Johns Hopkins Magazine

Johns Hopkins S u m m e r

M A GA Z I N E

2011

Our Sort Of Summery Issue

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Johns Hopkins Summer

2011

v o l. 63 n o. 2

MAGAZINE

Features 28

Man in the Middle

By Michael Anft Atheists and religious fanatics are equally wrong about God, argues professor William Egginton in a new book.

Just a little belief, he says, means a lot.

34

“Mom! It’s Ballet!”

By Dale Keiger, A&S ’11 (MLA) Last fall, Peabody Dance began training a troupe of little boys in ballet. By spring, they had discipline, moves, and a new French vocabulary.

42

The Johns Hopkins Magazine Not-Exactly-What-You’d-Call-Breezy Summer Reading List

By Michael Anft, Ann Finkbeiner, Dale Keiger, Gadi Dechter, A&S ’03 (MA), Kristen Intlekofer, Hollis Robbins Although they may require a little effort, these six summer reads are well worth the time.

50

Oh, the Places They Go

By Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson Thinking about a trip this summer? We travel— vicariously, at least—with Johns Hopkins faculty to Cuba, Germany, Syria, Nepal, and Italy.

34

Cover illustration by Paul Cox Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 3

Departments 5

Contributors: In the Spirit

6

The Big Question: Which “Human” Tasks Can’t Artificial Intelligence Do?

8

Editor’s Note: Seriously Summer

9

Letters: The Wild West

14

Essay: In Plain Sight

15

Golomb’s Gambits: Deranged!

16

Wholly Hopkins: Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins

6

16 Film: Tales unadorned and told from the bottom up 17 History of Science: In alchemy’s defense 19 Medicine: Mistakes noted 20 Arts and Sciences: The poetic subversion of capitalism

22 Weird Physics: Death Valley’s walking rocks

24 Recordings: Guitar, voice, flute, and more guitar

24 Medicine: Edward Miller to retire

25 Public Health: Speaking of violence

14

16

26 University: Preserving research universities’ “vital triad”

59

Alumni News & Notes

71

Golomb’s Solutions

72

How To: Succeed at Johns Hopkins 22

72 59

4 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Contributors

In the Spirit

Vol. 63 No. 2 Summer 2011

Editor: Catherine Pierre Associate Editor: Dale Keiger, A&S ’11 (MLA) Senior Writer: Michael Anft Assistant Editor: Kristen Intlekofer Art Director: Shaul Tsemach Designer: Pamela Li Alumni News & Notes: Lisa Belman and Mike Field Business Manager: Dianne MacLeod

Johns Hopkins Magazine (publication number 276-260; ISSN 0021-7255) is published four times a year (Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer) by The Johns Hopkins University, 901 S. Bond Street, Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231.

Produced in cooperation with University Magazine Group. Periodicals postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland, and additional entry offices.

Address correspondence to Johns Hopkins Magazine, Johns Hopkins University, 901 S. Bond Street, Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231. Via e-mail: jhmagazine@jhu.edu.

Website: magazine.jhu.edu Telephone: 443-287-9900 Subscriptions: $20 yearly, $25 foreign Diverse views are presented and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or official policies of the university.

Advertisers: Representative for local advertising: Alter Communications; Kristen Cooper, Sales and Marketing Director; 410-468-2700; jhu@alteryourview.com POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to Johns Hopkins Magazine, 201 N. Charles St., Suite 2500, Baltimore, MD 21201. Copyright Š2011, The Johns Hopkins University.

Rolling up her sleeves Kristen Intlekofer joined the magazine staff as assistant editor a week and a half before the Spring issue went to press—and jumped right into the fray. “As far as I’m concerned,� she says, “I joined the staff during the most hectic, fun part of the process.�

Atta girl! Kristen came to the magazine after spending a year as a freelance editor and writer; prior to that, she was a senior editor at Words & Numbers, a Baltimore company that provides editorial content for textbook publishers. In just a few short weeks, she’s become an invaluable member of our team, managing projects, editing copy, and contributing articles, including her review of Shrink Rap for “The Johns Hopkins Magazine Not-ExactlyWhat-You’d-Call-Breezy Summer Reading List.� Welcome, Kristen!

Imagination is the next best thing Artist Paul Cox naturally prefers working on location when creating his colorful and lively illustrations. “When one is working on location you absorb so much more,� he explains. But when he needs to paint a place he’s never been? “I try to imagine myself in the situation and simulate the drama of the place�—which is just what we asked him to do for “Oh, the Places They Go,� in which we travel with Johns Hopkins faculty to Cuba, Germany, Syria, Nepal, and Italy. Cox, who lives in East Sussex but will be returning to London, where he was born, has had his work appear in the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Esquire, among other publications. —CP

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Mike Ciesielski

The Big Question

6 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Q:

Are there any “human” endeavors that artificial intelligence won’t be able to handle better than we can?

A:

“Alan Turing, the brilliant English mathematician and computer scientist, anticipated most objections to the possibility of ‘thinking machines’ more than 60 years ago. One common argument goes something like this: Sure, computers might be able to do X, but they’ll never be able to do Y. Turing countered that most Y’s are things that it would be silly to create a machine to do—fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream—even if we could. However, as we look at other possible Y’s, we’re often struck by the results of research into Y around the world. There are programs that create paintings, compose music, and even recognize anger in a human voice.

“Where art is concerned, I think computers will only match us someday. However, in other areas, I expect computers to exceed the capacity of humans simply because of processing speed and storage capacity. With the right algorithms, computers will be able to think faster and have access to more information than a human, who has pesky biological limitations and psychological biases.

But this won’t happen right away.

“For the time being, most of our research is limited to what is called ‘weak’ AI. We try to find specific solutions to specific problems. We create savants. Very few researchers are interested in ‘strong’ AI or building general-purpose artificial intelligence. As a result, we have programs like Watson that can play Jeopardy! but can’t play chess. But I think more researchers will return to the problem of strong AI. At that point, it won’t be so much a question of if as when computers will become smarter than us. In which case, we should probably worry more about making sure they’re friendly.”

Stephyn Butcher is a lecturer at the Whiting School and a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science.

—Interview by Michael Anft

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 7

Editor’s Note

Seriously Summer

H

ere in Baltimore, as I write this editor’s note in mid-May, we’re enjoying a comfortable 68-degree morning. No one is really complaining about the cloudy skies or the 80 percent chance of rain. Soon enough—next week, according to the weather report—temperatures will begin their inevitable climb into the upper 80s, then 90s, then (help us) probably the low 100s. Add to that our infamous humidity, a hailstorm or two, and the occasional Inner Harbor fish kill, and ahhh . . . it’s summertime in Charm City.

This is roughly the scenario we had in mind when we started planning our Summer issue. Of course, many of our readers don’t live in Baltimore, but wherever they are, there’s a good chance the days are getting longer and hotter, activities are heading outdoors, and—even for Johns Hopkins people—the pace is slowing down at least a little bit.

So let’s lighten up, we thought. Give our readers a magazine to flip through while sitting on the porch after dinner, or to roll up and stuff in their beach bags. Books! we thought. We’ll gather together a selection of literary escapes. Travel! We’ll carry our readers to exotic destinations. Dancing! We’ll introduce them to little boys studying ballet at Peabody—what could be more charming?

This being Johns Hopkins, it turns out that “light” is a relative term, and so we present “Our Sort Of Summery Issue,” featuring “The Johns Hopkins Magazine NotExactly-What-You’d-Call-Breezy Summer Reading List,” whose title, I think, speaks for itself (page 42). There’s also “Oh, the Places They Go” in which freelancer Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson explains the research subjects that lure faculty to locales that, for the rest of us, sound like really great vacation spots (page 50). And we offer associate editor Dale Keiger’s story, “Mom! It’s Ballet!” about a Peabody program that trains local boys to be the next generation’s great ballet dancers (page 34).

And because we couldn’t go an entire issue without delving into at least one serious subject, in “Man in the Middle,” senior writer Michael Anft profiles Johns Hopkins professor William Egginton, who in a new book argues that religious fanatics and atheists are equally guilty of polarizing people, and that a moderate approach to religion is the best way to keep society moving forward (page 28). But don’t worry, Mike’s got a light touch.

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Letters The Wild West Americans and guns: Mass insanity Your spread on gun control [The Big Question, “Is America Culturally Capable of Controlling Its Guns?” Spring] caught my interest, which lasted just long enough for me to read it. Interest quickly turned into dismay.

All my European friends think when it comes to guns we Americans exhibit a mass insanity, and I must agree with them. In fact, I think it is a criminal insanity given that over 2,000 of us have been killed by gunfire just since the Tucson shootout. It’s one of the more rebarbative aspects of our society, but I’m sure my friends will be comforted to learn that we are doing a lot of research on the subject.

I have long wondered why we can’t treat guns the same way we treat automobiles. The same testing, licensing, insurance, safety checks, registration, and so on should apply. All renewable every year or so. Just like

cars, you could own as many as you had space for. Big ones, little ones, whatever. Who could possibly object?

Oh yeah, I forgot the so-called conservatives. Well, never mind.

Michael M. Stroup, A&S ’66 Waimanalo, Hawaii No common ground in the gun control debate I was looking forward to seeing some fresh ideas in “The Big Question.” Surely here, I thought, we would be presented with more than the usual clichés and half-truths that revolve around the use of guns in America. Sadly, it was the same old liberal mishmash. The attempt to portray [New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Engr ’64] as standing on some common ground between the camps was especially ridiculous. When Bloomberg is not riding one of his many hobbyhorses, he is leading the

charge of the anti-gun nuts. It was sad to see a respected Hopkins professor so butchering the truth.

Dennis Armstrong, A&S ’74 (PhD) Norwalk, California Is gun research impartial?

Daniel W. Webster’s attachment to the Bloomberg School of Public Health leads me to question the impartiality of any research he might present in answering the question, “Is America Culturally Capable of Controlling Its Guns?”

In Mayor Bloomberg’s New York City, it takes months and costs hundreds of dollars to obtain a handgun permit, and the application can be refused for any reason or no real reason at all. The disappointed applicant can then spend more hundreds to go to court, where he will face an experienced city attorney, and chances of success are slim.

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10 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

In the meantime, New York City does not even recognize the permits issued

by New York State.

