Michael D. Portman, A&S ’96 Michael Portman arrived in Austin from Los Angeles a few years ago, in desperate need of a haircut. He asked his longtime buddy Jayson Rapaport where to find a good hair salon, casually mentioning how much he liked the ones he’d known in L.A. —unisex places that were stylishly low-key, […]

Bearing reproof I enjoy receiving Johns Hopkins Magazine. Even when I am too busy to read the entire issue, I always check in with the puckishly pseudonymed Guido Veloce and usually enjoy a perceptive critique of contemporary absurdity that passes for everyday life. So I was especially disappointed by “Star, Lite” [Essay, Fall]. Quoth the […]

For the last 25 years of his life, Elliott Hinkes, A&S ’64, Med ’67, fed a ravenous appetite for the history of knowledge by collecting more than 300 rare books, pamphlets, and articles of science. An oncologist in Los Angeles, Hinkes grew to be as much a student of the works of scientific masters as […]

If you don’t mind, I’m going to lie down—my ass hurts,” Matthew Klam tells a just-arrived stranger before stretching out on the couch in his office. Although the scenario—one guy flat on his back on a couch, the other in a chair with his legs crossed and a notebook in his lap—looks like something out […]

A patient, recently released from intensive care to the hospital’s main floor, gasps for breath. Her heart beats rapidly. A nurse recognizes that this patient is spiraling toward death. She notifies her supervisors to call in the hospital’s rapid response team of intensive-care specialists. The team, drawn from a cadre of physicians, nurses, and respiratory […]

My parents’ generation was mostly technophobic, with the partial exception of my dad, a tinkerer who liked gadgets, although primarily because they existed rather than for what they did. When the Japanese made high-quality, sophisticated cameras affordable, even he headed for a point-and-shoot, the simpler the better. An aunt never mastered remote controls at a […]

Kami and Zobi teach children health, hygiene, and tolerance, with a little help from the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Dina Borzekowski.

Last spring, when President Obama announced “a new direction” for NASA, he wasn’t entertaining visions of space travel to Mars or a return to the moon. Instead, he and his advisers homed in on near-Earth asteroids. NASA now is pursuing a mandate to land a human on one of the 6,500 space rocks that enter […]

4: Number of Johns Hopkins fall 2010 sports teams that qualified for the NCAA championships. Men’s and women’s cross country and men’s and women’s soccer all had embarked on tournament play as Johns Hopkins Magazine went to press. Women enjoyed the best regular seasons, with soccer earning its sixth straight Centennial Conference title and cross […]

Sky watchers The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a massive and costly stab at capturing a large chunk of the visible universe in one electronic catalog/database, pulled in a cadre of the best universe-spanning minds starting in the 1990s. Now “the Sloanies” (as they’ve dubbed themselves) have opened up the skies for exploration by millions of […]