Hadley Nagel’s brush with history rubbed her the wrong way. Four years ago as a high school sophomore, Nagel visited Montpelier, the restored home of the nation’s fourth president, James Madison, in Orange, Virginia. Enthralled by the story the mansion told—of Madison crafting the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution and shepherding […]

Novelist Jean McGarry sits at a table in the Gilman atrium on the Homewood campus on a sunny June afternoon, looking like what she has been since 1988—a creative writing professor in the Writing Seminars at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. She’s clad in casual slacks and a lightweight shirt, and a copy of her 2010 […]

It’s expensive being poor, especially in the South. Consider: $100 worth of groceries in wealthy Connecticut will set you back as much as $112 in parts of Alabama, one of the poorest states in the country. That’s because Alabama is one of only two states with a full sales tax on basic foodstuffs, a tax […]

Changes at the top Enter two vice presidents, exit two deans. In July, Glenn M. Bieler assumed Johns Hopkins’ newest senior administrative post, vice president for communications and public affairs. He will oversee the new Department of Communications and Public Affairs, which includes Johns Hopkins Magazine. Bieler comes to Johns Hopkins from Case Western Reserve […]

Researchers have updated the Alzheimer’s diagnostic guidelines for the first time in 27 years, allowing for earlier detection.

It’s a mess up there. A half-century of launching satellites has turned the skies above Earth’s atmosphere decidedly unfriendly. The problem: Of the 5,000 or so satellites launched by the United States and a dozen other countries, only 1,000 still work. A few of the nonoperational craft have “de-orbited,” burning or breaking up as gravity […]

In November 2010, Daniel R. Levinson, inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, issued an estimate of how many Medicare recipients came to harm while they were patients in U.S. hospitals. Levinson’s office had surveyed a sample of the 1 million Medicare patients discharged by hos­pitals in October 2008, and determined that […]

A new book by Michael Mandelbaum and Thomas Friedman looks at the way we were—and how we can get back.

…Biomedical engineers led by School of Medicine professor Jennifer Elisseeff report promising results from experiments with a new composite material that helps restore soft tissue. The material begins as a liquid injected under the skin, which then hardens into a more solid structure that might have use in facial reconstruction. The researchers’ report appeared in […]

Sitting at his desk, Joshua Epstein readies a computer disaster simulation, benignly christened the “toy playground, agent-based model.” Graphically speaking, this particular computer scenario is pure Commodore 64. The playground is a green box. Inside, mostly blue dots (healthy kids) and a couple of red ones (sick kids) swirl around. Then, with the click of […]