Boxes sit stacked in a compact room on the second story of the Afro-American newspaper’s Baltimore headquarters, just down the street from the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus. They’re standard document boxes, brown, rectangular, with removable lids. They rest on metal shelving units, nearly floor to ceiling, that line and divide the room. Every box looks […]

A friend and colleague did an interesting thing recently. He took his iPhone back to an AT&T store and departed with an ordinary cell phone. One that doesn’t have an Internet browser or email or GPS or Angry Birds or a library of his favorite 2,000 songs or pictures of his two adorable kids. He […]

You park your car. You lock it up, grab your bag from the trunk, and head into work. As you do, your brain quietly gets in high gear, racing like it’s in the Indy 500. Even though it seems you’re hardly thinking about where you activated your parking brake, nerve cells in your gray matter, […]

We’re bombarded with messages to be healthier—“The Top 5 Superfoods You Can’t Live Without,” “12 Tips for Better Heart Health,” “3 Surprising Natural Cold Remedies,” “8 Tips for Healthy Living on the Go.” Never before have we had access to so much sound information about health. But never before have we had access to so […]

We laugh. We blush. We kiss. But why? What, evolutionarily speaking, are the advantages of swapping germs with someone when a sloppy smackeroo is hardly integral to propagating the species? We travel on a smallish stone that orbits a yellow dwarf of a star on the edge of one of billions of galaxies in the […]

On our second meeting, I tell John Irwin that I’ve been busy reading his favorite poet, Hart Crane. Like most civilians in the provinces outside university literature programs, I’d had scant experience with Crane, an American poet of huge ambition and unsteady temperament who died in 1932 at the age of 32. He left behind […]

The interrogation room was bare except for a few metal chairs, and its tan walls looked as if they hadn’t been painted in decades. A single transom window stood cracked open slightly, but it couldn’t relieve the room’s stuffy air. Outside, beyond view, lay the hot, dusty streets of North Africa. The prisoner—identified by the […]

John Singer Sargent’s Four Doctors looms over the West Reading Room of the William H. Welch Medical Library at the School of Medicine like a daunting challenge. The mammoth 1907 painting depicts Howard Atwood Kelly, William Stewart Halsted, William Osler, and William H. Welch, the school’s founding clinical faculty. They were considered the best of […]

At 3:25 on a Monday afternoon last May, six young boys with numbers pinned to their shirts wait in the Patterson Park Public Charter School gymnasium. They look uncertain, stealing glances at each other and at Miss Carol and Miss Barbara, who seem to be in charge. “Some of them are scared to come in,” […]

Of all the subjects to broach. Of all the things to bring up. Is there any better way to get people at each other than to ask them about God? Hordes have been dispatched to the Great Beyond, or at least the grave, over the issue of His nature, or whom He favors. Religion, in […]