Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of The Chronicle's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query. You can also try a Basic search
10 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
Can you all hear me? Yes? Alright, fantastic. I thought I’d stop walking backwards for a second because I’m always afraid that I’ll accidentally step on a squirrel and bring the whole rabid horde down on my head. What’s that sir? Oh no! They’re not really rabid! (Laughs harder than is probably necessary.) They’re just, uh, extremely confident around people. And fast. Really, really fast.
Tauheed Epps is an intelligent individual. Epps was an honor roll student in high school and received an athletic scholarship to play basketball at Alabama State University in 1996. In interviews, he seems proud of finishing high school, an accomplishment that many others in his career field cannot claim. His answers to interview questions are thoughtful and measured. In short, he seems to know what he’s talking about, which is more than can be said for many other public celebrities.
I don’t talk politics. As I mentioned in a previous column, I find that politics, along with religion, are topics that can’t be debated. These conversations leave at least one person angrier than they were before, and meanwhile everyone is still firm in their prior convictions. Yet, while racking my brain for an idea for this column, I realized that this was my last submission before the election next week. I know that over the past several months the two primary candidates have been poked, prodded, dissected, praised and criticized by seemingly everyone with a microphone or a working Internet connection. I know that virtually every person voting has already made up his or her mind (and I’m pretty sure that those people claiming to be “undecided” at the second debate only said so to get on TV). Yet I feel that if I let this election slip by unaddressed in this space, I would inevitably regret my own silence, since this election could shape a large part of how my life unfolds over the next several years.
When I was growing up, I spent a large part of my summers glued to the chair in front of the TV, anxious to catch up on all the quality American programming I missed during the school year. My interests were confined mostly to Nickelodeon, when it had “Legends of the Hidden Temple,” “All That” and “Kenan and Kel”—back when it was actually, you know, good. Occasionally, my focus would stray to the Tour de France, and I would end up watching a stage or two. This wasn’t because of any great love for cycling or the French countryside, but because I had heard about this guy named Lance Armstrong who had beaten cancer and then came back to win the Tour again and again. I watched the Tour to watch him dominate. He was an inspiring figure. He was someone to look up to.
The summer after I graduated from high school, my family took a trip to Zambia and Botswana. More than the beautiful landscapes and the amazing wildlife that I encountered during my time there, the people that I met left me with an indelible memory. Every person that I came across was incredibly happy. It seemed that they were perfectly content with their lifestyle and the environment around them. Though Zambia and Botswana are among the most stable African nations, people who live there on average make a small fraction of what Americans make. Yet virtually every person I met in the towns that I passed through was in high spirits and was more openly cheerful about their lives than most other people I’ve encountered before or since.
I don’t know exactly what I expected from senior year, but I definitely didn’t imagine I would feel so old so fast. I’m noticing less the crippling headaches and fuzzy memories after a hard night out and more the conversations overheard from the newly arrived Class of 2016, many of whom were born in 1994, which still boggles my mind four weeks into the year. All the talk of stumbling back home after a “totally sick party on West, bro” has left me feeling a bit like the old dude from “Up.” At the same time, the presence of the new kids affords me the opportunity to listen in on their highly entertaining frosh discussions on the C-1, which include everything from how good the food was at Cosmic the night before to how bad that homeless dude smelled outside Cosmic the night before. My personal favorite thus far: Girl A complimenting Girl B on her choice of swimming as an activity since it provides great exercise, to which Girl B nonchalantly replied, “Yeah, and you know, it’s good for saving lives and stuff.”
When I was 15 years old, I attended a summer program in the mountains of New Mexico, where the principal activity was hiking non-stop for three weeks with a 50-pound pack on my back. It seemed like a good idea at the time despite the fact that I was a scrawny kid coming out of ninth grade whose preparations for the program consisted of stomping up the stairs of my house with a backpack full of encyclopedias. Fast forward to the first night of hiking, and I was laughably out of my league. The pain, the exhaustion and the fact that we were hiking with no clear destination in sight fed a despair that overwhelmed me. Eventually we arrived at an old fort that enclosed a grassy area where we were told to put down our gear and lie down. As soon as my back hit the grass and my gaze lifted to the night sky, it was as if everything that was bothering me lifted as well. That sky was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. The lights of the universe, no longer obscured by urban illumination and the pollution of humanity, made the sky so dusty with stars that I couldn’t tell where one stopped and another began. I never wanted to look away.
They say you can’t go home again. “Home” holds countless meanings for different people. It’s the family that raised you. It’s the house that you grew up in. It’s the town or city that helped shape and define you. But above all else, home is the place where you feel you belong, where you’re supposed to be. Home is a seemingly easy concept to understand. Everyone has a home, or at least the idea of what one feels like. The word itself serves as a unique connection to nostalgia and memory. For me, home is Tokyo, the place where I was born and where I lived for 11 years before arriving at Duke. Over the past three years, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go back, to spend time with my parents and friends in the city that I’ve come to love. When I was little, I sometimes resented having to grow up outside of the United States, in a place that was so different, so foreign. Nowadays I can’t believe I ever thought that way, or that I ever wished for a life different from the one I had as a child.
After two weeks of Madness, the only thing standing between the Blue Devils and their first trip to the national title game since 2001 is West Virginia and its renowned 1-3-1 zone defense. More than anything else, how Duke attacks the Mountaineer zone will significantly impact who moves on from this marquee Final Four matchup.
As the nets came down in Greensboro and the Blue Devils wrapped up a record 18th ACC Tournament championship, the spotlight was never very far from Duke’s dynamic guard duo of Jon Scheyer and Nolan Smith, both of whom have played critical roles in getting their team to this point. Along with Kyle Singler—a combo player with size and range—they have formed the highest-scoring trio in the league, and the main reason for Duke’s 29-5 record as well as a No. 1 seed for March Madness.
