. Shortly after the birth of my son, I founded my first children’s media company, which published my own works first to test the market and business model; in the spring of 2019, my second company acquired it. I’m off on my next adventure, taking on an industry in need of much change with a purpose-driven approach and emerging technology.

Thankfully, I’m built to become. n DiOrio ’88 is the founder and CEO of Creative Mint Inc., which launches purpose-driven brands in children’s media. She also attended Vanderbilt University School of Law (J.D. 1991) and lives in San Francisco with her three children.

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_?

Dean Smith

_01

, who began this summer as director

What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self?

Advising and sometimes publishing my mentors while working in a place where my name causes a visceral reaction in both directions.

_02

What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist?

Develop portable assets (written and oral communication skills, presentations skills, project management), and endlessly cultivate your mind and an ironic sense of self.

_03

What is the most dramatic change you expect to see in the publishing industry?

The emergence of an “agile” or “smart” publishing firm that will utilize “just-in-time” machine-driven technologies to spontaneously create and deliver knowledge in multiple formats based on reader preferences.

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Lacey Chylack

_04

What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see in the publishing industry?

A sustainable model for opening high-quality, peerreviewed knowledge to the world.

_05

What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why?

J.K. Rowling fostered a new generation of readers and writers in the digital age around the world and reinvented the YA publishing genre for future generations.

of Duke University Press

_06

What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity?

A global lack of empathy—for the concerns of others and the social issues affecting us (e.g., climate change).

_07

In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why?

I’m a publisher who tilts at windmills at one of the world’s leading institutions—I’m definitely an optimist.

_08

What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219?

A Blackwing #1 Palomino pencil.

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_10 IT BLOSSOMED INTO HOPE

By Madison Catrett

t

he blue glow of my laptop was the only light in my dorm room. I stared at the screen, my eyes glued to a table ranking twenty-eight methods of suicide based on lethality, time required, and agony. A shotgun to the head would be lethal and almost painless, but there would be a lot of splatter. Jumping would require a building at least 150 feet tall, and there were plenty of those around, but it would also be messy. I could slit my wrists in the shower, which would wash away the mess, but cutting is pretty painful and is often not lethal.

I slammed my laptop closed. Why was it so hard to properly commit suicide? I wrapped myself in my comforter, closed my eyes, and told myself there would still be tomorrow. My depression would still be telling me I was worthless. I’d still believe I not only deserved to die but that death was the only option left. I slept, knowing my plans could wait another day.

A year and a half later, I’m home for the

summer, waiting for my internship to begin. I am surprised to feel the hollowing sadness I thought I healed from. I think back to that time, my first year of college. I see myself in the adult psychiatric ward, forcing food down my throat, swallowing pills I don’t remember agreeing to take, discussing what led me here. I see myself in weekly therapy sessions that turned into twice-monthly sessions that turned into monthly sessions. I see myself telling my therapist I didn’t need to come back.

I was fine. I convinced myself, and I somehow convinced her, too.

I attempt to distract myself from the emotions—dancing at a concert with my sister, playing vocabulary games with my brother, reading as many books as I can.

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I find a novel in my town’s small library about

a man called Ove, who struggles with grief and depression. Hopeless, Ove attempts to kill himself, not once, not twice, but five times. As the plot unfolds and Ove’s numerous suicide attempts fail, he begrudgingly helps his neighbors with their problems. Slowly, Ove finds love again. He experiences joy again. He realizes the world still needs his contributions. When I flip the last page and close the novel, I feel light but with a small weight settled in my stomach, like a helium balloon tethered to a paperweight. I think of a quote I found on Twitter: “You don’t have to feel hopeful about the future, it’s enough to just be curious about what is coming.”

I’d like to think Ove experienced curiosity first, and as he leaned into curiosity, it blossomed into hope.

“What do you plan to do after graduation?”

My aunt looks at me from across her dining table, a cup of wine in hand.

An innocuous question, but the words produce sweat on my palms and a tap-tap-tapping in my feet. Multiple futures pop into my head: I graduate. My parents still aren’t in the picture, so no emotional or financial support from them. I have no money saved. No safety net in sight. I crash

and burn. A Duke degree wasted on me.

I graduate, earn my spot in a prestigious graduate program in sociology. I work my ass off for years, sometimes poorer than I’ve ever been. But I graduate. I become a professor, teaching and producing research. I am happy.

I graduate, earn my teaching degree, and teach high-school English. In my down time, I work on my memoir. Maybe it’s about battling depression and anxiety. Maybe it’s about growing up in an abusive household. Maybe it’s about something I haven’t even thought of yet. Eventually, I get published. I receive a letter from a teenager. She says: “Thank you, I didn’t know I needed to read this until I did. You gave me hope.” I am happy.

Normally, I’d tell my aunt what she wants to hear: I’ll go to graduate school, I’ll make plenty of money. It’s easier that way. But I make eye contact with her, and I tell her: “I’m not sure what I’ll do yet. But I have some time. And this I do know—I am hopeful for and curious about what my future holds.” n Catrett is a rising junior studying sociology, education, and creative writing. She is spending her summer interning with the Partnership for Appalachian Girls Education in Madison County, North Carolina.

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_11 SEEING BEYOND THE NOW

i

By Sydney Roberts

n 2016, my freshman year at Duke, I was one of nine undergraduate students who occupied the Allen Building demanding, among other things, higher wages and improved workplace conditions for Duke employees, and because of an incident with an employee, the termination of Executive Vice President Tallman Trask III. While the whirlwind sequence of events that comprised the week we spent entrenched in the administrative floor can sometimes bleed together in my head, I remember with sharp clarity the moments the Reverend William Barber M.Div. ’89 spent bellowing into our twerpy second-hand amp and mic setup just outside the parameters of Abele-Ville.

Specifically, I remember him calling the building takeover an “act of faith,” and I’ve thought about that quite a lot since. At the time, it felt like such a weighty, abstract burden to place on such young shoulders: that of having faith.

I’ve been working with SEIU, UFCW, AFSCME Local 77, and a number of other economic-justice-focused organizations for the past four years in North Carolina. Most of the time, it hasn’t felt like an act of faith. It’s felt like white-knuckle anger and residual generational fear—cellular lineages of hard labor and deaths of orchestrated, artificial scarcity you could trace in my telomeres. It felt like an obligation of survival, not a pious burden handed to me by God. My dedication to it infrequently felt like faith in anything, but rather often a sense that it was either this or a passive death in a future uncertain.

I’ve come to find that to be concerned with labor and economic justice at all is to be concerned with future-building and futurity—seeing the future as

unprecedented and therefore full of potential for being free of our current conditions, not simply better off within them. While there isn’t space in this essay for recitations of Fanon, Marcuse, or Derrida, Mark Fisher does serve as an accessible entry point for thinking about this more.

Fisher developed the concept of Capitalist Realism as a definitional culmination of the ways in which capitalism obscures alternative futures. In Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? he refers to the well-worn adage—attributed to both Slavoj Žižek and Duke’s own Fredric Jameson—that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” noting that it reflects the precise phenomenon he’s attempting to understand.

Broadly, it’s the inescapable sense that only capitalism can support life and that there exists no other worlds outside of it—that we’d sooner be able to comprehend and accept a barren Earth purged of all life than one free of imperialism and the internal contradictions inherent to capital accumulation, regardless of how catastrophic. This crushing debt, piling medical bills, precarious living arrangement, perma-wars, imperialist military occupations, and endless hours spent working a job that you will never be able to retire from: all of it appears as a permanent sentence. What this leaves us with is a constrained, stunted sense of temporality—a warped life where the future is either too painful to endure or frighteningly opaque.

Now, looking back, Barber’s comment makes more sense. In the face of a shamelessly gerrymandered state with misleadingly named “Right to Work” laws, where the current minimum wage can’t cover cost of rent anywhere in the United States, the belief in the

collective power of workers to change their seemingly immutable conditions can often look like a faith in an impossible, unimaginable future. When we are mired by the inability to imagine a life worth living beyond our wage labor constraints, organizing for a better world must appear to be only the work of the devout called upon by something higher.

How else could one face the crushing reality of real hourly wage growth stagnation—despite productivity increases—since the 1970s, privatization of services essential to life, the breakdown of Fordist social relations with the coinciding birth of neoliberal social modes that increasingly situate capital at the center of our relationships to one another, and the largely unencumbered development of the debt economy, without something as unshakable as faith in a future most of us can’t even begin to envision?

So, perhaps futurity is reliant on some form of faith:

thousands of public educators flooding the state capital, the formation of the Duke Faculty Union and Graduate Student Union, state-wide mobilization against HB2 (which prohibited transgender people from using bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity and limited local minimum-wage increases), or McDonald’s employees walking out on strike over sexual harassment, we’ve witnessed tremendous feats of worker power here.

Of people daring to see beyond the often crushing misery of the now and daring to begin the work of envisioning something different—a faith in some new potential future even if we’ve never before seen it and may never witness it ourselves.

Socialism makes me believe in the future. Worker liberation challenging the interconnected sites of capital and white supremacy make me believe in the future.

Watching laborers demanding a life worth living makes me believe in the future. Seeing a revitalization of orga-

”it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.“ an unwavering conviction that despite all the evidence presented to us to the contrary, the struggle for an anti-racist coalition of workers building collective power is a just one and that a different life can come to fruition.

That faith is more than the will to just survive, to make it to the next day or paycheck. It’s an ability to conceive of something entirely new: an ability to not just rage against the now, but the capacity to dream of a tomorrow worth greeting. Maybe it’s a radical form of love.

Maybe it’s Gramsci’s optimism of the will. Regardless, in my experience, no place in the United States strengthens that faith more than the South.

In North Carolina alone, just the past few years have been transformational in the resurgence in organized labor and working-class demonstrations. Whether it be

nized labor crop up across universities, public schools, large fast-food chains, and grocery stores; watching increasing numbers of calls for anti-war solidarity and fights against settler colonialism from within the belly of Empire; and the roar of demands for the right to health care feel like a potential livable world slowly coming into focus. After all, we still have a world to win. n Roberts ’19 majored in global cultural studies with a Marxism and Society certificate, was the chair of The Chronicle’s editorial board, and was a Point Foundation Scholar. She works in union organizing in Washington, D.C.