I have yet to hear the mayor suggest that the laws prevailing in his domain would be a fine idea for the entire nation. Even if Webster shares that opinion, I do not, and I suspect that most gun owners do not either.

John Gorman, A&S ’61 (MA), ’67 (PhD) Miami, Florida Africa’s “resource curse” Dale Keiger explored some interesting questions in the Spring issue [“The Curse of the Golden Egg”]. I, too, have wondered why Africa’s natural resources have not led to widespread prosperity for its inhabitants.

European countries colonized Africa in much the same way as they colonized North America. Both continents were rich in natural resources.

Yet somehow the natural resource wealth of North America has been spread to a wider segment of the population rather than to a few socialist dictators, as is generally the case in Africa. The vibrant economies of Canada and the United States have resulted in great infrastructure improvements (roads, rail, communications) and abundant energy has led to excellent public health (water, sewer, reliable electric power, etc.).

There are at least two factors that may explain the difference between the two continents: No. 1, strong constitutions have produced stable governments with peaceful transitions of power; No. 2, free competition and private enterprise have enabled the natural resources to be developed in a manner that benefits the broader society.

While the goals of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative sound credible, I fear that the basic governmental models in Africa will still prevent significant trickle-down to the people from the wealth of their natural resources.

Bob Vaughan, SPH ’84 (ScD) Lutherville, Maryland

JHU Center for Africana Studies “African Studies” [Spring] was a thoughtful account of the challenges in Africa and the innovative ways our university is helping to address them. Especially given my own research there, most recently in South Africa, I read it with great interest.

I would like to add to the magazine’s feature the remarkable work JHU’s Center for Africana Studies is conducting, not just to solve Africa’s practical dilemmas, but to research and document the complex cultural, political, intellectual, and social histories of African people.

Under the leadership of Franklin Knight, Ben Vinson, and Floyd Hayes, the center spans diverse academic disciplines and offers important programs for our students. For example, Siba Grovogui, a professor in our political science department, has extensively studied African sovereignty. Working in conjunction with Lori Leonard of the School of Public Health, Grovogui is currently researching the recently introduced global governance of Chad. Or consider the history department’s Pier Larson, whose research focuses on slavery and the slave trades in eastern and southern Africa. Just as importantly, some of the center’s associated faculty, like sociologist Pamela Bennett, aim to address the African experience here in the United States. Bennett’s latest research draws attention to the trends and consequences of racial residential segregation among African Americans.

Outside of research and course work, the center conducts a studyabroad program in Ghana; the Critical Thought Collective, where regional Africana scholars gather to exchange ideas on the African experience; and a lecture series that examines the triumphs and tragedies of Africans and African Americans around the world.

Over the long term, the Center for Africana Studies’ broad intellectual exploration leads to the kind of cultural understanding that effects true, transformational change.

Katherine S. Newman, Dean Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

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12 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Teach with Africa The Spring issue showcased important and exciting programs currently conducted in Africa. Another program that may be of interest to readers is a reciprocal education venture between the United States and South Africa that was founded in 2007.

Along with my wife, Marjorie, we created Teach with Africa (www .teachwithafrica.org) to respond to the dire shortage of teachers in South Africa and the education disparities that continued to exist post-apartheid. This rapidly growing nonprofit organization has funded multidisciplinary teams (teachers, mental health workers, and MBAs/social entrepreneurs) who assist schools in the townships and rural areas of South Africa each summer and then return to the United States to assist in our own challenged communities.

Teach with Africa depends on highly skilled and passionate volunteers for its projects. We are unique in that we fund expenses for these volunteers, and we would welcome Hopkins students, faculty, and alumni as participants.

Larry B. Schlenoff, A&S ’68 Founder, Teach with Africa San Francisco, California Peak oil, peak population The most compelling issue in this very interesting article [Wholly Hopkins, “Running on Empty?” Spring] is that the public health community has done such a wonderful job in the last century that the world population has exploded. Just as there is a Hubbert peak for oil production, there are certainly peak points for many other commodities critical to human vitality.

With the current emergence of China as a mega-consumer and with the rapidly advancing India joining China, this seems a certainty.

Although the article’s focal point was oil, I think it is just an example used to open the door to a much bigger picture, which is: There must be some point at which population growth becomes a huge issue, big

enough to threaten the overall quality of life—indeed life itself—for almost all humans excepting the wealthiest segments. There has to be some population number that, when exceeded, will result in a global community that just cannot cope anymore. This leads to the real issue: At some point, the public health community will be fighting not only oil and other commodity shortages, but they will be fighting the legacy of their own success over the last century.

John Convey Roslyn, New York Moth beauty Your brief article about the “Audubon of moths,” John Cody, Med ’49 (Cert), was very welcome [Alumni News & Notes, “Moth Fancy,” Spring]. Readers should be aware that 15 of Dr. Cody’s original moth paintings are on display on the third and fourth floors in the new Wilmer Eye Institute’s Robert and Clarice Smith Building. They are gorgeous beyond words and need to be seen to be believed.

Morton F. Goldberg, M.D. Professor of Ophthalmology School of Medicine Director Emeritus,Wilmer Eye Institute Old Shatterhand Nobody could have been more surprised to see an article about Karl May in Johns Hopkins Magazine [Essay, “Lost in Translation,” Spring]. It brought back wonderful memories of a friend’s backyard, sitting on the grass with a bunch of kids smoking a peace pipe (with tobacco and dried oak or maple leaves—a wonder we did not all get sick). Everybody our age group read Karl May; Chief Winnetou and Old Shatterhand were a part of our childhood and we talked about our heroes for hours on end. What great adventures we shared with them!

Karl May was not a great writer in the classical sense nor a good role model (we did not know about his past), but then other writers did

not belong on a pedestal either. He kept our imagination alive, kept us wondering about that far, far great place—the American Wild West. It might even be more important that he kept us reading.

Ever since I could read, I have enjoyed authors from Homer to Goethe, Shakespeare to Voltaire, Mark Twain to

Kleist, Schiller to Steinbeck, Tolstoy to Gogol and Dostoyevsky, etc., but no book would compare to the youthful joy I got out of Karl May. If there are Karl May festivals in Germany, I hope his fans enjoy him as much as I did so many, many years ago.

Helga Dajani Manteno, Illinois

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www.andyo.org Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 13

Essay

In Plain Sight B y “ G u i d o Ve l o c e ”

14 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

There is also camouflage for places that usually are hidden anyway. One online vendor offers women a “SeXy [sic] Bra Top Cheeky Shorts Set Camouflage Print.”

Camouflage underwear is also available for plus-sized women, who presumably have more to conceal. I didn’t check for men’s camouflage underwear.

But I did check for diapers. They also come in camouflage. It’s unclear what camouflage diapers might be concealing and how they might be protecting it from harm, but this raises the possibility of culture wars in daycare centers. In the right-hand corner, you have tough, combat-ready toddlers in their camouflage diapers. In the left-hand corner, you have the organic milk–swilling, PBS-loving set in their smiley-faced Sesame Street diapers.

(If I were Elmo and the best product placement I could get was on diapers, I would be looking for a new agent.)

By the time I got to diapers, I decided that the case was closed, although I still wasn’t sure what the case might be, except that there is a major market for camouflage for people who don’t need it. Or am I missing something?

An intriguing use for camouflage that emerged from my research had never occurred to me. It can be educational. One website’s suggested list of activities for small children included this one: “Learn the secrets of animal survival—CAMOUFLAGE! Wear camo that day and see if you can survive like the animals by playing a game and searching for hidden creatures.” It’s a promising idea, although I’d be picky about where I’d have kids do it (not in Baltimore alleys) and when I’d have them do it (not during hunting season).

Perhaps my gloomy-day guy got it right after all.

There is a time to be invisible and a time to be seen. Even if it takes camouflage to do it.

Gilbert Ford

L

ast winter, I was walking to campus after several snowy days when everything around me was a slight modulation of gray. Suddenly, a figure popped out of the gloom. What made him stand out on this monochrome day? He was wearing camouflage.

Not the seasonally appropriate arctic type that makes you look like a gun-carrying polar bear. He was a moving jungle.

That seemed odd. A fundamental principle of camouflage is that being seen is a bad career move. As we approached one another, it became clear that he was not a member of the military (and we can all sleep more soundly knowing that). The camouflage was a fashion statement.

This strange episode set me thinking about the many recent times I’d seen civilians dressed in militarylooking camouflage. People who wear it professionally are often very happy when they don’t have to wear it.

Why would people who don’t have to wear it do so, especially when it isn’t hiding anything? I never did answer that question (although I have my suspicions), but I learned some strange stuff about camouflage.

The most striking thing was the variety on the market. I’d always known that there are different types, depending on the environment—desert, jungle, snow, or woods—and that different countries have different patterns. (Check out the Polish Pantera Woodland Digital pattern. I had a shirt like that in the 1960s.) It was nonetheless stunning to find pink camouflage, although it could be useful if you’re using little girls or flamingos for cover.

Also impressive was the range of things to conceal with camouflage. One company offers camouflage seat covers, although they only seem to be available for pickup trucks, and they don’t offer a pattern to hide coffee stains. If there is ever a Starbucks line of seat covers, we may do business.

Guido Veloce is a Johns Hopkins University professor.

Golomb’s Gambits TM

Johns Hopkins

Deranged!

M ag a z i n e

By Solomon Golomb ’51 An anagram is a rearrangement of the letters in one word to form a new word. Mathematicians call such a rearrangement a permutation, and if the permutation leaves no letter in its original position, they call it a derangement (which is also a synonym for insanity).

If you write an anagram below the original word, you have a derangement if only different letters line up.

For example, S P

T A

A S

P T

L E

E L

is a derangement, whereas S P

T L

A A

P T

L E

E S

is not because the letter A stayed in the same position.

Words sometimes have many anagrams, but derangements are harder to

find. One set of letters can’t have more derangements (rows) than the number of letters (columns).

Your present task will be to find three anagrams for each of the numbered sets of letters below in which each is a derangement of the other two. That is, when written as three rows in a rectangle, no column contains a repeated letter. Proper nouns and uncommon words are allowed.

The same set of letters may have more than one solution.

1. A, E, M, S 2. A, E, N, T 3. A, E, P, R 4. E, I, L, V 5. E, I, M, T 6. O, P, S, T 7. A, E, L, S, T 8. A, E, P, R, S 9. E, I, P, R, S, T 10. A, E, G, I, L, N, R, T

Paper or pixels?

