When Forbes published a list of “the world’s most beautiful campuses,” it spotlighted some of the usual suspects: the spired Gothic buildings of Oxford, the ivy-covered stone of Princeton, the stately columned porticoes at the University of Virginia. But one scribe averred that other college grounds—including Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus—shouldn’t be overlooked. Scott Carlson, author […]

I am writing at a time when “sex addiction” is much in the news. With any luck, it won’t be when you read this, although sex addiction is unlikely to vanish from headlines as long as there are people with lots of money, free time, hubris, and divorce attorneys. Caught cheating? Check into a clinic. […]

“We learn from failures, so we should take the opportunity this disaster has provided to improve the way we extract oil via offshore drilling. With such a massive release, there will be substantial harm to the ecosystem. The acute effects are terrible and very visual. “But once the source has been stopped, most of the […]

A young lab assistant attended an autopsy at the Johns Hopkins Hospital morgue on October 4, 1951. The assistant was Mary Kubicek. The autopsy was of a woman who had died at 31 from the metastasized cervical cancer that had so ravaged her there was scarcely an organ in her body not riddled with malignancies. […]

As he parks next to a large white farmhouse that would fit comfortably into a 19th-century still life, Richard Kelley smiles at a rust-colored retriever, an old friend that stirs from an early spring sunbath to greet him. Kelley knows this old place well. He’s been dropping by regularly to check on Joshua since the boy was little more than a month old, when his grandmother noticed that his body quavered slightly but uncontrollably.

On May 27 at Homewood Field, Johns Hopkins University awarded diplomas to the Class of 2010. (New this year: one massive ceremony conferring degrees on undergraduates and graduates from all the university’s divisions and campuses, in keeping with President Ron Daniels’ “one university” theme.) Hopkins is renowned for its heavy workload, high academic standards, and […]

A. 1. The five Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. 2. The colors of the rainbow, in order: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. 3. This fictitious disk jockey’s business card gives you the months of the year, in sequential order: June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May. […]

A lifetime of work in the field of substance abuse has left Pat Santora, a veteran Johns Hopkins researcher, in the grip of her own emotional turmoil—frustrated that her patients are stigmatized, angered that the public still sees addiction as a moral failing rather than a treatable disease, and irritated that, despite her vociferous protests, “in a wonderful acute-care hospital like Johns Hopkins, we have thousands of people who are diagnosed with addictions to alcohol, tobacco, and illegal and/or prescription drugs,” she says. “And like so many acute-care hospitals, we focus primarily on treating the adverse medical consequences of the addiction—heart disease, cancer, cirrhosis—rather than treating the addiction itself.”

Standing in the apiary on the grounds of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, Wayne Esaias, A&S ’67, digs through the canvas shoulder bag leaning against his leg in search of the cable he uses to download data. It’s dusk as he runs the cord from his laptop—precariously perched on […]

“Reds,” I said, “do you know that meander of Stony Run, the one off Linkwood Road, that’s eroding back toward that ugly apartment building?” Reds smiled at me like I was his best friend because he smiled that way at everybody, especially if they wanted to discuss meandering rivers. Yes, of course, he knew this […]