What’s in a name? Little-known fact: Ron Walters, professor and chair of the Department of History, has written more than 100 columns for Johns Hopkins Magazine. You might recognize him more readily as Guido Veloce, the wry voice that has graced the magazine for the past 21 years. It was after some arm-twisting by then […]

Download and try to solve this issue’s challenge Check your answers

Four years ago, Lonni Sue Johnson’s life story was as rich and vivid as her work. An artist of precisely detailed, often witty drawings—several had graced the cover of the New Yorker and the business page of the New York Times—Johnson also regularly bowed her viola and piloted planes. Suddenly, that story all but disappeared. […]

Baltimore is No. 1. Or we would be if the bloated bureaucrats south of us weren’t stealing what is rightfully ours. This isn’t about taxes. A recent Allstate study of U.S. drivers ranked Baltimore’s second-worst, with Washington, D.C., at the bottom of the heap. We were robbed. So was Boston, whose daredevil drivers weren’t even […]

“The standard line is that with Dawn of the Dead—where we get director George Romero at his best as a social critic, and he’s so clearly playing with consumerist and capitalist consumption—this is the moment, as scholar Kyle William Bishop calls it, of the triumph of the zombie social metaphor. “My particular research interests lie […]

1. c; Carl Snyder, Class of 2012 2. g; Zoe Bell, A&S ’09 3. b; Bob Clayton, A&S ’84 4. e; Freda Lewis-Hall, A&S ’76, and Emerson R. Hall Jr., A&S ’76 5. d; Jerry Brecher, A&S ’67 6. h; Frances Zappone, Class of 2015 7. f; Judah Sommer, A&S ’66 8. a; Sadie Howes, […]

Astrophysicists have known for decades that the universe is expanding. Still, they’ve wondered, could the expansion eventually peter out, leaving the universe to ultimately end when gravity causes all celestial bodies to crash together? In 1998, two competing research teams studying light left by stars that exploded billions of years ago found that the universe […]

1. asp-ire, car-ton, for-age, imp-air, men-ace, par-son, red-act, rot-ate, ten-ant, war-den. 2. cast-rate, cove-ring, disc-over, host-ages, mass-acre, mist-rust, must-ache, past-oral, port-able, read-just. Note: Combinations such as imp-act and men-age, or over-cast and mass-ages, are perfectly good words, but I don’t think they let you complete the sets of 10 combined words.

Knowledge produced from research has cured diseases, fueled technological revolutions, and explained much of the explainable. But do we put too much faith in scientific progress? During the Roaring ’20s, car sales boomed and fortunes grew, and yet Henry Ford was hardly happy. The tire rubber he needed to keep his assembly lines rolling came […]

Restoring faith in Hart Crane “I’m definitely a Hart Crane partisan now,” says David Dudley, A&S ’90, after interviewing Writing Seminars professor John Irwin about his latest book, Hart Crane’s Poetry, for this issue’s “Saving Hart Crane.” “This is the kind of poetry that I’d never in a million years try to wade through on […]