REVELATIONS

t

he shift to urban culture, specifically across the first millennium B.C.E. in Italy, is a perpetually

hot research topic in classical archaeology: It concerns the emergence of complex societies in the Iron Age, their evolution into city-states, and, finally, their transformation into Roman settlements.

Vulci, a well-known Etruscan and Roman city, has been excavated, though fitfully and incompletely, for some 150 years. It is now a protected archaeological park. For the past several years, Duke classical studies professor Maurizio Forte has led a collaborative project based in Vulci and including the Fondazione Luigi Rovati in Italy and the University of Evora in Portugal.

MODERN TECHNOLOGY AND ANCIENT REMAINS: An inside view of an Etruscan cistern; inset, uncovering a â&#x20AC;&#x153;Silenusâ&#x20AC;? decorative element from a Roman fountain

As it reveals buried and formerly inaccessible structures like foundation walls, living quarters, a cistern, a basilica, and a monument

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to the imperial cult, the project is showcasing the future of excavating the past. It combines data—collected in large amounts over a very short time—from a range of noninvasive technologies: rover-robots; magnetometry; ground-penetrating radar; aerial photography, through drones carrying multispectral cameras; and even a “smart trowel” equipped with multiple sensors.

A multidisciplinary example of “big data” at work, this array of methods creates a new research model for studying and interpreting ancient cities. Among the eventual outcomes: a “virtual exploration” of the archaeological park, slicing through layers of history, to educate visitors to Vulci. n

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AERIAL OVERVIEWS: Reconstructing the ancient city and its surrounding landscape through high-resolution digital elevation models, ground-penetrating data, digital photogrammetry, and 3D virtual models

ARTIFACTS RECOVERED AND RECORDED: A Roman amphora (above) and a Roman lamp (right) captured digitally by Antonio LoPiano, a Duke Ph.D. student in classical studies, part of a thirty-twoâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;person international team, including undergraduates and graduate students

All photos courtesy Maurizio Forte

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_01

_?

What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self?

That I’d spend over a decade on the coast of Maine or be setting up a life here in Durham; I thought I was headed for a big city like New York, Beijing, or London.

Their scale, community, and engagement give smaller cities and towns a distinct appeal I didn’t fully see back then.

Mary Pat McMahon

_02

, who began this summer as vice

What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see in the area of student life?

Access to and use of student space is a hot topic, and it will ultimately shift campus planning and design.

Who sets the agenda for social events and programs? Are the events inclusive and reflective of the whole student body? How are spaces organized and designed to reflect the shared values of a campus community?

_03

What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see in the area of student life?

I hope leaders in higher education look at the ways we define “success” before, during, and after the undergraduate experience. Our system of incentives and rewards can be unhealthy and shallow. How do we support students who want to take intellectual and personal risks?

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Courtesy Duke Student Affairs

_04

What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why?

Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan. Her personal heroism and her advocacy for access to education for young girls around the world will influence a generation of young people.

_05

What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity?

The decline of civic and community participation, and related ways that social mediaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;particularly without a healthy balance of face-to-face authentic engagement with other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;can lead to greater isolation and intolerance.

In some ways, this current generation of students has a better understanding of the problem than the rest of us.

president/vice provost for campus life

_06

In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why?

Optimistic. If we can equip our students to make the most of their college experience, they will be prepared to go into their field of study, the workplace, and civic life with the skills to improve humanity.

_07

What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219?

A baseball signed by Mookie Betts, a fidget spinner, the original cast recording of Hamilton, a recipe for homemade glitter slime. Can you tell my kids are in elementary school?

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06 08 07 09

_12 A MORE JUST WORLD

By Oluwadamilola “Lola” Fayanju

m

y boys have dark brown curls and mischievous smiles. They speak with clarity and confidence. They move with boundless energy but also with unexpected grace. They enjoy playing with their lovies, reading with their daddy, and dancing with me, their mommy. They were born in St. Louis, but their great-grandparents were born in Africa, Asia, and Europe. They are six and eight. They represent the best of America. And I am scared for their future.

I am a surgeon and health-services researcher who studies disparities in breast cancer. I am interested in the potentially modifiable factors that contribute to ethnic and racial inequities, including how well or how poorly our patients feel (e.g., psychological distress) and how well or how poorly we clinicians treat them (e.g., implicit bias). Black women are less likely to get breast cancer than white women but are also more likely to die from it. Black women are more likely to be diagnosed with an aggressive variant of the disease known as triple-negative breast cancer.

These disparities reflect a messy web of ancestry and access, biology and bias that belies the social constructs of race we use to organize and categorize the people around us. Much space in the

scientific literature has been devoted to describing disparities, but only more recently has research focused on concrete efforts to address the root causes of these differences. A plethora of toolboxes and smartphone apps and decision-making aids are being generated to promote enrollment of racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials, to facilitate patient communication with clinicians, and to help patients become more active participants in their own health-care decisions. We clinicians are also being trained to recognize the biases we bring to our work, and I’m optimistic about the growing consensus that this trend doesn’t spring from political correctness but from the need to practice better medicine.

I am committed to the goal of eliminating ethnic and racial health disparities but, perversely, it is unclear whether and how the work I and others do will help my boys. They are mixed race.

I’ve watched them blend into crowds of brown people in Bermuda and in Houston. I’ve seen the puzzlement on people’s faces as they try to figure out or simply blurt out, “What are they?” I’ve looked at their health records; I know that whether they are listed as “black” or “white” depends on whether I or my husband brought them to their first appointment. One of my boys already refers

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?

I’ve seen the puzzlement on people’s faces as they try

to himself as black while the other resists—even as he swears that he loves my skin.

As both a black mother to biracial boys and a surgeon-scientist who examines race, I am conflicted about what box(es) to check lest I bias the statistics one way or another. Yes, in America and in the U.K., where my husband is from, most people will consider them black. In Nigeria, where my family is from, they will be referred to by the antiquated term of half-caste and—to my chagrin—be celebrated for it. At their public school, in a system with one of the largest racial achievement gaps in the country, I actually do not know whether they are included in the roughly 10 percent of students who are listed as African American or the roughly 10 percent of students who are listed as being of two or more races.

A large part of me wants them included among the black students because it is important to examine the intersection of class and race when we interrogate interracial achievement gaps, which persist even when black and brown wealthy children with well-educated parents are compared to white, similarly situated peers in many of the “best” school districts in this country. But my bias toward including them with the black kids is not wholly logical: Part of me hopes that their strong grades and test scores will narrow local achievement gaps by raising the averages for black children. But part of me also— irrationally—

46 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

dares to hope that the social confidence and easy acceptance they take for granted might somehow be contagious and transmitted to the brown and black children grouped with them. That those who feel as “othered” as I did, growing up in a mostly white town, might somehow feel more included and more valued than I did and they do.

At the same time, I also worry that my boys’ categorical inclusion will provide false hope, will offer unrepresentative examples of black kids thriving in a place where they all too rarely do. That their success will allow the school system to pat itself on the back and place even less focus on addressing disparities in achievement.

But beyond how their stats affect school rankings, I think about how their complex racial heritage—and the complex racial heritage of most people who identify as black or Hispanic or Native American in the United States—could affect their ability to someday get a bone-marrow transplant, with matches being harder to achieve for people of color and mixed race. I think about the non-randomness with which the growing numbers of multiracial people in America will identify as black or white or Asian or Hispanic, depending on where and by whom they are raised and how these decisions will bias both resource allocation and the outcomes of clinical trials.

In short, I worry that our ability to practice good medicine will be challenged by the brown-

to figure out or simply blurt out, ”What are they?“

ing of America, by the increasing ethnic and racial complexity of this country at a time when the structural racism in our country’s culture and institutions is more entrenched than one would expect more than fifty years after the Civil Rights Movement. My boys were born just a couple of years before and ten miles away from where Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. They have borne witness to growing social divisions in this country and rising populism across the world. They have attended more political demonstrations before ten than I did before thirty-five. They know more about politics than six- and eight-year-old boys should. They have had “The Talk,” and they know why I won’t buy them toy guns and why their actions may not be viewed in the same way as the hijinks of their white friends.

I am committed to providing a more just world for my sons, and I—more than many—am equipped with tools and blessed with privileges that facilitate my being an active participant in the betterment of our country and our world.

But as their mother, I worry. As a disparities researcher, I worry. As a surgeon, I worry. And as an American, I worry. n Fayanju is a surgical oncologist whose clinical practice and research centers on the care of patients with benign and malignant breast disease.

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_13 THIS LAND IS MY LEGACY

istock/blewulis

By Shandiin Herrera

i

am the little girl at the end of a dirt road seldom traveled on. The curious mind who watched her grandmother weave rugs for eight hours straight, never tiring. The young soul who never understood the land she walked on was crying for help.

I walked aimlessly alongside my best friend, whose white paws left soft tracks in the red sand.

We ventured to the cliffs, where I stared at the giant monuments and listened to the soft breeze of the wind. I was free. In mind, body, and spirit.

I was happy. Perhaps it was because I had my grandmother’s house to watch the sunrise from. Or because my best friend was always waiting for me, prepared for another adventure. This chapter of my life I call: Answered Prayers. In my childhood, every day was filled with adventure and life lessons; every day prepared me for a future of resilience,

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and instilled in me a clear sense of self and an unshakable pride.

I grew up in Tse’bii’nidzisgai, Monument Valley, in Diné Bikéyah, the Navajo Nation. As a young girl, I often wondered why so many people flock to our lands in search of an experience in the West and to capture the views of our valleys. To be honest, it frustrated me that so many people could freely walk throughout our lands when just over 150 years ago my people were forcibly removed by the federal government and imprisoned at Bosque Redondo, Fort Sumner, New Mexico. It is only

through our treaty with the U.S. government that my ancestors were able to return home to begin rebuilding their lives.

Many who visit Tse’bii’nidzisgai are unaware of our history and the era of ethnic cleansing we endured. Many do not understand our trauma, our strength, or the meaning of our relationship to our land, but we do—I do. This is my homeland. This is where I am supposed to be. I think of home, and it makes my heart happy because I

me how to truly live in hozhó, beauty. To live in beauty is to live in balance. This interconnectedness between harmony and goodness in all things physical and spiritual that leads me to live in health and well-being. This is what this land has taught me.