The new digital edition of Johns Hopkins Magazine is now available.

Saves paper, saves fossil fuel, saves postage, and all the cool kids will have one. For details, please go to magazine.jhu.edu.

(Solutions on page 71)

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www. www w. rolandparkplace.org rolandparkplace.org e oorg Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 15

Wholly Hopkins

Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins

Film

Steve Ruark

Tales unadorned and told from the bottom up

Filmmaker Matthew Porterfield’s unvarnished view of working people focuses not on the loopy absurdity of their behavior but on the weight they bear as they move through their lives.

I

t’s a dreary day in one of Baltimore’s trendier neighborhoods. A young man with a gaunt face and big glasses sits at an unsteady table in a mid-scale hipster hash house. He picks at his late lunch of steak and Brussels sprouts and spies on a middle-aged couple seated on a public bench out front. The woman, for reasons no one seems to know, is taking a pair of scissors to the man’s patchy “We engage in a kind of locks. The setup—folks who voyeurism when we make or look down on their luck actwatch movies. I like to draw ing out an unselfconscious attention to that in my films.” display of public grooming— seems lifted straight from the oeuvre of John Waters.

As he draws his gaze away from the window, the spy—filmmaker Matthew Porterfield, no stranger to the edgy marriage of Baltimore streets and cinema—gives a hint of a smile. “We engage in a kind of voyeurism when we make or watch movies,” he says. “I like to draw attention to that in my films.”

16 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

A comparison between Porterfield, a lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the Krieger School, and the celebrated Baltimore auteur Waters, who is a fan and supporter, seems natural enough.

They each work the same surface of the street, parsing its grit for texture. But Porterfield’s spare, melancholy cinema, on display in his new film, Putty Hill, will never be confused with the campy spark of Waters’ work.

In Putty Hill, released early this year to rave reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere, Porterfield and his actors starkly sketch out the world of a group of friends and relatives who survive a 24-year-old addict felled by an overdose. The characters range from an ex-con tattoo artist to a gaggle of teenage girls, set in various places where urban and suburban life overlap.

Porterfield favors untrained actors who speak for themselves, improvising from the director’s rough sketches of scenes. “I like the combination of vérité and acting,” he says. “There’s this idea that you may be able to approach some objec-

tive truth with a camera. It’s hard to get that from people who are trained in drama. They get lost in how they’re doing their craft.”

Porterfield himself plays an off-camera interviewer who asks characters questions about the addict, Cory, and about their lives. By doing so, he says, he wants to break down the narrative wall between auteur and audience that allows viewers to suspend their disbelief—and makes so much Hollywood fare predictable and empty.

What emerges are acute portrayals of what are euphemistically called “working people”— though some of them, as in the real world, don’t have jobs. “It plays both as documentary realism and as fiction,” says Porterfield. “There’s a lot of interest now in films that walk that line, that are an amalgam of those two styles.”

Part of Porterfield’s M.O. grows out of his dissatisfaction with how people are represented on celluloid. Movies such as the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone, shot in the Ozarks last year

by New York filmmakers, used clichéd characters to tell a story—in this case, “inbred meth-heads with missing teeth,” says Porterfield. “It’s a form of exploitation. I’ve seen a lot of films that portray people without taking responsibility for the ramifications of perpetuating a stereotype. There are some hillbillies in my background, so maybe I’m more sensitive to it.” His sensitivity hasn’t been lost on critics, who have showered him with praise. “The list of American movies that depict working-class life with this much understanding and this little condescension is very short,” Andrew O’Hehir wrote at Salon.com, adding that Putty Hill “offers American independent film a new way forward.”

Porterfield, 33, started teaching at Johns Hopkins in 2007, right around the time he received raves for Hamilton, his first feature film.

Hamilton chronicled the lives of young people in the tidy working-class neighborhood in northeast Baltimore where he grew up and still lives with his parents. (His father, Gordon Porterfield, a playwright and teacher, is an instructor in the School of Education.) Struck by the stark differences between the lives and viewpoints of his neighbors and the up-market kids he attended private school with 13 miles away, Porterfield began to take a longer look at the people on his hilly street, with its eclectic mix of races and brick, clapboard, and wood-frame houses.

That long gaze shows up in the languorous camera shots and an often muted, detached style that marks Putty Hill. The film soaks up shadows and painted surfaces. “In every location, we wanted to honor the naturalism of the scene,”

Porterfield explains, with a nod to his cinematographer, Jeremy Saulnier. “When we saw a scene was dark, we wanted to use what little light there was to create a mood with it.” It’s impossible not to be moved by the mix of foreboding and serenity in scenes of the disheveled hovel where Cory, the dead addict, holed up during his last days.

Putty Hill cost $80,000 to make, put together with the help of a half-dozen Johns Hopkins students. Porterfield sees moving students from the classroom into the real world as part of his mission. There is a world full of stories out there, he says, as well as the chance to develop a meaningful camaraderie with those who tell them. He cites that as key to his art and his life. “As I was making this film, I was pretty melancholy, which I think comes through in it,” he says, adding that he was drinking too much to salve wounds inflicted by a failing marriage. “One of the things that saved me was doing this film. The collaborative process feeds me. I don’t think I would have found my way out of a hard time in the same way if it wasn’t for it.”

—Michael Anft

H i s to r y o f S c i e n c e

In alchemy’s defense

H

istory traditionally has ranked alchemists with counterfeit artists, huckster quacks, snake oil salesmen, and witches. Medieval men hunkered in dungeons, using primitive materials in an absurd quest to turn base metals like lead into gold? Definitely not scientists.

A Johns Hopkins historian has come forth to defend the honor of the lowly—and he says misunderstood—alchemical investigator. Not only did alchemists’ work have some scientific effect, says Lawrence Principe, professor of history of science in the Krieger School, but their labors contributed greatly to the development of modern chemistry. “Most of the techniques that chemists now use in labs were developed in the Middle Ages,” Principe says. “What alchemists and chemists were doing at that time was incredibly similar.”

Crystallization, distillation, sublimation—all techniques for working with substances that are still in use today—were developed by practitioners of the alchemical arts, who plied their trade from 300 B.C., when they emerged in Greekspeaking Egypt, until they were discredited and given the existential stage hook by scientific academies in Europe in the early 1700s. What laid Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

17

IStockphoto.com

Wholly Hopkins low the quasi-discipline was a discrediting “PR ated many of their lab experiments. For examcampaign of sorts,” Principe says, mounted by ple, he knew that alchemists extracted medicines some academies and figures of scientific author- from a glassy substance that they derived from ity. They equated alchemy solely with transmu- antimony. So he tried to use their techniques on an antimony compound he tation and linked it with had bought from a chemical other fraudulent practices, “Alchemy’s not mumbo company. “After many tries, making it impossible for jumbo or a fraud.These were I couldn’t get the experiserious chemists to pursue transmutation openly. people who were serious ment to work,” he says. “I’d get this dark, crystalline Meanwhile, “chymistry,” as investigators of nature.” mess that was nothing like it was then known, was glass.” Vexed, he decided to proving increasingly valuable in making marketable substances. To make order antimony ore from Eastern Europe, near “chymists” more respectable, scientific authori- where the original alchemical experiments ties split off all activities associated with alchemy took place. “It worked perfectly,” he reports. “The and repudiated them. “Current scholarship is antimony had the tiniest impurity—about oneonly now revealing how artificial and contrived half of 1 percent—of quartz in it. That made all the distinction between alchemy and chymistry the difference.”

Other researchers have had similar troubles making alchemy work, but Principe’s research shows it can be done. “What it all illustrates is the gulf in understanding between alchemy and modern chemistry. We have to be a little bit more forgiving of the work they were doing. Alchemy’s not mumbo jumbo or a fraud. These were people who were serious investigators of nature.”

Principe laid out his myth-busting take on alchemy in February at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and more recently in the June issue of Isis, a scholarly journal devoted to scientific history. He frequently discusses how the concept of transmutation—turning one metal into another—was based on a coherent theory about the composition of metals. Alchemists believed that all metals were compounds of the same two materials. The differences among them were due to the proportions of those two materials and their grades of purity. Thus, changing the proportions or purifying one material could change one metal into another, or so they thought. History has often made it seem as though alchemy’s really was,” Principe says. Prior to alchemy’s last emphasis on transmutation is what sank it into beaker of fame, “chymists were the comical fig- oblivion. But Principe notes that several prominent scientists, including Sir Isaac Newton and ures in theater and literature.”

During their heyday, alchemists may not have Robert Boyle, known as the father of modern successfully spun gold, but they created cosmet- chemistry, pursued transmutation and other ics, dyes, liquors, pharmaceuticals, and pigments. aspects of alchemy.

Although some science historians began to They analyzed metals, created artificial fertilizers, and tested hypotheses that proved pivotal take a second look at alchemy in the 1950s, it has in the development of science. “They developed become a much more popular research subject a sophisticated theory of matter and of material in the last decade or so. “There are many books change that responded to their direct observa- waiting to be written and read on the subject,” tions of the world and their work,” adds Principe. Principe says. “It’s an amazing phenomenon.

To test his theories that alchemists’ practice Everything we thought we knew about alchemy —MA involved genuine chemistry, Principe has recre- 50 years ago is being reconsidered.”

18 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Mistakes noted

I

n June of 1910, Johns Hopkins Hospital admitted a 23-year-old woman after she experienced headaches, seizures, and numbness on her left side. Hopkins neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing diagnosed a tumor on the right side of her brain and decided to operate. He was well on his way to becoming a world-renowned neurosurgeon, but during the procedure Cushing could not control the patient’s bleeding. She died in the operating room.

What went wrong? Was it human error? A lapse in judgment? Bad luck?

We know exactly what happened—in this case, a combination of human error and a supply oversight—because of Cushing’s frank surgical notes: “Almost every bite through the bone was followed by spurting arteries which bulged in all directions. So much wax was used [to control the bleeding] that we temporarily ran out of wax and had to send across town for some. . . .

Throughout this entire performance there was a constant loss of blood and at one time the pulse had run up as high as 120. . . . At this period the operator should have desisted but the temptation to continue was too great for him.” No blameshifting here. No couching events in inscrutable medicalese to avoid litigation.

