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 […]

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,” […]

If you Google search “Piper Weiss”—and I shamefully do, often—a photo of my mother comes up. She’s got blunt black bangs and a mustard-colored wool frock. Her smoky eyes look just past the camera. Taken on the balcony of a Portuguese hotel, the city square and the roofs of buildings in the background, the photo […]

1.  How firmly has democracy taken root in Africa? The United Nations reports that Africa currently has the greatest number of countries with democratic governments since the 1960s, though it’s far from accurate to call the continent a bastion of free and fair elections. “Democracy has a foothold; it’s more than just a toehold,” says […]

More than 25 years have elapsed, but Peter M. Lewis vividly remembers an early morning telephone call and subsequent walk through a city market. He was a doctoral candidate at Princeton University in the 1980s when he applied to the U.S. State Department for a summer internship. “In those days they had a good program […]

“Burglaries are very common here of late,” wrote 19-year-old Daniel Coit Gilman to his sister, Emily, in the spring of 1851. “Several houses and stores have been entered and robbed in the most scientific manner.” The Yale junior could not help but admire the ingenuity of the thieves, who studied the accounts of their exploits […]

They travel in search of answers, and adventure often finds them. Hundreds of Johns Hopkins academics, clinical workers, employees, and researchers work in Africa, seeking knowledge about cultures, disease, and the past. They do so at some peril. Before they board a plane, they are vaccinated against yellow fever, hepatitis A, rabies, typhoid, and meningitis. […]

At a judging of Emmy award nominees last August, Annelise Pruitt, A&S ’04, and her collaborator were the youngest people in the room. “Nobody knew who we were,” recalls Pruitt, designer of the website Star Wars Uncut (starwarsuncut.com). Their site had been nominated for an Emmy, but its chances were slim. It was just a […]

Every day for a month last summer, Cyrus Shahpar, A&S ’96, wilted in unending heat and humidity as the makeshift field hospitals and hotels he spent time in repeatedly lost power. As he shuttled from Islamabad to remote regions of Pakistan to search for eruptions of illness, he also worried about stumbling over exploding bombs […]

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 […]