The older I grew, the further away from home I found myself. Off to new adventures seeking educational and employment opportunities. Though sometimes thousands of miles away, I can still feel

If there is one thing I am sure of in this life, it is that all of my paths lead back to the little house at the end of a dirt road. know this is what my ancestors prayed for. I am healthy and happy on the land they loved and died protecting. I am reminded of the sacrifices of my people so that I could take evening walks to the cliffs and watch sunrises from our valley, like we always have.

Monument Valley is the place where stars are the only light at night, and where the air is filled with lingering prayers.

The concept of home is tied to my land because we have been loving this land the longest. I do not believe that people can be separated from land. I grew up learning that our relationship to land is as stewards and protectors. We are people of the land: In the Navajo language, we call ourselves Diné—the people. We continue loving and living on our land, known to us as Dinétah. Even in our language, we cannot be separated from land. We are interconnected, and this love and protection is visible throughout our history and our current day-to-day lives.

To grow up in such a beautiful place has taught

the harmony of home. I have been advised many times to follow an educational path, which led me to Duke. Paths of curiosity, education, and advocacy have led me to the Andean mountains in Cusco, Peru, the beaches of Hawai’i, and the hallways of the United States Senate. If there is one thing I am sure of in this life, it is that all of my paths lead back to the little house at the end of a dirt road.

Monument Valley has instilled in me an appreciation for all that my people have protected, and has showed me the responsibility of ensuring generations after me will have the blessing of growing on our land, too. To live in a beautiful place with beautiful people is nothing short of a blessing. It is Tse’bii’nidzisgai that has taught me to walk through this life boldly, but carefully, and always in beauty. n Herrera ’19 is a proud member of the Navajo Nation and graduate of the Sanford School of Public Policy. As a lead for America Hometown Fellow, she currently works with the Oljato chapter of the Navajo Nation as a policy analyst and project consultant.

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_14 FOR A SUSTAINABLE MEDIA

By Nick Martin

a

couple of weeks after I graduated, my editor at the independent blog company I had interned for over my junior-year summer called to offer me a full-time gig. This was about a month after a has-been professional wrestler nearly sued the entire company out of existence.

Taking a risk, I dumped the summer internship I had secured and took the job. That fall, the company got bought by a massive media conglomerate; the independence vanished overnight. Where once the fate of our media company and our financial futures rested solely in the hands of our owner, Nick Denton, that power now belonged to a faceless group of overpaid midlevel executives who would pop in every few months for increasingly disastrous all-hands meetings.

Fast forward to the spring of 2018. Saddled with debt by the privateequity firms that they had stupidly sold pieces of themselves to for years, the conglomerate, or rather its debtors, decided costs needed to be trimmed. For us, that could have meant dropping 30 percent of our staff, as the conglomerate initially (reportedly) hoped. Instead, because of our union, the result was eighteen weeks of severance for the forty-four staffers who took the deal. A major loss, but also a mitigated one.

Now jump to this spring. In March, a day after I joined a dozen fellow employees in informing the lawyers for the faceless conglomerate that we would strike if they did not offer us a fair contract, the conglomerate conceded to our heroic

bargaining team and offered us a fair contract. A month later, our (highly successful!) blogs were sold as part of a preplanned dump-off to a(nother) private-equity—sorry, “growth” equity—firm, which immediately replaced our bosses with two nondescript mid-sixties white guys to run a company whose cornerstones include Jezebel and The Root (which focus on women’s and AfricanAmerican issues, respectively). Oh, and the big conglomerate that used to own us gave us about a two-week notice that our company’s more than 200 employees had to move out of our office.

The economic issues that have befallen the digital news industry in the past five years, and America in the last forty, have also befallen print media: Outlets are increasingly coming under the control of a select few major investors and newspaper groups, whose executives feel far more beholden to their stockholders than to the communities their outlets serve, let alone the reporters serving them. And at a certain point, a union, as they are currently constituted, is limited when these people decide the axe must fall.

The summer following my sophomore year, I interned for The News & Observer​in Raleigh, on the sports desk. Thanks to industrywide consol-

Since 2015, more than 2,000 digital media workers have unionized their newsrooms.

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w

e

idation and some terrible investments made by some C-level suits, mass layoffs had ravaged the newsroom. As a result, the three-story office was a ghost town. The interns, along with the remaining staff, sat through meetings where the higher-ups explained how the paper was actually still profitable, but because it was not independent from the dozens of other properties this corporation controlled, its profits did not mean more jobs or higher salaries, but that the money simply vanished, ​ poof​, off to settle the company’s aforementioned debts. A couple of years later, they swapped their office for a smaller one, selling the storied building to a company that invests in “securities, real estate, and oil and gas.”

In the same way that our union could not stop Gawker Media from being sold, a union would not have saved The N&O from its post-Recession contraction. It almost certainly would have secured workers better health care and salaries and, eventually, buyouts, but a union in the form that presently pervades the print and digital sectors would not have withstood the inherent idiocy of late-stage capitalism.

The idea of always-elusive high profit margins and quick cash-ins has spelled doom for workers at every outlet from Vox to The Denver Post, because at the end of the day, newsrooms that do not control their own financial fate, or have a sole owner that is concerned with more than their ROI, are asking their owners to minimize their own outsized slice of the pie chart in favor of providing a crucial and quickly fading community service. What we

have seen on the owners’ part, repeatedly, is the opposite. They instead point to us, the reporters and editors, and say we must do more with less. Then, after normalizing the new work practices, they will ask the same of us again. And then again. And then again, until there is left but one person clacking away in a hollow bullpen, assigning, filing, editing, and publishing all the day’s news.

For the current and future employees in the news media to create a sustainable model that fosters lifelong careers and moves away from the benefits-absent freelance model, unions are necessary. But they must grow and evolve with the goal of inserting a group of representatives in the boardroom to force executives to hear the voice of all those who contribute to the production of the outlet, so that when it comes time to make a risky investment or cutbacks due to macroeconomic reasons, the workers at the bottom are not the only ones getting screwed. Since 2015, more than 2,000 digital media workers have unionized their newsrooms. It is time for these workers, and for their colleagues in the print industry, to declare the era of single-handed domination by venture capitalists and conglomerates at an end.

I’m not old or grizzled or wise. But I’m already tired of praying for a benevolent billionaire, and other journalists should be, too. n Martin ’16 is a staff writer at Splinter, where he covers Indian Country and Southern politics. He is also a citizen of the Sappony Tribe and a proud member of the Writers Guild of America-East.

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_15 THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS

By Jane Terlesky

i

recently walked around the Duke campus with my eighteen-year-old daughter, her many possible futures spread out before her, each one, for this flash of a moment, an equal contender in the competition for her attention. As we walked on Abele Quad toward the East Campus bus, I saw myself at her age, waiting for the same bus in my Calvin Klein jeans and clogs, on my way to an audition at Baldwin Auditorium for a Hoof ’n’ Horn production or on my way to my first acting class—both decisions I made on a whim at her age because I never got the chance to do theater in high school.

The young me, like my daughter now, had many possible futures ahead of her. She would decide, without hesitation here and after great deliberation there, to take this path or that, and she would become, has become, this woman walking toward

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the bus stop. I’m told in a TED talk that the deepdown laws of physics don’t distinguish between past and future. This seems right, as I walk on West Campus with the chapel hovering over me, my daughter, and my younger self.

The future, as we generally understand it, is a static thing that exists in the distance—a thing, the future. But there are an infinite number of futures near, and mid, and far. The future is a moving target. The future is the eighteen-year-olds who have just begun the fastest-flying four years of their lives: our youth and everything they will do in the years to come. The future is five minutes from now, it is the longed-for morning during a night of no sleep, it is flying cars in the sky (my fantasy as a nine-year-old) and Star Trek and warp speed and holograms. It is environmental devastation and extinction, but also the smell of a baby’s neck and the open joy of its smile as it looks into your eyes, unimpeded by knowledge of anything

”Wait.

but now. In the future, we can hope, things will be better in some ways: more tolerance, more equal distribution of work and food and favor, fewer unsolvable puzzles and incurable diseases. Or, we fear, it will be much worse, and in many ways: more division and less tolerance, less kindness, less compassion, greater inequality, the disappearance of some of the most exquisite life this Earth has ever seen, and, well, let’s stop there. And ask instead, what about now?

I’m at a point in my life where the future means a far different thing than it meant when I was younger. There’s a day when you wake up and go, “Wait. What?” The years that lie ahead of the eighteen-year-olds around us are full of possibilities.

But as the years go by, those possibilities slough off, one by one, mostly unnoticed because they weigh so little at the time, until we are our present selves, the product of years of choice after choice as we walked toward our future.

What?”

If we embraced this, if we realized the future is in fact now, might we make better choices along the way? If we give it even a second’s thought, we realize that we never reach the future. When we get “there,” this place we keep envisioning in front of us, “there” leaps ahead, like a mirage, and we are just here again. Here and here and here. All around us is now, the future of seconds and minutes and years past. And all around us, perhaps, if those physicists are right, are the nows of the future. Perhaps, as I walked on Abele Quad toward my younger self waiting for the bus to East Campus, the chapel high above us, my daughter’s future self walked beside us saying, “I remember this.” She is, I am, you are, the future. n Terlesky ’82 is an actor who was most recently seen playing the role of Admiral Katrina Cornwell on Star Trek: Discovery, over 230 years into the future. Her stage name is Jayne Brook.

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_16 LATER

By Lucas Hubbard

i

started writing seriously seven years ago, and sometime in the intervening period, I became a procrastinator. Missing a deadline is a terrible, deep pit: At first, it’s to be avoided at all costs, and then, once experienced, it’s something never to be relived.

And yet, I catch myself following the same patterns, flirting with the same disasters. Creativity can’t be rushed, I say to no one in particular, and so I delay my work obligations throughout the week, and then let them bleed into the weekend, when I’ll be free from the rigors of responding to e-mail. Then, I bump my tasks until Sunday evening, when the weekend’s activities will have abated; once I find myself too sleepy to think properly, I postpone again, with plans to hit the ground running early Monday morning—at which point, I work my alarm’s snooze button like a speed bag.