“I don’t think it would happen today,” Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, associate professor of neurosurgery at the School of Medicine, says of Cushing’s forthright and detailed notes. “Number one, we are likely more afraid of reporting errors, or number two, we are not simply working as hard as Cushing. Back then, residents lived in the hospital—it was a different time.”

Unvarnished assessments of his own performance are characteristic of the records Cushing kept throughout his career. His candor caught the attention of Katherine Latimer, a third-year

student in the School of Medicine. Latimer was helping Quiñones-Hinojosa digitize Cushing’s early surgical notes, stored on microfilm in the hospital’s archive and photocopied into hard copy. The collection—which includes records for more than 800 patients from Cushing’s time at Hopkins from 1896 to 1912—afforded researchers a unique opportunity to view previously unpublished and unstudied material.

Image courtesy of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions

Medicine

Originally tasked only with reviewing Cushing’s files and adding information to the growing database, Latimer pored over hundreds of handwritten notes, fascinated by the old surgical techniques. “I found it interesting the way that records were written back then—the script, deciphering old abbreviations,” she says.

As she became more involved, Latimer was increasingly intrigued by how Cushing documented his mistakes. He had a peculiar habit of writing in third person, referring to himself as “the operator”—a means of remaining objective, Latimer thinks. He was also incredibly critical of his own performance. Latimer says, “[I found it] impressive that Cushing used awfully disparaging terms for himself, like ‘stupid’ or ‘careless.’”

He acknowledged mistakes due to bad luck (“By ill luck or carelessness, the operator retracted the dura to too great an extent.”), ignorance (“The operator stupidly did not recognize that this was a new growth.”), and fatigue (“A large

Harvey Cushing, in the Hunterian Neurosurgical Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1907.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

19

Wholly Hopkins

C o rdis h Center

If you are a fan of Johns Hopkins lacrosse, you’ve probably grown used to buying pretzels, Italian sausage sandwiches, and sodas in the southeast end of Homewood Field. Well, prepare for a change. This summer, construction begins on the new 14,000-square-foot Cordish Lacrosse Center, which will house both men’s and women’s lacrosse programs and include locker rooms, an academic center, coaching staff offices, a training room, and a theater for watching game film and conducting team meetings and press conferences. Named after principal donor David Cordish, A&S ’60, ’69 (MLA), the new facility, first of its kind for an NCAA lacrosse program, will cost $10 million, all of it privately donated. The building is slated to open by the end of the 2012 lacrosse season. (No word yet on where the Italian sausage vendor will be stationed.) crowd of interested bystanders and a tired operator led to a mistaken direction of the exploration.”). Regardless of whether a patient died in the operating room or survived the surgery with no apparent complications, Cushing showed the same candor in his notes.

Latimer’s interest eventually led to a study published in the February issue of Archives of Surgery, in which Latimer and her co-authors posit that acknowledging medical errors was crucial to innovation at a time when neurosurgery was in its infancy. Latimer, principal author of the study, counters assumptions that Cushing and his contemporaries did not have to worry about lawsuits by pointing out that Cushing practiced when malpractice litigation was ramping up and surgical notes, considered more reliable than witnesses’ memories, were relied upon heavily in court cases. It was not uncommon for the successes and failures of a prominent surgeon like Cushing to be reported in The Baltimore Sun. Yet 20 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

throughout his career, Cushing urged colleagues to report errors—not only to instruct fellow surgeons who could learn from others’ mistakes, but to familiarize the general public with the realities of modern surgery. “Errors will be made,” Cushing said in a 1920 address before his colleagues, “but it is from our mistakes, if we pursue them into the open instead of obscuring them, that we learn the most.”

When Cushing entered the emerging specialty of neurosurgery around 1901—“a discouraging and discouraged enterprise,” according to one researcher—30 to 50 percent of patients were not expected to survive brain surgery. By 1910, Cushing’s patient mortality rate had fallen to less than 13 percent. Latimer et al. believe his advancements were made possible, in large part, by the fact that he acknowledged his mistakes, studied them, and devised ways to avoid repeating them.

—Kristen Intlekofer

Arts and Sciences

The poetic subversion of capitalism

C

hristopher Nealon’s aha! moment came when, thumbing again through books by contemporary American poets, he realized that they all contained writing about capitalism.

Adrienne Rich worried that capitalism had corrupted feminism. Amiri Baraka wondered if black Americans should even try to get ahead in a system that had so thoroughly exploited them. And back-to-the-lander Wendell Berry took a manof-action approach, providing a chore schedule for readers ready to put modern economics out to pasture: “So, friends, every day do something / that won’t compute. Love the Lord. / Love the world. Work for nothing.”

Nealon, an associate professor of English in the Krieger School and a poet himself, isn’t the first to discern in the output of America’s poets a decidedly anti-capitalist bent. There’s a long tradition that holds that lucre and lyrics don’t mix, and neither do art and politics. But in The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Harvard University Press, 2011), Nealon shows how poets preoccupied with capitalism have gotten away with pissed-off political commentary by adopting a conversational tone that mixes in perfectly everyday, even mundane observations. In fact, the poets who pioneered

destruction that capitalism wreaks. Poems can’t be bombed to bits in wartime. And their lowly nature helps them resist, as much as is possible amid any economic system, becoming commodities—unlike precious works of art that can give pleasure only to those with enough money to purchase access to them.

Nealon found research for The Matter of Capital engaging enough that he began studying economic theory, but he still writes poetry. Like his idol Jack Spicer, he is fascinated by catastrophes—he cites the recent economic crisis—and casts about for unlikely heroes. In one recent poem, he writes, “In my apocalypse it’s teenage girls, they save the world a lot. / Wide open eyes and averted glances – / they can see what’s coming forming, how excellent is that?”

Is there any hero more unexpected than an adolescent girl? For Nealon, who has devoted himself to exploring poetry’s subversive side, that’s, like, totally the point.

—Darcy Courteau

Robert Neubecker

this method are among the most vaunted—the modern poetry godfathers Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden. In one of his cantos, Pound condemned an economic system that pays workers less than the value of their labor, using a factory’s operation as an example: “It pays workers, pays for material. / What it pays in wages and dividends / stays fluid, as power to buy, and this power is less, / per forza, damn blast your intellex, is less / than the total payments made by the factory.”

As Pound knocked the corners off his pedagogy with colloquialisms and asides, Auden mixed his anti-government indictments with schoolboy slang, his language and cadence becoming increasingly campy as catastrophe approaches.

Of job-seekers’ chaotic passages, he writes: “And self-respect drives Negroes from / The one-crop and race-hating delta / To northern cities helterskelter; /And in jalopies there migrates /A rootless tribe from windblown states . . .”

This telling big ideas with unexalted language has provided poets the camouflage, Nealon argues, to counter the crises for which he blames modern economic systems: social breakdown, environmental degradation, warmongering among nations in competition for resources. Far from simply producing pretty aesthetic objects, these poets have used art to speak out without taking too much heat. Bay Area poet and 1960s queer subculture hero Jack Spicer saw language as a Trojan horse that could sneak in otherwise foreign ideas to audiences that “never knew what hit them.” For Spicer, poetry was a frontier “somebody could hide in with a sheriff’s posse after him.” Anxious about a society that preferred he feed coins to a jukebox rather than sing songs with his friends, and connecting mass culture with mass violence, Spicer believed that performing poetry in small groups was one way to maintain a sense of community while rebelling against a homogenized culture.

It is the very insignificance of poems that most people don’t care about, enjoyed by bands of misfits reading to each other, that makes them perfect vehicles of subversion, Nealon argues. “Poetry is the cockroach of the arts,” he says. Its “cheap, reproducible” textual form, composed only with pen and ink, helps it outlast the physical

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

21

Wholly Hopkins We i rd P hy s i c s

Solving the mystery of Death Valley’s walking rocks

F

IStockphoto.com

or six decades, observers have been confounded by the movement of large rocks across a dry lake bed in California’s Death Valley National Park. Leaving flat trails behind them, rocks that weigh up to 100 pounds seemingly do Michael Jackson’s moonwalk across the valley’s sere, cracked surface, sometimes traveling more than 100 yards. Without a body of water to pick them up and move them, the rocks at Racetrack Playa, a flat space between the valley’s high cliffs, have been the subject of much speculation, including whether they have been relocated by human pranksters or space aliens.

The rocks have become the desert equivalent of Midwestern crop circles.

“They really are a curiosity,” says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory. “Some [people] have mentioned UFOs. But I’ve always believed that this is something science could solve.”

It has tried. One theory holds that the rocks are blown along by powerful winds. Another posits that the wind pushes thin sheets of ice,

created when the desert’s temperatures dip low enough to freeze water from a rare rainstorm, and the rocks go along for the ride. But neither theory is rock solid. Winds at the playa aren’t strong enough—some scientists believe that they’d have to be 100 miles per hour or more— to blow the rocks across the valley. And rocks subject to the “ice sailing theory” wouldn’t create trails as they moved.

Lorenz and a team of investigators believe that a combination of forces may work to rearrange Racetrack Playa’s rocks. “We saw that it would take a lot of wind to move these rocks, which are larger than you’d expect wind to move,” Lorenz explains. “That led us to this idea that ice might be picking up the rocks and floating them.” As they explained in the January issue of The American Journal of Physics, instead of moving along with wind-driven sheets of ice, the rocks may instead be lifted by the ice, making them more subject to the wind’s force. The key, Lorenz says, is that the lifting by an “ice collar” reduces friction with the ground, to the point that the wind now has enough force to move the rock. The rock moves, the ice doesn’t, and because part of the rock juts through the ice, it marks the territory it has covered.

Lorenz’s team came to its conclusion through a combination of intuition, lab work, and observation—not that the last part was easy. Watching the rocks travel is a bit like witnessing the rusting

Rocks like this one can travel more than 100 yards across the floor of Death Valley.

22 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

of a hubcap. Instances of movement are rare and last for only a few seconds. Lorenz’s team placed low-resolution cameras on the cliffs (which are about 30 miles from the nearest paved road) to take pictures once per hour. For the past three winters, the researchers have weathered extreme temperatures and several flat tires to measure how often the thermometer dips below freezing, how often the playa gets rain and floods, and the strength of the winds. “The measurements seem to back up our hypothesis,” he says. “Any of the theories may be true at any one time, but ice rafting may be the best explanation for the trails we’ve been seeing. We’ve seen trails like this documented in Arctic coastal areas, and the mechanism is somewhat similar. A belt of ice surrounds a boulder during high tide, picks it up, and then drops it elsewhere.”

