Editor's Note

The Chronicle has a history of being produced by undergraduates. Towerview, this stack of papers affiliated with The Chronicle, has a (much shorter) history of being produced by The Chronicle’s senior class. It is the “retirement home” for those undergrads foolish---nay, stupid—enough to stick around the 301 Flowers office for the whole of the undergraduate careers, burning nights away basking in the glow of faulty Mac computers and even faultier Adobe software. In no way is this meant to be self-congratulatory. This pursuit is idiotic, irrational, almost exclusively self-fulfilling, and indulgent.

Yet it persists.

It has persisted from the beginning – for over a century of The Chronicle, and for over a decade of Towerview. The pursuit of some meaningful insight into campus and regional affairs. The semblance of perspective and wisdom. The capability of narrative. These things, ideologically, define this pursuit to innovate and inspire thoughtful reflection on the imminent affairs of the day at Duke and in Durham. They remain, in some iteration of the concepts, constants.

But constancy won’t do. There must be change to embolden the future.

But change isn’t enough. Even risk is not enough. The folks and places profiled in these pages—notably, the brains behind the MFA, the masters of Fullsteam Brewery, those imagining a new future for the site of the infamous lacrosse house—took risks and made changes to the status quo. But they envisioned a future. In my cursory interest of Whitehead, I recently encountered a quote of his: “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.” What we—and all these actors profiled—must do is be dangerous. It must come from us and be active within the readers engagement with the product—more than text, more than image. If we fail, it is not a failure but a call to consciousness for us and you. This is after all a joint engagement.

Editors-in-Chief