A few months ago, I decided to try to learn why this keeps happening. I wanted to know the mechanisms in the brain causing me to stall, to invoke a Wimpy’s choice, if you will, and perpetually assume that next Tuesday will be more fruitful than today. In other words, what is unique about future thinking that causes people like me to fall behind, again and again and again?

So, I pitched this essay, and after a sufficient number of weeks passed for the shadow of a deadline to creep up, I talked to Scott Huettel, chair and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, who told me, very kindly, that my question isn’t that straightforward. The explanation for this phenomenon doesn’t lie so much in how we think about the future; rather, it’s found at a more elementary level, in how we decide.

“Almost all our decisions are about consequences in the future,” says Huettel, whose lab specializes in the field of “decision neuroscience,” broadly engaged with exploring how humans navigate such choices. Outside of very specific instances—say, electing between two hors d’oeuvres— our brain chooses by parsing benefits and consequences to be realized far down the line. “If we make a decision about where we go to dinner tonight and where we make a reser-

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vation, that’s about the future,” Huettel says. “If we have to make a decision about which college to attend, that’s about the future. If we have to make a decision about whether to spend money now or save it, that’s a decision that weighs future consequences.”

But what do we think about when we think about the future? Mostly, we’re creating and testing scenarios, says Huettel. “Your brain is sort of a simulation engine. One of the things that’s most important about a human brain is that it can take conditions and run them through.”

Doing so requires tapping into the part of the brain called the hippocampus, says Felipe De Brigard, Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor of philosophy at Duke. The hippocampus is maybe best known for its role in memory, but memories provide the kindling, the “building blocks,” for any forward projections. “The future is not exactly how the past was,” says De Brigard, “but it is more likely that the future may be how the past could’ve been.”

De Brigard studies the interaction of memory and imagination through counterfactual and hypothetical simulations, more precisely, our constant formation and creation of such false scenarios, of “something that didn't happen but could have occurred.” He’s fascinated, then, by what specifics we retain from our past to use in our projections. Over time, scientists have learned that one’s memory doesn’t function like a court stenographer, dutifully recording what happened when and allowing precise recall of the facts. Memory is more of a construction. And thus, unsurprisingly, so is our understanding of the future.

I’ve used “our” a lot in this essay, and I feel bad about it. Like most invocations of the first-person plural, it’s born out of laziness: The brain mechanisms might loosely be the same across all humans, yet there is no uniform approach to the future. For example, De Brigard notes that not all elements of memory—and thus future projections—are equivalent: There are semantic building blocks, created from a knowledge of the world, and episodic, or more

autobiographical, building blocks. Older adults have more semantic memories; younger adults are the opposite.

But many explorations of future thinking, including Huettel’s, center on the question of patience: When given a choice, do people elect for a “smaller, sooner” reward—say, forty dollars today—or are they able to hold out for a “larger, later” payout—sixty dollars in six months? And what do those individuals who are more patient have in common?

The findings oscillate between obvious and striking. Adults are more patient than youths, but older adults—who might, callously speaking, be planning for a shorter future—tend to demonstrate more patience than younger adults. Individuals suffering from drug addiction prefer rewards sooner, but impulsivity, as a character trait, isn’t a strong predictor of what economic payouts a person will prefer. Perhaps most compelling is the lab’s recent discovery, from tracking subjects’ eye movements when comparing rewards across time, is that the more future-oriented individuals exhibit a very rapid comparison process.

Said another way: When people took more time to decide on a reward, they were actually less patient.

Huettel explains that, traditionally, scientists have believed patient individuals either exhibit greater self-control or slow down to make the proper choice. “Our recent research really argues that neither is correct,” he says. “What seems to be the case is that the people who are most patient have this meta-program of a rule that they can apply in a lot of contexts that basically says that the future is very valuable, and you should look for what gives you the most total resources regardless of when it occurs.”

Undoubtedly, myriad biases plague humans’ future thinking. There’s “decision paralysis,” or what De Brigard calls “the Hamlet problem,” in which one faces a complex and/or infinite set of possibilities and struggles to find a shortcut. (Teenagers struggle with this task more so than adults; they decide both more slowly and more randomly.) There are “availability heuristics,” in which the choice is colored by one’s ability to almost automatically think up expenditures of forty dollars today—but not costs of sixty dollars in half a year. Individuals “might be more willing to wait for the future in cases where there’s a major life transition you can think about,” Huettel says, like the holidays, or an upcoming move. In other words, if your goal is to be more patient, force yourself to consider what your future self might need.

And time and again, people procrastinate, a symptom of “optimism bias.” “People are very willing to assume,

“

in the future, that they’ll have more time,” says Huettel.

“It’s harder to think of the constraints” in the future, and so quickly, tasks get pushed back, and schedules become overbooked with future commitments and responsibilities.

“It’s particularly pernicious when thinking about things in the future, because we might be overestimating our ability to deal with things,” he says.

“We don’t think about all of the little obstacles that life is going to throw at us.”

Certainly, there’s a lot left to be discovered in these areas.

De Brigard hopes to explore variances in the creation of mental simulations: Are certain future scenarios overlooked because it simply doesn’t occur to us that these things could happen? Do particular populations—say, people suffering from anxiety—struggle because they generate too many counterfactuals?

For Huettel, one aim is to understand the conception of the future self. Recent scientific literature has suggested we might think about our present selves and our future selves as different people, although he wants to explore this debate further. “Is it the case that in order to think about our own future self, we use social-cognitive methods that evolve when thinking about others?” If so, it could mean that the interventions—the nudges to inform optimal behavior—might need to exist not just individually but societally. “To make better decisions,” Huettel says, “we might need to develop empathy.”

At first the idea seems tangential, but at its core is the desire to effect change. Perhaps the most dangerous flaw is in thinking that our decision-making will always improve, that things will always, eventually, become painless. To believe that deprives us of our agency in the current moment; our future selves can only be better off when we do things to improve their worlds—now.

I know, firsthand, how easy it is to fantasize about being productive in a week, a year, a decade. What’s even easier, I’ve discovered, is entertaining the dream where I don’t have to be, because all my work has been taken care of by a very kind soul: present-day me. It’s a nice dream, in that the fantasy soon reaches its natural conclusion, evaporating as fast as it forms. And by the end, I’m left sitting at my desk, typing. n

People are very willing to assume, in the future, that they’ll have

MORE TIME.

Hubbard ’14, the former Clay Felker staff writer for Duke Magazine, is a writer and researcher based in Durham whose work has appeared in INDY Week, Deadspin, and other publications.

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_17 TOO MANY STEPS AHEAD

i

By en Chu

magine you are a chess player and you’re given a gift, where you can put any one of your pieces anywhere on the board. The possibilities would be boundless! There’s actually a chess strategy called the Christmas Present Game that’s a version of that gift. Once you have the piece and square in mind, you move your pieces to make it happen.

Not so very long ago, in a match at the National Scholastic Championship, I had that piece and that perfect square in mind. I wanted to put one of my awkwardly placed knights on an aggressive central square to constrict my opponent’s pieces and suffocate the space around his king. I meticulously orchestrated my pieces around the board until my knight finally came to a dominating position in my opponent’s territory.

As I maneuvered my pieces around to make my plan come to fruition, my opponent was making seemingly senseless moves.

I remember imagining the plethora of annihilating attacking possibilities that came from having my knight in that position. From a devastating pawn storm, to a smooth smothered mate, I could barely keep count of the different winning scenarios I would possess once I put my pieces in place. With my dream scenario just over the horizon, I quickly developed each of my pieces so that they were poised for an assault. As I fit the final jigsaw piece into place by moving my knight to its outpost, I pressed the clock and smiled at the fact that all the pieces had finally come together to make the perfect setup for an attack.

“Rxh2+!!” My heart skipped a beat as I watched my opponent drag his dormant rook all the way across the board and check my king. Not once did I consider this move: a blatant sacrifice of one of his most valuable defending pieces. Dumbstruck by this huge sacrifice, my brain scrambled for a response to his surprise attack on my king. I tried my best to fend off the onslaught of checks. After a few moves, I stepped back and analyzed the position one more time. I realized that my supposedly dominating knight was but a piece of coal in a Christmas stocking compared to my opponent’s position, which was a mountain of presents under the Christmas tree.

The bombardment began, as my king attempted to

scurry away to safety. Check after check, capture after capture, clock slam after clock slam, my opponent sent a volley of pieces directly at my king. It wasn’t long before the position looked like a flashback to the Alamo, with my king all alone in the center. With defeat in my heart, I finally surrendered and let my king fall just as my spirits had. That dream scenario I kept looking forward to suddenly became my worst nightmare.

Looking back at the game, I realize that all of those “purposeless” moves that my opponent made while I constructed my master plan weren’t so meaningless after all. I was so fixated on materializing that perfect position that I completely dismissed my opponent and didn’t see that he was already well prepared for my assault. My illusion of being a clairvoyant chess player was shattered by my lack of awareness at my bested position.

Though chess is largely about thinking one step ahead of your opponent, looking so many steps ahead just had me lost. I was enamored with the thought of outwitting my opponent, the thought of calculating just one move more than him, the thought of seeing more than he could. My opponent’s counterattack showed me just how dangerous the perils of strategy could be, that hidden within such enticing tactics are just as many traps that can undermine your whole plan.

I realized, after the fact, that maybe the strategy needs a slight name adjustment: It shouldn’t be the Christmas Present Game but the Christmas present game. In other words, if you spend all your energy dreaming of that future position—without focusing on the actual present moment—you’ll never have a gift to open. n Chu, a rising senior from Charlotte, is majoring in economics and psychology. A previous national scholastic chess champion, he is the former president of Duke’s Chess Club.

He also enjoys playing music and soccer, and gaming with his three younger siblings.

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_18 STUMBLING INTO UTOPIA

By Michael D’Alessandro

i

was never supposed to teach a course on utopian and dystopian literature, especially not one in modern and contemporary American lit. I’m a nineteenth-century Americanist specializing in the classics (Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Alcott)—all the stuff people hate reading in high school and then find mildly more digestible in college.