His “ice raft theory” was also borne out by an experiment that used the ingenuity of a high school science fair. Lorenz placed a basalt pebble in a Tupperware container with water so that the pebble projected just above the surface. He then turned the container upside down in a baking tray filled with a layer of coarse sand at its base, and put the whole thing in his home freezer.

The rock’s “keel” (it’s protruding part) projected downward into the sand, which simulated the cracked surface of the playa (which scientists call “Special K” because of its resemblance to cereal flakes). A gentle push or slight puff of air caused the Tupperware container to move, just as an ice raft would under the right conditions. The pebble made a trail in the soft sand.

“It was primitive but effective,” Lorenz says of the experiment.

Lorenz has spent the last 20 years studying Titan, a moon of Saturn. He says that Racetrack Playa’s surface mirrors that of a dried lakebed on Titan. Observations and experiments on Earth may yield clues to that moon’s geology. “We also may get some idea of how climate affects geology—particularly as the climate changes here on Earth,” Lorenz says. “When we study other planets and their moons, we’re forced to use Occam’s razor—sometimes the simplest answer is best, which means you look to Earth for some answers. Once you get out there on Earth, you realize how strange so much of its surface is. So, you have to figure there’s weird stuff to be found on Titan as well.”

Whether that’s true or not will take much more investigation, he adds: “One day, we’ll figure all this out. For the moment, the moving rocks present a wonderful problem to study in a beautiful place.”

—MA

Now we k n ow …Johns Hopkins researchers may have found an alternative to liver transplants. A team led by Yoon-Young Jang, assistant professor of oncology at the Kimmel Cancer Center, demonstrated that adult stem cells that had been genetically reprogrammed to revert to an embryonic state succeed in regenerating liver tissue in mice. The research appeared in the May 11 issue of Science Translational Medicine. …A bit of real-life science fiction: Saturn is beaming ions at its moon Enceladus. The high-energy emissions were discovered

by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft using a camera developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory. In a paper published April 21 in Nature, APL’s Don Mitchell and Abigail Rymer noted that the ion beam had sufficient energy to generate a glowing spot, similar to the northern lights observable on Earth, that appeared on images snapped by Cassini. …Global climate change could result in heat waves that kill between 166 and 2,217 people per year in Chicago, according to analyses by Bloomberg School researchers. Lead author Roger Peng, associate professor of biostatistics, and his team analyzed three climate change scenarios for the years 2081 to 2100. Said Peng in a press release, “For a major U.S. city like Chicago, the impact will likely be profound and potentially devastating.” The research appeared in the May 1 edition of Environmental Health Perspectives. …Mild trauma induced by explosions accounts for four-fifths of the brain injuries suffered by combat soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. A study out of the School of Medicine has found that armor shielding the torsos of laboratory mice subjected to simulated explosive blasts reduced axonal damage to their brains by 80 percent. This suggests that wearing improved body armor could be critical to safeguarding combat troops. Lead author of the study, in the May issue of Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology, was Hopkins neuropathologist Vassilis Koliatsos. …DNA, ordinarily stable, sometimes changes chemically, and these changes have been implicated in a list of cancers, psychiatric disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases. In new research published online April 14 by the journal Cell, School of Medicine scientists led by professor of neurology Hongjun Song announced that they had uncovered a previously unknown step and two molecules involved in this alteration of DNA. The finding raises the possibility of future manipulation of the process to treat various diseases. …Hands-free faucets that automatically dispense water were installed in and near patient rooms in Johns Hopkins Hospital to reduce bacterial contamination. An investigation led by Lisa Maragakis, director of hospital epidemiology, has discovered that the new technology was more likely to be contaminated. The high-tech faucets cut daily water consumption by more than half, but the more complicated valve components appear to offer more surfaces on which Legionella bacteria can grow, despite disinfection efforts. The study was presented at the April annual meeting of the Society for Health Care Epidemiology.

—Dale Keiger, A&S ’11 (MLA)

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

23

Wholly Hopkins

Recordings: Guitar, voice, flute + more guitar Manuel Barrueco became entranced by the guitar when he was an 8-year-old in Santiago de Cuba.

Part of what entranced him was the music of Francisco Tárrega. Tárrega was a 19th-century Spanish composer and guitarist who did much to bring classical guitar to the recital stage. By the time he was 11, Barrueco was performing Tárrega’s Danza Mora, Capricho Árabe, and Recuerdos de la Alhambra.

But he had never recorded the pieces.

Now the Peabody faculty member has, producing Tárrega! on his own label, Tonar Music. The recording, the fifth in Tonar’s Manuel Barrueco Collection, is a master class in the Spaniard’s music.

It includes his best-known compositions, plus transcriptions of other composers’ works that he admired. Among the latter are compositions

by Tárrega’s contemporary Joaquín Malats; music from zarzuelas, a sort of Spanish comedic musical theater, by Federico Chueca, Joaquín Valverde, and Rafael Gómez Calleja; and Romantic works

by Mendelssohn and Schumann. Schumann’s Träumerei turns out to be as achingly beautiful on the guitar as it is on the piano.

From first note to last, Tárrega! displays Barrueco’s signature virtues as a musician—technical mastery that brings out every color and timbre that the guitar has to offer; the dexterity to range across a variety of styles; and a deep knowledge of the music that imparts meaning to every passage.

The disc was recorded in Barrueco’s home studio, which serves double duty as his wine cellar.Tonar is Medicine

Edward Miller to retire

I

n 1997, Johns Hopkins made the title on Edward Miller’s business card really long when it named him dean of the School of Medicine, university vice president for medicine, and the first-ever chief executive officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine. Next summer, Miller will simplify his designation. He has announced he will retire from Hopkins on June 30, 2012.

Miller’s tenure has been marked by extra­ ordinary institutional expansion. Set to open next year on the medical campus are two massive

24 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

a family business. The recording engineer and producer was Barrueco’s wife, Asgerdur Sigurdardottir, and his daughter, Anna Barrueco Wong, edited the text that accompanies the recording.

Peabody faculty artist Jay Clayton’s career as a singer has been all over the place. That’s meant in the best way. She has been part of the free jazz movement, performed avant-garde compositions by Steve Reich and John Cage, and recorded jazz and pop standards.

Her most recent release on Sunny Side Records, In and Out of Love, fits the last category. Backed by guitarist Jack Wilkins and bassist Jay Anderson, Clayton handles the ballad “Never Let Me Go,” the swing of “I Hear a Rhapsody,” and the scatsung “Freedom Jazz Dance” with equal aplomb.

Marina Piccinini, who heads the flute program at Peabody, recently teamed with the Brasil Guitar Duo to record all five flute sonatas by J.S. Bach. The logically titled Bach Flute Sonatas, on the English label Avie, demonstrates not only Piccinini’s virtuosity but the sparkling results obtained by using guitar instead of the standard piano or harpsichord accompaniment.

—DK new hospital towers. The Johns Hopkins system has added four hospitals in the Baltimore-­ Washington area and Florida, and now partners with health care providers in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, and the Caribbean.

Closer to his office, Miller oversaw the total revamping of the medical school curriculum to focus on health promotion and the medical practice emerging from ever-expanding knowledge of the human genome.

Johns Hopkins president Ron Daniels announced that he had appointed co-chairs to direct the search for Miller’s successor: Francis B. Burch Jr., incoming chairman of the board of Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Lloyd Minor, —DK Hopkins provost.

Alex Nabaum

Public Health

Speaking of violence in Rwanda and Baltimore

W

hen Edmond Baganizi, SPH ’11, explored Baltimore by bus, he was moved by the poverty he saw. “Poverty is one of the things that make people more prone to violence here, just like in Rwanda,” he says. Baganizi feels that connection in his bones.

As a child in Rwanda, he and a few of his siblings would leave their home to watch planes descend from the clouds near their village, “a peaceful place” just east of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, and its international airport. The family raised cows and led a quiet life. One day, young Edmond ran outside to check out noise he thought came from jet engines. But what he was hearing was a cacophony of gunshots, and the harbingers of a disaster. A day or two later, the government told people to stay home. Radio announcers, stirring up hate by using bogus racial distinctions that dated back to when the country was run by its Belgian colonizers, told Hutus to kill Tutsis, sometimes naming those they thought should be killed. Those Hutus who didn’t follow orders were themselves targeted.

Over the course of the next six months, Baganizi, two young brothers, and an 8-yearold neighbor who bore scars from machete attacks ran from militia men who tried to kill them, hitched rides from one camp for displaced persons to another, hid among corpses in plundered homes, and worried for their families.

They finally made it home after members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front saved them.

Baganizi told his story to a Bloomberg School of Public Health class one night and broke down in tears. “I started to get emotional during my talk, and this man from Baltimore who had lost his brother, and who had been shot 12 times himself, stood to talk to me,” he says. “He told me it’s normal and healthy to go back into your memories when you talk about violence.”

When the Bloomberg School sought new ways to study the nature of violence as part of a recurring graduate course, it stayed close to home. What would happen, educators asked last December, if they used the course, called Children in Crisis, to start a dialogue among one-time Baltimore gang members, the city’s victims of crime, and the school’s Rwandan students?

The results of the course’s new emphasis, educators say, were dynamic and poignant, and

will likely lead to an ongoing series of conversations among Baltimore community members about how they can overcome the bloodshed that has racked their neighborhoods. Both the handful of conversations on violence and the course itself took a cross-cultural look at the conditions that underpin and herald violence.

“We’re already seeing a demand to expand these conversations to kids in more neighborhoods and to another college,” says Daniela Lewy, SPH ’06, a research associate in international health at the school and a teacher of the course, which focuses on the cultural and political forces that place children at risk worldwide. She adds that the course has grown to include how violence affects people of all ages, and not just children.

To develop the course, Lewy and other Bloomberg professors turned to Baltimoreans affected by violence—either as victims, family members of victims, or perpetrators. They also tapped graduate students in public health, including Rwandans Lorraine Beraho, SPH ’11, and Baganizi. “When we first started exploring this, we thought, ‘What possibly could connect the violence in Baltimore with what happened in Rwanda?’” says Beraho. “But we found those connections. The only real difference is that Rwanda was an acute violent situation while Baltimore is chronic.”

