The fit man in the blue shirt, shown here racing across the bricks of the Decker Quad, is Ron Daniels on the morning before his installation as the 14th president of Johns Hopkins University. The occasion was the RD2.5K Presidential Fun Run. An estimated 300 students, faculty, staff, and family members turned out for the […]

Would you eat at a place called The Frog and Peach? Probably not. That was the point of a classic bit of British comedy, viewable once again on the Internet. In it, a gruff and daft Peter Cook attempts to convince a skeptical Dudley Moore that the world needs such a restaurant, a place where […]

Q: How did your injured hand change your teaching? A: “I had to think very much more in language. I had to become far more precise and specific, and take feelings, which are by their very nature ephemeral and transitory, and try to nail them down with vocabulary. I find that using words, and asking […]

Homewood’s baseball diamond turned field of dreams for a 15-and-under All-Star squad from Baltimore and a talented youth baseball team from Kawasaki, Japan. The July exhibition game (which Kawasaki won 17-1) celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Sister Cities program between Charm City and its Japanese counterpart. “The players first met at Fort McHenry, and […]

One would be hard-pressed to disapprove of autodidacticism. Consider a list of notable alumni from the academy of the self-taught: René Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, William Blake. Michael Faraday apprenticed himself to a bookseller and read everything he could before going on to figure out electromagnetism. August Wilson schooled himself at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh after dropping out of the ninth grade. Arnold Schoenberg claimed to be an autodidact, and who are we to dispute it? Frank Zappa advised, “Forget about the senior prom and go to the library and educate yourself, if you’ve got any guts.” Hear, hear. (Though if the prom band is playing Frank Zappa songs, we’re donning a powder-blue brocade tux and we’re going.)

The systematic didacting of oneself—it’s not a verb, but it ought to be—requires printed text bound between boards. Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, or an iSquint will not suffice. And because we subscribe to the advice of Isaac Watts in his 1741 volume Improvement of the Mind—“It is of vast advantage to have the most proper books for reading recommended by a judicious friend”—we consulted a roster of judicious friends to compile some required reading for an autodidact’s course catalog. (The course titles and descriptions are our invention.) We grade on the curve and will allow you to set your own pace, but do proceed with one last piece of advice from the good Mr. Watts: “Have a care of indulging the more sensual passions and appetites of animal nature; they are great enemies to attention.” Your summer of beach reading is over. It’s back to school, even for the self-taught.

Reader, didact thyself!

As the nation’s nonprofits feel the pinch of the current economy, a Johns Hopkins researcher says the “resilient sector” will adapt and survive. In fact, it may even thrive. – It’s tough to log on to the Internet or pick up a newspaper (if you can still find one) these days without being deluged with […]

Malaria kills more than one million people worldwide each year, most of them young children. Backed by new money and renewed interest in stopping this eternal killer, researchers at Johns Hopkins are working on several fronts to stop it. Their main experimental subject: the bloodthirsty mosquito. – She comes out at night, flying out of […]

Scientists battling the malaria parasite and its protean ability to mutate face a centuries-old dilemma: As surely as new drugs are introduced as “cures” for malaria, the genome of the parasite changes just enough to make those new drugs ineffective, or marginally viable tools with which to fight the disease. The irony is that, lacking […]

As a young PhD candidate in biochemistry in India, Nirbhay Kumar was felled by chills, sweats, and fever—the calling cards of malaria. He had been infected with Plasmodium vivax, a mild yet debilitating form of the disease. “I was very sick, but vivax doesn’t lead to cerebral malaria,” he says. “Maybe that’s why I’m still […]

The New Horizons spacecraft, built and operated by the Applied Physics Laboratory, is now midway between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus on its way to Pluto. For much of the 10-year voyage, as a means of saving wear on the spacecraft and also saving money, New Horizons will hibernate, with most of its instruments […]