But as a postdoc a few years ago, I was assigned to team-teach a course with a historian. Our scholarly interests varied wildly, but our literary fandom overlapped within the utopian and dystopian genre.

So we stitched together a course and taught some of our favorite literary texts: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—plus a handful of relevant films (Children of Men, Snowpiercer, Mad Max: Fury Road). Somehow it all worked, and the subject had more philosophical punch than I ever fathomed.

Each spring when I teach “Utopias and Dystopias in American Literature,” I tell students that the material can be terribly depressing. Utopias are often built to fail, or at least disenchant; one character’s utopia is often another’s dystopia. I always expect some sort of disappointment. But students swiftly tell me that they’re enrolling for the dystopias, not the utopias. They’re here for the post-apocalyptic landscapes, the totalitarian regimes, the starving heroes and heroines. No one wants stories about communes of happy, smiling people; in fact, they’re

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suspicious whenever those sunny narratives appear.

There must be something more sinister underneath, students say—and they’re almost always right.

So why is utopian and dystopian literature all the rage these days? Some pop critics believe the appeal can be traced to a crude sensationalism popular among the masses; others theorize that hopeless despair is the millennial generation’s calling card.

My students often gravitate toward the subject because they recognize our own society as increasingly on the verge of disaster. Conveniently, there is a flavor of this narrative for every student. Biology majors are attracted to the works about genetic mutations run amok, sociology students find fascinating the narratives about failed communal planning, and engineering students inform me that dastardly robots actually are going to overtake the human race.

But everyone agrees: The future is utterly terrifying.

Before we look at the future, I direct students to the past. Antipatriarchal utopias and ecological terrors, as two examples, stretch decades if not centuries backward. I structure one unit around

OTHERWORLDLY TEACHING AIDS: A sampling of first editions and landmarks of science fiction and fantasy from the Locus Science Fiction Foundation. The foundation’s collection was recently acquired

by Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library; it also includes correspondence, story drafts, and other manuscript material from the genre’s best-known practitioners.

America’s postwar suburban dream (with works like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet). Selfishly, I also use these materials to confirm my suspicions that beyond the perfectly manicured lawns and phony smiles of my childhood neighbors, there was an epic desperation at play. As I say, the friendly milkman can be just as frightening as the murderous android.

Rest assured, I save enough airtime for the latter.

Readings by authors like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov—who tell tales about electric grandmothers and cyborg-human hybrids—exhibit a fictional future creeping closer to our present reality.

My favorite class each semester takes us to Duke’s Glenn Negley Collection of Utopian Literature and the newly acquired Locus Science Fiction Collection. Parsing through Thomas More’s original 1516 map of his fictional Utopia island or dissecting Russian cover illustrations of George Orwell’s 1984, students can understand how wide-ranging—chronologically and geographically—the genre reaches. As imminent as so many of our fears appear, there are almost always precedents or analogs. These discoveries don’t make the course

Photos: Mark Zupan / Duke University Libraries.

themes any less urgent. Rather, the archive initiates students into a fraternity of intellectuals who have wrestled with an uncertain tomorrow.

This urgency is finally what drives the course. Sure, students are attracted to dystopias first. But as an intellectual collective, we can still devise ways to thwart the forces behind them. As I finally try to bestow, the future isn’t here yet—and we all might be secret utopists at heart. n D’Alessandro is an assistant professor of English whose teaching at Duke has included “Modern American Drama” and “Classics of American Literature,” along with “Utopias and Dystopias in American Literature.”

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_?

Adam Silver ‘84

_01

, commissioner of the National

What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self?

The amount of traveling I do around the world.

(And the fact that I’m friends with Coach K!)

_02

What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist?

Take courses in many different fields, stay up-todate on current events, and pay attention.

_03

What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see around professional sports?

Changes to the way live games are experienced, presented, and distributed.

60 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

_04

What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see around professional sports?

More media and corporations embracing women’s professional sports.

_05

What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why?

President Barack Obama, for embracing globalism.

Basketball Association

_06

What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity?

Technology designed to connect people that instead fosters isolation and mental-health issues, along with the inability to distinguish fact from fiction—all of that in a world where content, including video, can easily be altered and manipulated.

_07

In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why?

Optimistic, because of institutions like Duke that teach young people how to solve problems.

_08

What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219?

A basketball.

DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke In Memoriam

1930s

Joseph F. Thomas ’36 of Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 31, 2019.

1940s

Martha L. Forlines Forney ’41 of Mount Airy, N.C., on Jan. 2, 2019.

Claude A. Adams III ’42 of Durham, on Jan. 28, 2018.

Wilton G. Fritz ’42, M.D. ’44 of Melbourne, Fla., on Jan. 24, 2019.

Catherine B. Kling Russell ’42 of Glasgow, Va., on April 18, 2016.

Mary L. Whitney Wentz ’42 of Lancaster, Pa., on Jan. 10, 2019.

William M. Hardy B.S.M.E. ’43 of Chapel Hill, on Jan. 2, 2019.

Lucy E. Kiker Jones ’43 of Virginia Beach, Va., on Feb. 24, 2017.

James E. Major M.Div. ’43 of Little Rock, Ark., on Aug. 13, 2017.

Elizabeth Deaton Steel ’43 of Durham, on Feb. 2, 2019.

Jane Herring Wooten M.D. ’43 of Raleigh, on Dec. 23, 2018.

Lucy S. Osborne Whiteley R.N. ’44 of Mammoth Lakes, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2018.

Marshall A. Barrett Jr. ’45 of Vero Beach, Fla., on Dec. 16, 2018.

John F. Bedinger ’45 of Nashua, N.H., on Feb. 4, 2019.

Hazel R. Durner Howell R.N. ’45 of Lakeland, Fla., on Dec. 29, 2018.

Virginia Shapleigh Wood ’45 of Wilmington, Del., on Jan. 14, 2019.

Warren J. Collins ’46, M.D. ’48 of Shelby, N.C., on Jan. 3, 2019.

Peggy J. Klotz ’46 of Fishersville, Va., on Dec. 29, 2018.

Lloyd M. Taylor M.D. ’46 of Steamboat Springs, Colo., on Nov. 23, 2018.

Claude W. Bogley ’47 of Gainesville, Va., on Dec. 27, 2018.

E. Lucille Sommer Clark A.M. ’47 of Falmouth, Maine, on Dec. 16, 2018.

Martha L. Bishop Garrick B.S.N. ’47, R.N. ’47 of Jacksonville, N.C., on Dec. 11, 2018.

Jane Brackney Kendrick ’47 of Clarion, Pa., on March 7, 2019.

Ernest M. Knotts ’47 of Albemarle, N.C., on Feb. 22, 2019.

Elizabeth Lee Ambrose Moore ’47 of Princeton, Texas, on Dec. 27, 2018.

Kenneth Taylor Jr. ’47 of Gastonia, N.C., on Feb. 19, 2019.

Audrey V. Hatcher Vaughan B.S.N. ’47 of Richmond, Va., on March 1, 2019.

L. Elbert Wethington B.Div. ’47, Ph.D. ’49 of Durham, on March 3, 2019.

Mary E. Williams Whitford R.N. ’47 of Kinston, N.C., on Feb. 21, 2019.

H. Robert Baer ’48 of Newport, Ky., on Jan. 28, 2019.

Ann J. Lyerly Blankenship ’48 of Orange Park, Fla., on Feb. 12, 2019.

Effygene Chunn Bull M.R.E. ’48 of Houston, on Oct. 28, 2018.

Mary I. Spears Canfield ’48 of North Branford, Conn., on Feb. 1, 2019.

Agnes Lorraine Howard Clark ’48 of Durham, on Dec. 4, 2018.

Grier L. Garrick Jr. ’48 of Jacksonville, N.C., on May 14, 2018.

Marilyn Eelman Martin ’48 of St. Helens, Ore., on Jan. 14, 2019.

Wilbur H. Oliphant Jr. ’48 of Asheville, N.C., on Dec. 28, 2018.

Hugh B. Praytor Jr. H ’48 of Montgomery, Ala., on Feb. 23, 2019.

Phyllis B. Riley Stephenson ’48 of Black Mountain, N.C., on Jan. 8, 2019.

Charles G. Todderud B.S.M.E. ’48 of Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 12, 2018.

Mary M. Wimberley Cohea ’49 of Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 4, 2019.

Patricia A. Hull Driscoll ’49 of Charlotte, on March 17, 2016.

Rosemarie Wilson Edwards ’49 of Washington, N.C., on Dec. 9, 2018.

William H. Edwards ’49 of Bradenton, Fla., on Dec. 21, 2018.

August B. Priemer ’49 of Tucson, Ariz., on Oct. 20, 2018.

Lula D. Moshoures Redmond R.N. ’49 of Clearwater, Fla., on Jan. 19, 2019.

More Duke memories online Find links to full obituaries for Duke alumni at

alumni.duke.edu

Megan Mendenhall

1950s

Mary Lou Kern Forrest ’50 of Southern Pines, N.C., on Dec. 9, 2018.

Ragnar E. Johnson Jr. ’50 of Galveston, Texas, on Sept. 26, 2018.

Samuel J. Ricca ’50 of Hammonton, N.J., on Feb. 1, 2019.

Eugenia Williamson Smith ’50 of Williamstown, Mass., on Jan. 11, 2019.

Nancy Y. Holland Tucker ’50 of Richmond, Va., on Dec. 29, 2018.

James J. Yates ’50 of Durham, on Aug. 30, 2018.

ForeverDuke Edwin E. Boshinski ’51 of Englewood, Ohio, on Feb. 1, 2019.

H. Kerman Copley Jr. ’51 of New Bern, N.C., on Jan. 16, 2019.

Barbara J. Kirk Hardesty M.R.E. ’51 of Asheville, N.C., on Jan. 21, 2019.

Donald L. Hermance ’51 of Scituate, Mass., on Feb. 28, 2019.

John E. Marsh Jr. J.D. ’51 of Fairfax, Va., on Dec. 30, 2017.

Hugh R. Phythyon M.F. ’51 of Hermitage, Pa., on Jan. 16, 2019.