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

25

Wholly Hopkins She and other course designers developed themes that would find points of intersection between the two cultures, as well as explore assumptions each makes about violence. Besides providing catharsis and communion among speakers, the course provided students and facilitators with the opportunity to explore the common face of violence. Language prevalent during the Rwandan genocide—members of the Tutsi minority like Baganizi were slurred as “cockroaches” and “snakes”—was compared to the use of the term “nigger” as a precursor to violence in the United States. “It’s an old white term of derision that you now see used on the street by blacks who want to do violence to each other,” says Selwyn Ray, one of the facilitators of

V i g ne t t e Navin K. Singh, assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the School of Medicine, estimates he has operated on more than 500 children as part of volunteer medical missions to correct cleft palates, lips, and noses. Hoping to bolster the kids’—and their parents’—spirits and make them feel less different and alone, he and Johns Hopkins Hospital plastic surgery resident Sachin M. Shridharani have co-authored a slender book titled Special Smiles: The Journey of Three Amazing Children.

The book—illustrated by Jared Travnicek, Med ’09 (MA), and Jenny Wang, Med ’09 (MA)—follows three children as they have their lips or palates repaired by volunteer surgeons. Kim lives in Asia and is tired of being teased at school. Jamal is a musical African boy who asks his mother, “How come I can’t sing the same as everyone else?” In South America, Maya has difficulty swallowing properly. Their parents get them to “special smiles kids’ camp” by bicycle, bus, or canoe. After their procedures, the children go home to normal lives.

Singh and Shridharani pack a lot into their little book. For example, they took care to include a nurse, a dentist, and a surgeon from the kids’ home countries because those people often are instrumental in getting a child to a clinic for surgery. On a website created for the book, the authors explain, “The sense that someone from the Western world comes to solve their problems for them is palpable and can be condescending.” One additional clever touch: The South American girl, Maya, has a cleft palate, and so does her mom. The little girl tells her mother that maybe next year she can have the same surgery— provided she’s as brave as her daughter.

—DK

26 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

the conversations and executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Maryland. Adds Baganizi, “You can see other signs—the language of violence in some extreme forms of rap music, the stop-snitching campaigns. People who grow up in those harsh conditions without mentors— that’s a warning sign, too.”

Using his experience as a guide, Baganizi exhorted Baltimoreans to get out in front of their violence problem, particularly the desire to avenge one harmful act with another. “Of course you want a perpetrator to be punished, but a community still needs reconciliation,” he says. In Rwanda, special local tribunals—called gacaca (and pronounced ga-cha-cha) courts—were formed to judge accused murderers during the genocide. “They are there to make sure people can live together and overcome the violence together,” Baganizi says.

Baganizi has lived that idea: During the height of the genocide, he and his brothers considered joining a militia to punish those who had killed and maimed. But instead of focusing his anger on hurting the guilty, he turned it toward helping people heal. “My main objective became saving lives,” he says. He became a licensed medical doctor in Rwanda in 2009 and hopes to study and treat childhood diseases. “My thinking is that if people are healthy, perhaps they’ll be more likely to work together. And if they do that, maybe they’ll be more tolerant.”

—MA

U n i ve r s i t y

Preserving research universities’ “vital triad”

I

n a New York Review of Books essay covering a flurry of books critical of U.S. higher education, scholar Peter Brooks summarized the charges: “Above all, the university has become unjustifiably expensive, inaccessible, and unaccountable.” What are federal and state governments getting for their money? What are students (and parents) getting for their money? Can the current business model sustain an institution like Johns Hopkins?

These critiques and a search for new models concern Johns Hopkins provost Lloyd Minor. He believes U.S. research universities have thrived because of a vital triad: autonomy, freedom, and meritocracy. But in a recent address at the Nitze

Ken Or VIDAS

School of Advanced International Studies, Minor warned, “The temptations to compromise our principles will only become stronger as cost and budget pressures increase.” He added, “There will be powerful incentives to trade autonomy for more restrictive funding, to exchange freedom for certain forms of business and corporate support, to subvert meritocracy in order to appease political correctness.”

Minor defended each fundamental trait of the American university system. “One result of autonomy”—institutional autonomy as well as the autonomy granted to faculty and students—“is an interdisciplinary culture in American research universities that you don’t see in European universities.” Regarding freedom, he said, “Rigorous debate, the free arguing of ideas, the free sharing of discoveries—this is the foundation of the rise of democracy and the cornerstone of the scientific revolution.” As for meritocracy, the provost added, “The core value of meritocracy means that in most cases, sooner or later, the good ideas, the true discoveries, the profound insights, are irrepressible. The cream rises to the top.”

England has launched an agonizing re-examination of how and why it funds higher education. Minor notes an underlying reorientation to “a marketing mentality. Such an orientation imagines students as consumers who attend college to maximize their future earning potential.”

The ever-escalating cost of higher education in the United States has prompted critics to question whether costs have outstripped future financial benefits of attending an elite school. Minor argues that the investment remains worth it. In the SAIS speech, he noted the difference in earnings between those who have college degrees and those who do not, and said, “The disparity is so great that even for students who use loans to finance all of their tuition, it takes only about 11 years to recoup that cost plus the earnings foregone while in school.”

He adds, “In my speech at SAIS, I talked about the need for research universities to defend a triad of key values, but this defense is offered in the context of the broader need to address legitimate criticisms, respond to challenges, and critically examine our performance. Autonomy, freedom, and meritocracy must be earned by a willingness to be accountable.”

When he discusses the challenges ahead, Minor cites an analysis of American universities made by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen looks at schools like Johns Hopkins and sees three incompatible business models housed within the same

institution: research, teaching, and “facilitated user networks,” which at Hopkins could refer to things like hospital patient care. In a report titled “Disrupting College,” published by the Center for American Progress, Christensen said, “This has resulted in extraordinarily complex—some might say confused—institutions where there are significant coordinative overhead costs that take resources away from research and teaching.”

Where Christensen sees weakness in the three models’ cohabitation, Minor sees diverse sources of revenue at a time when there is pressure on revenue streams like tuition and federal research funding. He believes institutions like Hopkins are uniquely positioned to work on immense global challenges. “Our task and our unique contribution lie in turning information into knowledge. We will do this by bringing multiple disciplines together to take up profoundly complex issues that can be solved no other way.”

—Niv Ellis, SAIS ’09 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

27

Man in the Middle

Atheists and religious fanatics are equally wrong about God, argues professor and philosopher William Egginton. To do right by humankind, he says, just a little belief means a lot.

O

By Michael Anft Photos

by

Will Kirk

f 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 grand historical terms, has meant breaking out the slingshots and scimitars. In modern times, avid nonbelievers have added their (often loud) voices to the fray. You’d think the last thing a sensible, introspective person would want to do is get in the crossfire. Even if one were to write a thoughtful treatise that pleads for the moderate uses of religion in furthering the aims of humankind, he would risk becoming the enemy of the two poles of the U.S. culture wars.

Yet that’s exactly what William Egginton has done. In his book In Defense of Religious Moderation, published this month by Columbia 28 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 29

University Press, Egginton argues that fervent believers and nonbelievers share more than they’d care to admit: a certainty that goes beyond the bounds of reason and does little more than polarize people. Their ongoing metaphysical shouting match has real-world consequences, Egginton argues. It keeps society from moving forward.

A professor and chair of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins, Egginton is aware that he’s placed himself in the middle of a philosophical pissing match. He knows he’s asking for it. “Honestly, I do worry about how people might react,” says Egginton, a tall, elegant man with a warm demeanor and a ring in each ear. “I want this book to be part of the larger public conversation on religion. Instead of yelling at the TV, I wanted to say something thoughtful, to offer something.”

I

f “moderatism”—a label that has been applied to some politicians and a small but powerful bloc of voters in the fractious, turn-of-the-millennium United States—can actually be “impassioned,” then Egginton’s book earns the adjective. The author energetically defends the center position—and it’s not an easy gig.

He argues that religion, practiced without the arrogance of ardor, has the power to make people do things that

hard-line theocracies, secular dictators, and communist regimes. “Perhaps it is possible for humanity to be radical and cut off from its religious roots, but not entirely.”

He calls himself a political liberal, one motivated by pragmatism—the concentration on the solving of problems and not on adherence to ironclad concepts like Truth and Justice. Egginton says his argument has more to do with evidence sprinkled throughout the history of philosophy than his own beliefs. “The book is really about how I find religious moderation a defensible position philosophically,” he says. In clear language, Egginton muses about moderate religious thinking through the ages—mining Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, and Leibniz. He focuses especially on the 18th-century moral philosopher Immanuel Kant, who in the Critique of Pure Reason questioned humanity’s ability to grasp the universe by being entirely logical.

“My rationalism leads me to look at the limits of reason,” Egginton says. “Kant warned us 250 years ago that reason runs into trouble when it oversteps its boundaries. I’m very scientific in my outlook. What I’m calling religious beliefs are things we don’t know or can’t know about. It’s about making a choice.”

His response to people who possess the passion of certainty: We can’t know. For Egginton, God is a metaphor

William Egginton sees value in not knowing, in preserving the religious customs based on not knowing, and in embracing what may in fact be a non-entity—God. transcend self-interest. Even agnosticism, with its skeptical approach to religion, has value because those who embrace it recognize there are limits to human knowledge. They have doubts. They’re much less likely to claim they hold the only tenable metaphysical position, and that the rest of the world is wrong. They are more likely to be tolerant of people who aren’t like-minded.

In one light, Egginton’s (anti?) polemic can be seen as a defense of a conservative impulse. He is, after all, defending systems of thought that have existed for centuries without concrete proof that the main actor in them—God—has a genuine presence. In a river of modern academic liberalism, he is swimming upstream. “I don’t entirely shirk the notion that there is a conservative side to my argument, as long as we separate it from the political conservatism in the U.S.,” he says. “I base my argument in part on the suspicion of humanity’s ability to roll out grand plans,” such as those concocted by 30 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

for the ineffable, a symbol for what the mind can’t reach.

We simply make an existential decision about whether to believe or not to believe. Those who can admit that they can’t ultimately know whether a supreme being hangs out in or above the cosmos, being acquainted with doubt, are more likely to be tolerant than those who reject outright the idea that there is a God. If you can’t admit we’re all clueless in the realm of metaphysics, then you’re likely, he thinks, to be part of the problem here: entrenched camps of religious fundamentalists and antitheists that inflame the wrong kind of passions.

