In 1925, The Chronicle published issue 14 of its 20th volume, announcing Trinity College was renaming itself Duke in honor of a donation from James B. Duke. Also on the front page is a much smaller story, announcing the creation of a chapter of Theta Alpha Phi, a national dramatic fraternity, on campus. This typified arts coverage for much of Duke's early years. While The Chronicle covered the arts, the coverage was limited to significant events like celebrity visits and performances by campus groups. Rather than being relegated to a particular section of the paper, these stories were presented alongside the rest of The Chronicle's content.
Arts coverage continued as part of The Chronicle's broader news coverage until the close of the 1980-81 school year. Though the amount of stories written and their placement changed between and within different decades and volumes, arts coverage continued to be a regular part of the Duke Chronicle. The paper even regularly had arts editors on staff, who were responsible for writing and editing arts stories.
However, starting in the 1981-82 school year, The Chronicle's arts coverage underwent some significant changes. While some arts pieces — typically reviews of local plays and art exhibits — would still frequently appear in the regular paper under the recurring Arts section, most entertainment coverage was brought under the purview of a new weekly zine called R&R. The move enabled a greater diversity of arts coverage as the magazine was free of many of the stylistic constraints of a traditional paper.
First issued on Sept. 10th, 1981, R&R was billed as a weekly arts magazine. Every issue contained a mixture of previews, reviews, interviews and essays on culture, as well as advertisements for local restaurants and theater shows. Compared to previous arts coverage, R&R was more wide-ranging and substantial, with the standard edition usually containing five or more articles, which would not have previously been found within The Chronicle. R&R would run for 16 volumes, concluding on Thursday, April 23, 1998.
R&R was retired for two main reasons, according to Timothy Millington (Trinity ‘00), who helped transform R&R and served as the second Recess Editor. The first was that in the summer of 1998, Devin Gordon (Trinity ‘98) and Jessica Moulton (Trinity ‘99) — the outgoing and incoming Chronicle Editor-in-Chiefs respectively — felt it was the perfect time to revamp the magazine. The second reason was that over time, R&R had morphed into an indie zine that focused primarily on music, though it also occasionally covered experimental films and lesser-known media. As a result, it had acquired a reputation as something so alternative that most of the Duke community didn't read it.
Recess replaced R&R as the heart of The Chronicle's entertainment coverage, striving to make it more relatable, fun and oriented towards pop culture instead of alternative media. It was an 8-page weekly magazine that covered topics of general interest from the world of entertainment, and included stories that previously would have been in the Arts section of the general paper as well as more consistent film coverage, something that had been largely lacking in R&R. The name was chosen by Adam Winer (Trinity ‘99), who liked its “fun and nostalgic vibe” according to an email he sent and felt that it “seemed particularly fitting given that” the staffers “were at school covering stuff to do during” their “play time.”
In the first year, it was run by Winer and focused primarily on entertainment and art, with some commentary on broader cultural trends. According to Winer, the early days were both extremely fun and incredibly tough, with one edition taking so long into the morning to finish that he inadvertently slept through and missed his class the next morning. He also worked to build Recess into a place where writers who loved pop culture could play around.
Recess came into being at a time before much of the modern cultural media ecosystem was born. Blogs didn’t exist and most print media covering the arts was dry. Recess was designed to be the opposite of existing alternatives, providing lively and interesting arts coverage.
After Winer graduated, the torch was passed to Millington, who worked alongside a team of undergraduate and graduate students. Recess also put together a special edition in December 1999 that looked back at the most significant cultural touchstones of the decade. By then, Recess had already covered everything from “The Phantom Menace” to Rodin’s “Thinker” to the Confederate flag controversy, according to Millingon.
Recess remains the primary vehicle of arts coverage at Duke to this day, though it has changed over time, first going from a magazine to a normal department — alongside news, sports, photo and opinion — within The Chronicle and later becoming a primarily online department as The Chronicle went online during the Coronavirus. However, we continue to cover the same arts and culture that have been a part of Duke University from the beginning. As while the name Recess is new, Chronicle staffers have been doing what is now Recess’s work for a long time.
Note: This piece was originally published in the Duke Chronicle’s Centennial Magazine. The version here has been expanded on account of additional information provided by past and present Recess members. It is dedicated to all the wonderful Recess Members and Duke Chronicle staff members who wrote about or still write about arts and culture.
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Zev van Zanten is a Trinity junior and recess editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.