Donald M. Stearns J.D. ’51 of London, England, on Jan. 13, 2019.

Ann Ballentine Moore Walker ’51 of Suwanee, Ga., on Dec. 31, 2018.

George H. Brooks III ’52 of Charlotte, on March 4, 2019.

Elinor Wetherington Grant B.S.N. ’52 of Fleming Island, Fla., on Sept. 5, 2018.

Mary E. Harris Harper ’52 of Winston-Salem, on Jan. 14, 2019.

Max K. Lowdermilk ’52, B.Div. ’55 of Tempe, Ariz., on Oct. 5, 2018.

Edward C. Nixon ’52 of Bothell, Wash., on Feb. 27, 2019.

Reginald H. Potts III M.Div. ’52 of Richmond, Va., on Feb. 13, 2019.

W. Henry Rogers ’52 of Durham, on Feb. 28, 2019.

Aileen H. Lewis Schaller A.M. ’52 of Durham, on Jan. 2, 2019.

Robert T. Simpson ’52, D. ’55 of Durham, on Jan. 13, 2019.

May M. Leffler Warren ’52 of Asheville, N.C., on Jan. 19, 2019.

Robert H. Dufort ’53, Ph.D. ’56 of Gainesville, Fla., on Aug. 8, 2017.

Thomas D. Elder ’53, M.D. ’57, H ’63 of Norfolk, Va., on Feb. 4, 2019.

Clyde T. Gatlin A.M. ’53 of Southbury, Conn., on Jan. 21, 2019.

Christina K. White James ’53 of Atlanta, on Jan. 22, 2019.

Edward M. Kohn Ph.D. ’53 of Wynnewood, Pa., on Feb. 10, 2019.

Norton H. Morrison ’53 of New Haven, Conn., on Feb. 4, 2019.

Marilyn F. Vaughan Pierce ’53 of Cotuit, Mass., on Feb. 5, 2019.

James A. Robertson ’53 of Moultonborough, N.H., on May 6, 2016.

C. John Abeyounis ’54 of Williamsville, N.Y., on June 14, 2018.

Eugene M. Anderson Jr. J.D. ’54 of Davidson, N.C., on Jan. 16, 2019.

Horace E. Beacham Jr. ’54 of West Palm Beach, Fla., on Dec. 29, 2018.

Saul Boyarsky H ’54 of Durham, on Jan. 15, 2019.

Vito J. Ciminello ’54 of Naples, Fla., on Feb. 22, 2019.

Charles H. Cooley ’54 of Austin, Texas, on Jan. 12, 2019.

Arthur J. Holmes ’54 of Kissimmee, Fla., on Feb. 11, 2019.

Garnet A. Menges Miller ’54 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Dec. 27, 2018.

Guy F. Miller B.S.M.E. ’54 of Charlottesville, Va., on Dec. 21, 2018.

James W. Ramey M.D. ’54 of Danville, Ky., on Dec. 10, 2018.

Rodney M. Riker Jr. B.S.M.E. ’54 of Wilbraham, Mass., on Jan. 3, 2019.

Samuel C. Stephens Jr. ’54 of Orlando, on Dec. 12, 2018.

Ronald L. Wilson B.S.M.E. ’54 of Durham, on Jan. 25, 2019.

Charles L. Ballard B.S.E.E. ’55 of Miami, on Aug. 28, 2017.

P. Douglas Franklin ’55 of New York, on Jan. 11, 2019.

Burton E. Hannay B.S.E.E. ’55 of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Nov. 5, 2018.

Boyce C. Medlin B.Div. ’55 of Wake Forest, N.C., on Dec. 25, 2018.

David P. Parker ’55 of Boston, on Jan. 11, 2019.

Carol A. Hoke Saunders ’55 of Annapolis, Md., on Jan. 19, 2019.

Donald L. Stegner B.S.E.E. ’55 of Baltimore, on Oct. 7, 2018.

Joseph E. Belmont ’56 of Denver, on Jan. 6, 2019.

Etta Lou Apple Blaney ’56, M.Ed. ’60 of Reidsville, N.C., on Jan. 27, 2019.

Redwell K. Forbes ’56 of Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 20, 2019.

Edward L. Friedman Ph.D. ’56, H ’56 of Middletown, Conn., on Jan. 30, 2019.

James E. Hardin Sr. B.S.M.E. ’56 of Hillsborough, N.C., on Jan. 22, 2019.

Evelyn J. Parker Patrick B.S.N. ’56 of St. Louis, on Jan. 16, 2019.

Marlene R. Rideout R.N. ’56 of Dumfries, Va., on Jan. 9, 2019.

Billy F. Andrews M.D. ’57 of New Albany, Ind., on March 15, 2019.

Robert Brubaker ’57 of Davidson, N.C., on March 6, 2019.

E. Blake Byrne ’57 of Los Angeles, on March 23, 2019.

“MY DUKE DEGREE HAS OPENED INNUMERABLE PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL DOORS FOR ME. I WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO ATTEND DUKE WITHOUT THE SCHOLARSHIP, AND I WOULDN’T BE WHERE I AM TODAY WITHOUT MY DUKE DEGREE.” ELIZABETH LEVERAGE HILLES ’89 Unrestricted bequest from retirement account to support Duke

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e uk eive r D ec ou o r ty t e n ID e e s nt Fe Pr e n ud io St at ic

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T HE B E S T I S G E T T I N G E V E N B E T T E R !

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APARTMENT FEATURES New White Kitchen Cabinets and Granite Countertops Under-mount sink with Stainless Steel Appliances Woodstyle Plank Flooring | Updated Lighting Package New Plantation Blinds | High-Speed Wireless Internet In-Unit Washer and Dryer | Keyless Entry

Hear From Our Residents “Great amenities, good communication among staff! The rooms in Station Nine are fantastic, very spacious and comfortable for having guests and everyday living.” – Nick B.

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Would recommend to friends!” – Alexis S.

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Where 9Th Street Lives

www.StationNine.com | 919.286.3800 2211 Hillsbor oug h Road | Dur ha m , N C 22705

Christian Marclay: Surround Sounds On view through September 3, 2019

Christian Marclay drew from a collection of comic books to create this large-scale, synchronized silent video installation.

Christian Marclay, Still from Surround Sounds (detail), 2014 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 15. four silent synchronized projected animations each 13:40, looped. Š Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Surround Sounds is on loan from Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, New York. The presentation of Christian Marclay: Surround Sounds at the Nasher Museum is made possible by the Marilyn M. Arthur Fund; Victor and Lenore Behar Endowment Fund; Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger; Parker & Otis; and Arthur and Caroline Rogers.

ForeverDuke Stanley E. Faye ’57, J.D. ’60 of Denver, on Dec. 24, 2018.

Sarah Anita Culver Hager R.N. ’57 of Dahlonega, Ga., on Jan. 2, 2019.

Katharine L. Zeigler Jones ’57 of Atlanta, on Feb. 11, 2019.

Walter H. Keim ’57 of San Antonio, on Jan. 26, 2019.

G. Brock Magruder H ’57 of Orlando, Fla., on Jan. 8, 2019.

Kay Thompson Manning R.N. ’57 of Durham, on Jan. 20, 2019.

Cecil K. Myrick B.Div. ’57 of Asheville, N.C., on July 29, 2017.

Vernon C. Tyson B.Div. ’57 of Raleigh, on Dec. 29, 2018.

F. Thomas Wooten III B.S.E.E. ’57, Ph.D. ’64 of Manteo, N.C., on Feb. 11, 2019.

Emily A. Millwee Neal Bowles ’58 of Searcy, Ark., on Dec. 9, 2018.

Ronald G. Edmundson ’58 of Oxford, N.C., on Feb. 18, 2019.

Dietrich W. Heyder H ’58 of Powells Point, N.C., on Dec. 27, 2018.

Robert T. Johnson Jr. ’58 of Atlanta, on Oct. 6, 2018.

Ann Cone McWhirter ’58 of Crofton, Md., on Feb. 21, 2019.

John F. Moore ’58 of Hartford, Conn., on Dec. 1, 2018.

Wendall K. O’Steen Ph.D. ’58 of Atlantic Beach, Fla., on Jan. 1, 2019.

Battle M. Robertson ’58 of Raleigh, on Feb. 23, 2019.

Wesley M. Robison M.Ed. ’58 of Monroe, Ga., on Feb. 19, 2019.

Vivian G. Leamer Bevis ’59 of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on Dec. 15, 2018.

Janice Nowalk Davis A.M. ’59 of Montgomery Village, Md., on Oct. 8, 2018.

Lewis Livingston ’59 of Hot Springs, Ark., on Jan. 3, 2019.

Wilburn L. Moore B.S.E.E. ’59 of Falls Church, Va., on Feb. 9, 2019.

Egerton K. van den Berg LL.B. ’59 of Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 14, 2019.

Harriet M. Pickett Wuensch ’59 of Baton Rouge, La., on Dec. 7, 2018.

1960s

Floyd A. Bell Jr. ’60 of Greensboro, N.C., on Jan. 31, 2019.

W. Paul Carlson M.Div. ’60 of Columbia, S.C., on Feb. 13, 2019.

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

Seth T. Cox Jr. B.S.C.E. ’60 of Sanford, N.C., on Jan. 4, 2017.

Charles E. Dobbs M.D. ’60 of Louisville, Ky., on Dec. 16, 2018.

Harmon T. Gnuse B.S.E.E. ’60 of New Canaan, Conn., on Jan. 20, 2019.

Alan L. Kaganov B.S.M.E. ’60 of Los Altos Hills, Calif., on Feb. 2, 2019.

Robert A. Merrell Jr. M.D. ’60 of Daytona Beach, Fla., on Feb. 15, 2019.

David F. Rowe ’60 of Clemmons, N.C., on Feb. 9, 2019.

Maynard F. Swanson Jr. J.D. ’60 of Wellborn, Fla., on Feb. 4, 2019.

Warren G. Wickersham ’60 of McLean, Va., on Feb. 8, 2019.

Elizabeth G. Garvin Baynes ’61 of Greensboro, N.C., on Jan. 20, 2019.

Sam B. Bridges M.Div. ’61 of Chester, S.C., on Dec. 28, 2018.