By distancing himself from the claims of either extreme, Egginton puts himself in a bit of an odd place and in a position that, at least initially, could be seen as weak by other thinkers. He sees value in not knowing, in preserving the religious customs based on not knowing, and in embracing what may in fact be a nonentity—God. He’s basing a lot on knowing that we can’t

have knowledge of everything. In doing so, he says, he’s following a tradition that has led religious men to question their beliefs and to look to science for answers.

For every Galileo burned at the metaphorical stake for heresy, there have been many more devout individuals in history, including Isaac Newton, who were free to use their religious belief to balance their quest for knowledge of the knowable, and did so.

Science hasn’t been hindered by a modicum of belief, Egginton posits. In fact, it has been aided by it, because of the limits of knowledge inherent in believing. “Moderate religious practice as well as much of the theological tradition have placed doubt at the very heart of faith,” Egginton writes. “The existence in my life of a realm of counterintuitive stories [in the Bible] making implausible claims to truth may well have strengthened rather than weakened my commitment to seek the truth in this world.”

Lines like those are bound to gall atheists, who often lay blame for religion’s durability not on extremists but on people who should “know better” than to believe in an interested, lone supreme being but who support churches—and the secular sins they (allegedly) commit— anyway. Folks who think like Egginton are frequently called out as “enablers” by hard-line atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith), and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). In turn, it is those atheists on whom Egginton shifts the weight of his argument in In Defense of Religious Moderation.

Because Egginton uses those atheists as exemplars of ungodly thinking, many nonproselytizing atheists and secular humanists aren’t likely to recognize themselves in his critique. Atheists who took at least a quick peak at the book, pre-publication, say Egginton has painted the atheistic movement with too broad a brush. He is wrong, they say, to insist that nonbelievers, as a group, discredit the pious by claiming they believe the literal letter of holy books. Many of Egginton’s fellow academics are nonbelievers, and though his book is a tightly focused philosophical essay, and not a theological rallying cry, he’ll likely take heat for it. Some said they couldn’t bring themselves to intently read In Defense of Religious Moderation.

Here’s the terse dismissal of Egginton’s book by Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University and author of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon: “Skimmed it. Not worth rebutting. It’s a mixture of sneering caricature and egregious misunderstanding. If this is the best critique of atheists as ‘fundamentalists’ that can be wrought, the defenders of agnosticism and ‘moderate religious beliefs’ are on the ropes.”

H

e doesn’t look like a glutton for whatever punishment God or man can mete out.

Energetic but relaxed, and with a bearing that is open and accommodating, Egginton, 42, evinces the air of a hip young uncle whom junior family members love to visit. As he teaches a graduatelevel course in New World Baroque, he veers seamlessly between speaking English and Spanish, applying his expertise at extracting interpretations from centuries-old Spanish literature and making them relevant to today’s art, fiction, film, and politics. He encourages his class, held with 11 advanced degree candidates and a couple of prospective grad students shopping for schools, to do the same. As good students do, they find shortcomings and contradictions in the class text.

At the head of a rectangle made of tables, Egginton is all length and angles, a rangy realm of locomotion topped with an oblong face. A towering forehead is fringed with short blond hair. He looks a bit like a mash-up of Sting and Bill O’Reilly. Today, he wears an orange zip-up fleece shirt with a red rectangle on it—a Rothko painting made functional.

The son and stepson of academics and a teacherturned-lawyer, Egginton spent part of his early years in South America, learning to speak Spanish as well as English while his dad traveled the back roads of Colombia to research his doctorate on land reform. Young Bill proved to be a quick study. As he grew older—living in Louisville, Kentucky, and then with his mother in Arlington, Virginia, after his parents’ divorce—his interest in languages expanded. (He would eventually learn to speak and read five of them—English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish—fluently.)

His family attended Catholic services early on. His father, Everett Egginton, a socialist and agnostic, thought that Billy should understand religion. But the young student was a believer, though one who began asking tough questions when he reached middle school. Certain Catholic concepts, such as transubstantiation (the conversion of a glass of wine into the blood of Jesus Christ and a small bit of Styrofoam-like carbohydrate into his body), floored him. “He told me, ‘I can’t believe that wafer is a piece of bread, much less the body of Christ,’” Everett Egginton remembers.

As his inquisitiveness grew, so did his number of interests—everything from chess to tennis to Shakespeare to advanced math—to the point that his parents wondered about his wanderlust. Billy followed such a wide range of interests that, like an overstretched piece of elastic, he threatened to split apart at the center. “Of course, I worried about him,” says his father, the longtime dean of international and border programs at New Mexico State University and now a professor of education there.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 31

“I saw this huge potential, but I wondered what exactly Billy would do with it.”

Everett Egginton saw something of himself in his son: an enthusiastic generalist set in relief by the Western world’s penchant for specialization. “I’ve struggled with finding that center,” he says. “As I look back, it has worked out. Maybe being uncomfortable isn’t a bad way to make your way through the world. If you look at it metaphorically, walking is being off balance.”

Bill Egginton staggered on to become his high school class valedictorian and gave his speech on—shocker!—the importance of being moderate to an audience at Washington’s Constitution Hall, touting the value of consensus and compromise to solve problems, his father recalls.

Although Bill had set out on a path to study math or science, possibly pre-med, Dartmouth College offered more opportunities for undergrads to travel than most schools. With his father’s taste for revolutionary movements in Latin America and for seeing the world, Egginton saw a chance to take his education international. A German opera course taken as a sophomore confirmed his decision to switch to the humanities, the Valhalla of the generalist.

With political theory and literature as his quarry, a vision of a life not unlike his father’s began to form. Trips to Ecuador, France, and Spain followed, as did a return of sorts to Latin America. Bill decided to visit his father and stepmother in El Salvador during the summer between his junior and senior years to research his undergraduate thesis on revolutionary poets and writers. Because of an ongoing brutal war, Bill was forced to stay to the north, in Guatemala City, where he rented a room in the back of a poor family’s compound. The son of the woman who ran the place regularly reminded him that a young American student wasn’t welcome there. One day, cops robbed him of his passport. “At its heart, Guatemala City was a very violent place,” he recalls.

He further immersed himself in languages as a grad student at the University of Minnesota and then by seeking a doctorate in comparative literature at Stanford.

Blending intense language study, literary theory, media, and philosophy, comparative literature pushed all of Egginton’s intellectual buttons. So did an Austrian Romance philologist, a fellow member of a Stanford philosophy study group, whom Egginton gave a lift home one night on the back of his motorcycle. She was amazed that the guy she was forced to wrap her arms around was so stereotypically American—cowboy boots, leather jacket, even the earrings.

His caricature belied an active, worldly mind, Bernadette Wegenstein recalls. The two later married, and both taught at SUNY-Buffalo. Egginton and Wegenstein, now a research professor of German and Romance languages at 32 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Johns Hopkins and the director of the university’s Center for Advanced Media Studies, came to Homewood in 2006.

These days, the William Egginton family is religious but in a predictably judicious way. Egginton, Wegenstein, and the couple’s three children, ages 11, 8, and 3, are Catholics. But piety isn’t exactly in huge supply in their Baltimore home. Egginton might attend church now and again. “It’s rare. I try to go to what Jews would call the High Holidays,” he says.

Still, he and his wife are skeptics. “For all of the Catholic Church and its horrible faults, and there are many”—here, Egginton ticks off a list that includes the Church’s restricting a woman’s right to choose an abortion and proscribing condom use during the AIDS crisis—“I love the ritual of the ceremony, the smell of the incense, the stopping of time. Even though I’m a liberal and often progressive in my thinking, I’m impressed with the anchor of time that is part of religion.” It’s been more than 20 years since he took confession, but he’d like to try it again soon, he says. “I could see putting myself before the question of guilt and forgiveness.”

The children should have some idea of what religion means, Wegenstein adds, even though religion in the United States often does not always live up to the lofty standards of forgiveness and altruism. “It’s a bit of a weak spot because we’re not sure where it’s all going,” Wegenstein says. “And they want to be like us and not spend much time at church. But it’s still the right thing to send them off to Sunday School.”

Such considered, almost cautious devotion angers atheists, who argue that those who practice a faith that they question provide cover for those who don’t ask questions about their beliefs. “Moderate religion enables fundamentalism by providing aid and comfort to the basic belief that supernaturalism really is OK,” says Gregory Paul, an author of several academic journal articles on religion and its relation to economic health. The more religious a country is, Paul contends via his sociological research, the more likely it is to be beset by socioeconomic ills, including inequality and violence. He took a quick read of Egginton’s book before it was published.

“Basically, [Egginton] thinks that it is best for people to worship and love a creator that has one way or another slaughtered and denied free will to countless billions of innocent persons,” he says, adding that studies show atheists to be more ethical than people who tag themselves as “very religious.”

Like Dennett, Paul bristles at Egginton’s portrayal of militant atheists. “He does the usual trick of claiming that assertive atheists stereotype all Christians by in turn stereotyping assertive atheists,” Paul says. “He contends that assertive atheists have to make all Christians into ideological Bible literalists. I’m not aware of a single, well-

known atheist who does that. We are quite aware, for example, that Catholics who make up half of Christendom are not literalists.”

F

rom the view of his office’s small dormer window, a peering hole cut from the roof of Gilman Hall and pointed south, Egginton can espy much of the Homewood campus, a good bit of the sturdy progressivism of downtown Baltimore, and the old steeples that poke up around its edges. Farther away, and through a good bit of haze, he can make out the poor man’s Golden Gate Bridge—a span named after Francis Scott Key, the moderately religious author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and former vice president of the American Bible Society—which crosses the Patapsco River just before it spills into the Chesapeake Bay. Egginton shakes off such facile interpretations of his place in the world. He’s not an academic atop an ivory tower.

“It’s brick,” he quips.

But he knows the argument. A lofty, cloistered academic tells less-privileged people how to believe. Who should care? “The ivory tower criticism is a valid one,” he says. “Even the metaphor of climbing down the stairs to be with the people might not be entirely apt. But by trying to teach myself how to write for a larger audience, I’ve sharpened my thinking. I’m challenging myself to make a crystalline point. That means I have to very precisely understand what I think.”

