“If you had a million dollars for health, what would be the best way to spend it?” That question, posed by the Disease Control Priorities Project (DCPP) in August 2008, is poignant, in a way. How could anything be accomplished with only a million dollars? There seems no end to global public health problems. HIV/AIDS, […]

“SEVEN THOUSAND TEENS dropped out today.” That was the bomb that U.S. Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter dropped in the middle of a lengthy appraisal of No Child Left Behind last December. She, along with five other panelists, had been invited by the Johns Hopkins School of Education to discuss, before an audience of […]

TSAVO, COLONIAL EAST AFRICA, 1898. It was another long night for Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, a British civil engineer. Clutching his rifle, he crouched inside a deserted railway-camp hospital, waiting for the lions to return. A pair of them had been prowling around the camp together, killing the workers who were building a railroad […]

Spoiled by nostalgia Regarding “Now What?” [Winter 2009]: How old were these people? Did they actually experience the 1960s? The “heady days of the 1960s,” indeed; filled with optimistic visions of “progress,” to be sure. In the movies, we enjoyed that sanguine future in Dr. Strangelove (1964). In books, we read the cheerful fictional visions […]

Crossword-style definitions are given for each word in each of the following sets of words. The words in each set are permutations (anagrams) of the same letters. Starred words are uncommon. A. A set of five letters 1. Analyze grammatically 2. Asparagus unit 3. Precedes moi or ski 4. Fraction of a Turkish piaster* 5. […]

Why do expensive hobbies inspire silly names? Prompting that question was a midwinter professional trip to a warm place with a stay in a hotel next to a marina. Never having spent time next to a marina, I was fascinated by the yachts—by their price (entry level seemed to be $750,000); by the fact that […]

In January, associate editor Dale Keiger was working on our cover story, “The Buck Goes Here” (p. 36), about cost-effective public health interventions that, if funded, could save many, many lives. As he filled me in on his reporting, he and I talked about the fact that there’s actually plenty of cash out there, but […]

“Nothing’s going to stick in terms of the massive relief effort unless we really put the Haitians front and center and build their capacity in the process. We know that 63,000 women were likely pregnant in the quake-affected zones. Of those, you’ve got 7,000 who would give birth in the first month after the quake, […]

Locals were inventing terms like “Snowpocalypse” and “Snowmageddon” to describe the twin blizzards that pounded Baltimore with a historic amount of snow and shut the city down for several days in February. The two storms together dumped 51.7 inches of flakes on the Homewood campus, doing their part to make this winter the snowiest on […]

The Universe works. It has to. And yet humanity remains humbled: Mysteries endure about how, exactly, the wheels on The Big Machine turn. Our knowledge is sketchy, a dark picture punctuated only by bits of theoretical light. So, physicists ask Big Questions: What makes up the force that pushes the Machine outward faster and faster? […]