Daniel M. Brown B.S.C.E. ’61 of Nashville, Tenn., on Dec. 30, 2018.

Louis Cantor A.M. ’61, Ph.D. ’63 of Fort Wayne, Ind., on Jan. 25, 2019.

J. Lawrence Frank ’61, M.D. ’65, H ’67, H ’71 of Durham, on Feb. 11, 2019.

Laurence O. Howard Jr. ’61 of Waynesboro, Va., on Dec. 7, 2018.

William A. Mauer Ph.D. ’61 of Surfside Beach, S.C., on Dec. 8, 2018.

Gerald M. McGee ’61 of Elizabeth City, N.C., on Jan. 6, 2019.

Martha Lumbard Pridgen ’61 of Wilmington, N.C., on Dec. 21, 2018.

Henry E. Riley Jr. B.Div. ’61 of Chesterfield, Va., on Dec. 18, 2018.

Francis S. Turnage ’61 of Fredericksburg, Va., on Feb. 20, 2019.

Roston M. Williamson H ’61 of Black Mountain, N.C., on Jan. 15, 2019.

Allan P. Baker Jr. ’62 of Oxford, N.C., on March 18, 2019.

James C. Morris III M.D. ’62 of Roanoke, Va., on Dec. 17, 2018.

Barry A. Osmun ’62 of Cary, N.C., on Jan. 8, 2019.

Carroll W. Youngkin ’62 of Virginia Beach, Va., on Feb. 12, 2019.

Nancy A. Jenkins Best Abernathy ’63 of Naperville, Ill., on Feb. 21, 2019.

Frank M. Armbrecht ’63 of Hockessin, Del., on Jan. 15, 2019.

Roy B. Blake Jr. M.S. ’63 of Lower Saucon Township, Pa., on Feb. 20, 2019.

Hugo L. Deaton H ’63 of Hickory, N.C., on Feb. 12, 2019.

Edward L. Lewis Jr. M.D. ’63, H ’67 of Greensboro, Ga., on Feb. 6, 2019.

Samuel L. Combs III ’64 of Panama City, Fla., on Jan. 18, 2019.

M. Adelaide Austell Craver ’64 of Shelby, N.C., on Jan. 4, 2019.

C. William Dawson Jr. LL.B. ’64 of Upper Arlington, Ohio, on Jan. 21, 2019.

Donald A. Douglas ’64 of Reno, Nev., on Sept. 22, 2018.

John W. Kinney Jr. E. ’64 of Garner, N.C., on Nov. 24, 2017.

Mary Lou Huck Nolan-Bazan ’64 of Gig Harbor, Wash., on Jan. 10, 2019.

Robert H. Winter M.D. ’64 of Westfield Center, Ohio, on Feb. 19, 2019.

William B. Anderson H ’65 of Durham, on March 1, 2019.

Percy M. Beard Jr. Ph.D. ’65 of Atlanta, on Dec. 23, 2018.

Walter G. Moeling IV ’65, J.D. ’68 of Brookhaven, Ga., on March 4, 2019.

John E. Morris III ’65 of Rehoboth Beach, Del., on Jan. 19, 2019.

George B. Breckenridge A.M. ’66, Ph.D. ’69 of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, on Dec. 11, 2018.

Signe A. Christensen B.S.N. ’66 of New Zealand, on Nov. 23, 2018.

William J. Lohman Jr. A.M. ’66, Ph.D. ’72 of Tampa, Fla., on Feb. 2, 2019.

Mary Ruth Miller Ph.D. ’66 of Durham, on Dec. 6, 2018.

Roy W. Moore III LL.B. ’66 of The Woodlands, Texas, on Feb. 15, 2019.

Kirk K. Von Salzen ’66 of Coto de Caza, Calif., on Dec. 13, 2018.

James H. Coil III ’67 of Atlanta, on Dec. 29, 2018.

Donald D. Hamachek Jr. M.H.A. ’67 of Chattanooga, Tenn., on Feb. 12, 2019.

Rudolf A. Raff Ph.D. ’67 of Bloomington, Ind., on Jan. 5, 2019.

David E. Schneider Ph.D. ’67 of Bellingham, Wash., on Jan. 7, 2019.

William A. Van Nortwick Jr. ’67 of Jacksonville Beach, Fla., on Jan. 12, 2019.

Stephen L. Walker ’67 of Johns Island, S.C., on Feb. 10, 2019.

Ina Smith Welch Cert. P.T. ’67 of Melbourne, Fla., on Oct. 6, 2018.

Steven E. Gaddis ’68 of Durham, on Dec. 12, 2018.

Prentiss L. Harrison Cert. P.A. ’68 of Apex, N.C., on Dec. 11, 2018.

Glenn R. Lawrence ’68 of Indianapolis, on Sept. 11, 2018.

Jeffrey A. Lilly ’68 of San Francisco, on Feb. 20, 2019.

Cynia Brown Shimm H ’68 of Durham, on Dec. 28, 2018.

Brice T. Voran J.D. ’68 of Walloon Lake, Mich., on Sept. 18, 2018.

DUKE MAGAZINE

SPECIAL ISSUE

2019

67

Travel with Duke Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

Where do you want to go in 2020? #DukeIsEverywhere www.dukealumnitravels.com

New Zealand: Majestic Fjordland & a Circumnavigation of South Island Feb 18-Mar 1

Photos courtesy of iStock

Mexico City & Oaxaca Mar 6-13

Southeast Asian Odyssey Feb 13-Mar 4 Exploring Bajaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Madgalena Bay Mar 7-12

EDUCATIONAL

SUSTAINABLE

GLOBAL

Bleed Blue. Live Green. Duke University is educating and

empowering its Duke community to create a more sustainable future through environmental, economic, and social change on campus and beyond. Duke signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment and set the goal to become climate and carbon neutral by 2024. In line with Duke’s overarching sustainability goals, Duke Alumni Travels is joining this movement by engaging the travel industry to help develop approaches and metrics to monitor and improve environmental impact.

DUKE TRAVELERS are Duke Alumni, Parents, Family and Friends who seek to learn about the world and its cultures as well as to protect the environment and communities they visit.

SPEARHEADING SUSTAINABILITY Duke Alumni Travels has engaged a team of graduate students in Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment to collaborate with its tour operators to assess their practices and engage the travel industry around sustainability.

As this project develops, Duke Alumni Travels aims to leverage the best practices of its educational travel operators to help improve sustainability standards across the industry to benefit travelers and the world-wide destinations they explore.

DUKE. WE TRAVEL SMART. For more information on Duke Alumni Travels’ sustainability journey, please visit dukealumnitravels/sustainability or contact us at sustainabletravel@duke.edu.

Good Question

I was selling what I called “local produce,” it was now produce harvested in part by people who had traveled thousands of miles to find work. They had no citizenship papers when they arrived.

Though I paid them a living wage per hour – much more than they continued to make in their hours at the poultry plant – I was the one benefitting most from their hours. Above all, I learned from these men about the global politics of food. They taught me about how borders are tied to eating, even for the enlightened consumers who care deeply about food origins.

Above all, they taught me about the human suffering that remains hidden in our food. We have done a fair job of highlighting periodically the plight of the so-called independent farmer in the United States. So much so that consumers may even think that if they can just buy “organic” and “local,” they may help remedy the food problem. I once agreed wholeheartedly that buying local and organic was the answer, but then I started asking what’s in the shadows of the food system I don’t see? Those questions helped send me back to graduate school to find out.

An Exploration in Ethics Charlie Thompson in front of the mural his 2018 class on farmworkers produced with artist, Cornelio Campos.

H

ow are the U.S. immigration system, the decline of rural America, and food justice connected?

Often absent from the fiery national debate around immigration is our reliance on immigrant labor for food production. All Americans in fact “consume” the U.S. immigration system every day. It is on our dinner plates, if we can learn to see it.

My wife and I farmed organically for 9 years. As I labored to provide produce and meats to our enlightened clientele at farmers’ markets, I could not forget that just down the road were undeniable signs of our food system’s reliance on a permanent underclass of exploited people. Even as mainstream agriculture reaped profits, family farmers I knew were unable to make ends meet. The hog and poultry industries of North Carolina worsened the problem.

As corporate meat prices became cheaper, I realized this was in part due to a growing population of rural people from Mexico and Central America coming here to work for factory farms. Even as I supplied niche markets in Chapel Hill and Durham, huge numbers of immigrants were moving to towns nearby to labor inside meat factories and produce fields, becoming part of a growing population of international food and farm workers often invisible to consumers.

The two worlds of “local” and “international” collided one day when I desperately sought part-time help on my farm. Five men from the state of Nayarit, Mexico arrived in my driveway, said they wanted work, and changed my life. What really floored me was to understand that these men were farmers who had left their own land in order to come to North Carolina and work in the godawful processing plant just down the road. They had left their own sunny corn and tobacco fields to work in a windowless, frigid room, forced to stand in blood and icy water, eviscerating factory birds all day. With their arrival to my farm, the dynamics of the international labor movement of people and products now affected me. Though

A

bove all, I learned from these men about the global politics of food.

Since I left farming, food has further globalized. Several of those big North Carolina hog corporations that we worried about in the 1980s, like Murphy and Smithfield, are now owned by Chinese companies. In other words, American farms have been colonized by international corporations. The international plight of people crossing borders shows that the flight of rural people is part of the same takeover. People arriving at the southern U.S. border looking for work are typically from communities that have lost their local economic stability. Forces of agricultural consolidation continue marching across the globe, displacing millions of people.

For the time being, Americans eat well because immigrants who are skilled at producing food strive to come here and work in our worst jobs. As long as they continue to arrive here with farming skills, and willing to labor in factory farms for low wages, we benefit whether we like it or not.

Making informed personal choices about food is only part of the answer. We need national policies that address root causes of rural displacement -- both in Central America and in Central North Carolina. We cannot separate places and people and work conditions from the nutrients we take in. Working toward food justice must include identifying our reliance on immigrants as an essential ingredient in the food on our plates.

Charles D. Thompson, Jr.

Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Documentary Studies, Duke University

Good Question: An Exploration in Ethics is a series presented by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. dukeethics.org 919-660-3033

ForeverDuke Kathleen A. Merry Mills J.D. ’69 of Hanover, Pa., on Feb. 1, 2019.

Janine L. Wallin ’69 of Wheaton, Ill., on Dec. 21, 2018.

Charles Webb III J.D. ’69 of Charleston, S.C., on Sept. 21, 2017.

1970s

Wayne G. Boulton A.M. ’70, Ph.D. ’72 of Indianapolis, on Feb. 1, 2019.

August V. Dessel Jr. ’70 of Arlington, Va., on Jan. 13, 2019.

Janet Gay Larson Gelein M.S.N. ’70 of Rochester, N.Y., on Jan. 21, 2019.

William M. Hall M.Div. ’70 of Morganton, N.C., on Jan. 2, 2019.

Sallie E. Hildebrandt ’70 of San Diego, on March 12, 2018.

Marjorie S. Fine Mead B.S.N. ’70 of Severna Park, Md., on Dec. 21, 2018.

John C. Meadows Jr. Ph.D. ’70 of Jacksonville Beach, Fla., on Dec. 24, 2018.

Nancy Biersach Dalley ’71 of Clearwater, Fla., on May 28, 2018.

James M. Cooper J.D. ’73 of Fayetteville, N.C., on March 7, 2019.

Patricia L. Hart ’73 of Chapel Hill, on Dec. 24, 2018.

John M. Mann M.Th. ’73 of Ballwin, Mo., on Feb. 19, 2019.

F. Gordon Maxson M.B.A. ’73 of Washington, D.C., on Oct. 17, 2018.

James C. Moffatt ’73 of Potomac, Md., on Dec. 28, 2018.

Bruce M. Smith H ’73, H ’79, H ’80 of Nashville, Tenn., on Jan. 5, 2019.

James D. Collins B.S.E. ’74, M.S. ’76, Ph.D. ’82 of Pittsboro, N.C., on April 12, 2018.

Allen W. Lease Cert. P.A. ’74 of Centre Hall, Pa., on Dec. 19, 2018.

William J. Rowe A.M. ’74 of Vero Beach, Fla., on Aug. 31, 2018.

Brenda G. Harrison Lackey ’75 of Columbia, Mo., on Jan. 23, 2019.

Stephen M. Prentiss ’75 of Memphis, Tenn., on June 18, 2017.

Mark A. Sikkel M.B.A. ’75 of Spring, Texas, on Feb. 26, 2019.

Audrey V. Nelan Stevenson B.H.S. ’75 of Washington, Pa., on March 20, 2018.

Linda K. Bognar Cargill ’77, A.M. ’78 of Tucson, Ariz., on Feb. 8, 2019.

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Charles M. Hackett M.Div. ’77 of Goldsboro, N.C., on Dec. 21, 2016.

Marta Gomez Peppin ’77 of Cumming, Ga., on Feb. 6, 2019.

Carl G. Quillen H ’77 of Maplewood, N.J., on Jan. 28, 2019.

Elizabeth Wood Thompson Severance M.Div. ’77 of Burlington, N.C., on Feb. 11, 2019.

Thomas H. Stark ’77, J.D. ’81 of Durham, on Dec. 17, 2018.

Peter M. Titus B.H.S. ’77 of Lakewood, Colo., on Jan. 22, 2019.

Martin G. Chilek M.H.A. ’78 of Lewis Center, Ohio, on Nov. 19, 2017.

Susan J. Kerr Dragone ’78 of New York, on Feb. 16, 2019.

Jasper E. Sadler III Ph.D. ’78, M.D. ’79, H ’81 of St. Louis, on Dec. 13, 2018.

Keith A. Sage Ph.D. ’78 of Atascadero, Calif., on Feb. 11, 2019.

Holly F. Alford Stanford Cert. A.H.C. ’78 of Durham, on Jan. 24, 2019.

Robert A. Klingle ’79 of Scottsdale, Ariz., on Jan. 14, 2019.

1980s

James A. Brown Jr. ’80 of Marshall, N.C., on Nov. 27, 2018.

Robert P. Murphy J.D. ’80 of Strasburg, Va., on Feb. 19, 2019.

Janis Forrest Applewhite ’83 of Durham, on Jan. 21, 2019.

Elizabeth G. Reich Keane ’83 of Arlington, Va., on Dec. 14, 2018.

Ariadne H. Cook Lourie M.S. ’83 of Lakewood, Colo., on Dec. 30, 2018.

Scott J. Coonan B.S.E. ’85 of Raleigh, on Jan. 18, 2019.

Myrtle F. Downey Hatcher M.Div. ’85 of Suffolk, Va., on Feb. 8, 2018.

John G. Carter M.B.A. ’87 of Bellevue, Wash., on June 20, 2018.

Robert K. Eldredge M.Div. ’87 of Graham, N.C., on March 6, 2019.

Michael J. Steinbaum J.D. ’88 of St. Louis, on Feb. 21, 2019.

1990s

William R. Lambert M.T.S. ’90 of Monterey, Calif., on Nov. 16, 2018.

Randolph B. Capone M.S. ’91 of Towson, Md., on Dec. 29, 2018.

Dana J. Lesemann J.D. ’91 of Alexandria, Va., on March 9, 2017.

Samuel R. Ward Jr. H ’92 of Erie, Pa., on Dec. 29, 2018.

James L. Fishback H ’94 of Overland Park, Kan., on Jan. 13, 2019.

Justin D. Macfarlan ’94 of Philadelphia, on Feb. 19, 2019.

William L. Joyner H ’95 of Wilmington, N.C., on Jan. 12, 2017.

Ellen Sears Harkey M.Div. ’97 of Salisbury, N.C., on Nov. 25, 2018.

Stewart A. Crank Sr. M.Div. ’98 of Burlington, N.C., on Feb. 2, 2019.

Ajay Koduri ’99 of San Francisco, on Feb. 6, 2019.

2000s

Nancy Hobbie Grinstead ’00 of Durham, on Feb. 15, 2019.

Promise R. Terrell Whitley ’00 of Palmetto, Ga., on Feb. 8, 2019.

Tyrone Thomas M.B.A. ’04 of South Orange, N.J., on Dec. 18, 2018.

Mary J. Hovey M.S.N. ’07 of Hampstead, N.C., on Feb. 20, 2019.

Janice Butler Ryckeley R. Cert. ’09 of Tar Heel, N.C., on Feb. 25, 2019.

2010s The only collection of Duke merchandise in the world that actually comes from Duke University

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW about new arrivals, special collections, sales events and more! To sign up, visit dukestore.com and click on the BTFTK icon.

Mark W. Carrabine ’14 of Chicago, on March 4, 2019.

Alexander E. Ching B.S.E. ’16 of Holmdel, N.J., on Dec. 25, 2018.

Kimberly A. Kassik H ’16 of Durham, on June 4, 2016.

Ernest M. Vafee M.I.D.P. ’17 of Monrovia, Liberia, on Jan. 19, 2019.

Yixuan Gong M.B.A. ’19 of Durham, on March 12, 2019.

2020s

Philip J. Herr G. ’22 of Durham, on March 9, 2019.

DUKE MAGAZINE

SPECIAL ISSUE 2019

71

d

Class of 2019

uring Commencement Weekend for the , the DAA offered graduates the chance to write a note to their future self, which we’ll mail to them a year later. Here’s a sampling of some letters (with their permission, of course): “So, my dear Samia, my letter is coming to an end. I would like you now to look into the future and remember what the child inside you wanted to be when she grows up and ask yourself the following questions: ‘Are the choices I am making aligned with what that child was dreaming of?

Am I still true to myself and my values? Am I making the world a better place at the closest level, at least?’ If your answer happens to be a ‘no’ anywhere here, I urge you to stop, sit down, and reevaluate yourself.”

—Samia Haimoura

“I know times are tough and the struggle is real, so here is a dollar for you! Make sure to spend it on someone who deserves it.”

—Ernesto Morfin Montes de Oca

“Here’s to living life to the fullest independently and living with no reservations/regrets.

Let’s have the best life ever.”

—Joyce Choi

“A year ago you had no clue where you’d be or what the next year had in store for you—so just take a moment to look back and see (hopefully) all that has happened since. Read some Psalms (18).”

—Anna Merryman

72 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

“You arrived in this country nine years ago on a sweltering summer night. The AC unit in your apartment was broken so in the 100-degree weather you decided to sleep on the floor for the first week. (The mattress firm screwed up your order and couldn’t deliver the bed yet!) But you learned a very important lesson of resilience in America.”

—Grace Tong

“Don’t forget to take good care of the family and the friends you made throughout your life.”

—James Hwang

“You did it! And it was all worth it.”

—Asma Agad

“You have officially had 365 days to become president of America, start your own clinic, become the dean of a well-known school, and look fantastic while doing so.”

—Ashakie Phillips

“I’ve also been extremely nervous for the big move and the new job. My nightmares about leaving college have been pretty bad this week. I know you’re probably thinking that this all seems so silly now and that you are THRIVING in your new job in the new city. I would expect nothing less from you!”

—Kelly Cheng

set the stage The Rubenstein Arts Center and Duke Engineering Design Pod – a first-year design course funded by the Engineering Annual Fund – are bringing fresh energy to Duke. But what happens when both draw you in?

Campus transformation made possible by you.

Finish the story at giving.duke.edu/set-the-stage

Through gifts to the Annual Fund, planned giving and other contributions, the outrageously ambitious at Duke are forging an ever better world. What will you make possible?

October 11-13, 2019

.duke.edu

HOMECOMING

giving

Still speak CRAZIE? We know you do! And being crazy about your alma mater means there’s always a good excuse to come home. Don’t miss Homecoming Weekend 2019 with highlights such as Party on the Plaza, affinity gatherings and a Duke vs. Georgia Tech football match-up. Plus: Make plans now to stop by the new Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center!

Visit www.alumni.duke.edu/homecoming for more information and to register.

MAGAZINE

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DUKE MAGAZINE â&#x20AC;¢ SPECIAL ISSUE 2019

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duke SPECIAL ISSUE 2019

M A G A Z I N E

Stamp of approval From this Durham-issued construction permit, a future campus would take shape.

the future...issue