Nearly a decade after the United States thought it had toppled the bad guys in Afghanistan, American military and government officials are still dealing with warlords, jihadists, drug traffickers, and extortionists. And those are just the Americans’ Afghan allies. A rampantly corrupt government still does not exert political control over much of the country. The […]

Brendan Cooke, Peab ’01 (MM), was live on the radio when he learned he no longer had a job with the Baltimore Opera Company. For 10 years, he had performed in the company’s chorus and the occasional secondary role: Jero in Rossini’s The Siege of Corinth, Crespel in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman. The company was […]

For the sake of happiness, indulge in this fantasy: Think of a tropical island where the sun shines and the fish jump, where exotic fruits fall off the trees into your hands and gracious people move through their paces as they have for centuries, and where time passes as slowly as the days unfold. Who […]

Carol Graham’s transition from Dr. Poverty to Dr. Happy began in the late 1990s when something she found in Peru did not make sense. Graham, SAIS ’86, was born in Lima in 1962, and spent so much time there as a child that she sometimes says “we” when speaking of Peruvians. (Her father, George C. […]

Sometimes waking life resembles a nightmare. Picture a graduate student walking through a Romanian orphanage that has hundreds of cribs. In each of them are two or three emotionally or physically malnourished infants, many crying or catatonic, with the student slipping from room to room like a ghost. For six hours she just wanders, never […]

Listening to Mozart while reading a book. Going out to dinner, so I don’t have to cook. Snuggling a puppy from my Lab’s new litter. Watching baseball when they have a good hitter. Gathering family for good conversation. Volunteering for the Child Health Foundation. Solving a crossword or creating a rhyme. Hugging my sweetheart any old time. —Jo Sack, wife […]

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.

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 […]

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.”