Not that Egginton isn’t already out in the world. He is well published, contributing several philosophy-based columns to the erstwhile New York Times blog The Stone, regularly submitting to academic journals, and penning five previous books on the philosophies and interpretations present in everything from Argentine magical realist writer Jorge Luis Borges to ethics, psychoanalysis, Spanish literature, and the theater. All were academic books, replete with precise but specialized language likely to be understood only by students of philosophy and comparative literature. He hopes In Defense of Religious Moderation, constructed as if by a very well-read nonacademic thinker and for lay readers, introduces him to a larger audience. He’d like the book to ensconce him in the world of the public intellectual, a realm of celebrity in Europe

but populated by few in the egghead-wary United States.

He’s not all that fond of the term, either, though he wants to have more of a stake in public debate than the typical academic. “I wanted to write a book that wouldn’t have the tag ‘impenetrable’ on it,” he says.

He writes it at a time when high-profile religionists, such as Pat Robertson, and self-styled messiahs, such as the Mormon Glenn Beck, are on the wane and when religious belief is dwindling. Despite highly publicized battles over books and teaching evolution in schools, a declining number of Americans attend church or claim to follow a religion. Egginton doesn’t dispute that. But he sees his argument, which could be viewed by skeptics as a default one, as a sensible philosophical answer to an age-old question.

“The argument I’m making is that this possible nullity—God—represents our limitations, temporally and spatially,” he says. “We have this drive to transcend.

It’s part of our being. It’s an ineradicable metaphysical desire. It’s not that you can’t be rational about it. It’s an existential decision, one I take responsibility for. I respect that people like Christopher Hitchens make a choice as well.”

Only time will tell if his voice will get out there with the big boys, like Hitchens’ has. He pursues a higher profile against some steep odds, say others who have worked with Egginton. Americans haven’t exactly been charitable to public intellectuals. “I think if he worked in Europe he would constantly be in the newspapers and in TV debates,” says Santiago Zabala, a research professor at the ICREA/University of Barcelona, and a colleague. He adds that In Defense of Religious Moderation, the Spanish-language edition, will be published under the guidance of Manuel Cruz, an important philosopher there. “Perhaps we will be able to steal Bill from you,” Zabala adds.

His father emphasizes where Egginton hopes to interpolate himself on the theological and political continuum—right in the scrum of things. “He’s going to love being there,” Everett Egginton says. “It will put him in the middle of the conversation.”

Michael Anft is Johns Hopkins Magazine’s senior writer.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 33

“

34 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

“Mom! It’s

Ballet!”

Last September, Peabody Dance began training a troupe of little boys in ballet.

By the spring, they had discipline, moves, and a new French vocabulary.

By Dale Keiger, A&S ’11 (MLA) Photos

by

Steve Spartana

A

t 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,” says Miss Carol.

“Tell them we’re not going to bite,” says Miss Barbara.

A formidable woman who works for the school notes that 14 more boys signed up but have not shown up. She bustles out into the hallway, on the hunt for the no-shows.

Miss Barbara observes a slender African American boy, No. 1, as he spontaneously spins round and round and round, unaware that he’s being watched. “He has a natural spot,” she says, meaning he turns his head faster than his body and returns his gaze to the same spot, maintaining his body’s alignment and avoiding dizziness.

Miss Barbara is Barbara Weisberger, the 84-year-old founder of the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia and artistic adviser to Peabody Dance in the Peabody Institute.

She was George Balanchine’s first child dance student;

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 35

when she was 8, she sat under a piano and watched the great choreographer create Serenade. Miss Carol, Carol Bartlett, is the artistic director of Peabody Dance. Dark haired and possessed of a British accent, she tells the boys—nine in number now that two more have wandered in and the school staffer has hauled in a third, who looks sheepish—to sit on the floor. The first thing a dancer does is stretch. Bartlett has them spread their legs, reach overhead with their hands, then bend and touch their toes. The boys have first names like Hassan, Alexander, Diago, Diallo, De’Eric, Dwayne, Glen, and Jeremiah. Most are 9 or 10 years old. They are here to audition for the Estelle Dennis/Peabody Dance Training Program for Boys. Those who show some flexibility and coordination and natural ability to move to music will be invited, along with boys selected today from two other auditions, to participate in 32 weekly ballet classes at Peabody, beginning in September. The classes will not be Saturday morning rec center stuff but serious dance instruction designed to start the long process of training male ballet dancers. The classes will be taught by professional dancers and choreographers, and will be tuition-free. All that will be required of the boys is that they show up every Saturday at 9 a.m. and work hard.

Bartlett and dance teacher Timothy Rinko-Gay lead the boys in unfamiliar moves with unfamiliar names: Plié.

Relevé. Plié. Relevé. Jump! They get the jump part. After a while, Bartlett cues some Latin music on the portable sound system. A few of the boys are game but hopeless; whatever imbues a kid with the ability to sense the music’s pulse and move to it, they don’t have it. Others look like naturals. Bartlett and Weisberger keep an eye on No. 1, who clearly loves to move; No. 5, who seems to know some steps; No. 13, who follows every instruction intently; and No. 2, a sober little Salvadoran boy named Alexander Ortega, who does a robo-arms move and smiles for the first time. At some point, No. 6 slips out of the room, evidently deciding that ballet is not for him.

After about an hour, Miss Carol and Miss Barbara assemble the boys and explain what will happen next

36 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

should they be chosen—the classes at Peabody, the attendance requirement, the opportunities. Weisberger tells them, “The greatest dancers in the world are men.

Gene Kelly. Fred Astaire.” One boy asks if the classes will be only ballet. Yes, Weisberger says, because ballet is the foundation, “the ABCs of dance.” She tells them, “You don’t pay, but you have to work hard. You give back by working hard.”

The boys soberly take this in. One of them, Alexander, raises his hand. “Where is Peabody?” he asks.

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stelle Owen Dennis was born in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore in 1909, and began dancing as a young girl. According to her obituary in The Baltimore Sun, as a teenager at a finishing school in New York City she lied about her age and joined the Metropolitan Opera corps de ballet. Her furious parents ordered her home and threatened to cut her off from the money they had set aside to pay for her society debut in Richmond, Virginia. She did go home, but only long enough to scoop up the money and race back to New York, where she used the funds to buy more dance lessons. She returned to Baltimore in 1934 and founded a company, Dance Theatre. She seemed to know everyone in professional dance, so a steady flow of world-renowned artists visited her dancers, including Balanchine, Alicia Markova, Margot Fonteyn, Alexandra Danilova, Martha Graham, and Ted Shawn.

When she died of a heart attack in 1996 at age 87, Dennis left the Estelle Dennis Trust Fund to provide scholarships for young “advanced male students” in Maryland who, buoyed by their instruction in Baltimore, would then pursue professional training in New York with the goal of joining a major professional company. But when the scholarship trust committee, which included Bartlett, began searching for advanced male dancers in Maryland, they didn’t find many. Bartlett finally proposed something new. “About two years ago, I said, ‘Look, if the [advanced] boys

Anthony Johnson, age 10, African American, Latino, white, Asian aren’t out there, can you allocate some concentrates on learning American. Some are part of prosperous funds for us to begin our own boys’ the choreography for A families, some are not. A couple have training program?’” The trust committee Midsummer Night's Dream. already had a bit of dance instruction, voted $8,000 for a pilot program that He practices at home with but judging by the looks on their faces, first held auditions in 2009. his 5-year-old sister. most are not sure what they’ve gotten Bartlett recalls those initial auditions, themselves into. which attracted mostly African American Bartlett first has the boys run for six counts, freeze boys ages 11 to 18. “We had a gymnasium full of boys for six counts, run for six, crouch for six, run for six. Trot and it was overwhelming. You’d expect maybe a little bit in a circle. Freeze. Trot backwards. Freeze. Sit in a circle, of resistance, of tentativeness, but the thing that struck legs outstretched and spread wide. Ameer is a gabby me is they were so grateful, so engaged, and so joyful to kid, and Bartlett shushes him. “Save your energy for your be given this opportunity. They were just so gung-ho.” body.” Three more boys wander in. Noah. Elias. Sober Weisberger remembers, too. “We were all moved beyond little Alexander from the Patterson Park audition. One words. Carol and I had tears, we cried. We let them do says, “My mom had a flat tire.” “We’re never in control, their thing, and they were fantastic. They were natural are we,” Bartlett replies. She brings them to the barre movers and they loved it.” and instructs them in the proper way to plié, tells them to stand up straight, to never slouch against the barre or n the first Saturday morning of the fall the wall. “When you do that, your muscles go all gooey,” semester, the corridor outside Peabody’s she says. “Guys don’t want gooey muscles, they want downtown dance studios is jammed with tough muscles.” skinny little girls in pale blue leotards and After an hour, Bartlett invites the grown-ups into yawning mothers and fathers wearing windbreakers the studio and explains the program to them. A toddler and toting travel coffee mugs. In Room B22, a troupe on one mother’s lap sneezes, and instantly another of boys mill around, sizing up this unfamiliar situamother’s arm shoots out with a tissue. Weisberger tion—an expansive dance floor, a piano, a barre, a tells them, “I don’t even like to talk about learning wall of mirrors. Bartlett comes in promptly at 9 o’clock, to dance. We all dance. We love to dance.” She talks claps her hands, and sits them down in a circle so she instead about the need for craft. “I love the word. C-rcan take attendance. There are fewer than expected. a-f-t. Craft. We take whatever they love and match it Devonte. Bill. Corey. Isaac. Aidan. Ameer. TJ. Thomas. with craft.” She says she cries at beauty. “I would be Anthony. Weisberger is here as well, in black slacks very happy if one day, one of these boys goes on the and a turquoise blouse. The boys are a diverse crew:

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Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 37

ballet, Mom! I hope I can do well, but I’m not sure.” She told him, “Calm down, calm down, just give it time.”

Cherry laughs easily in her small house on a Saturday afternoon. She apologizes for the clutter; she’s getting married in July and there’s “wedding stuff” all over. She’s gracious but looks tired. During the day she works for the Baltimore City Office of Home Energy; at night, she works a second job as a mail handler for the U.S. Postal Service. She says Devonte rides her about getting more exercise. “And he’s on me for eating healthy,” she says. “‘Let’s eat a lot of fruit.’

He’s very into eating fruit.”

What began for Devonte as one Peabody class per week has turned into three. He Carol Bartlett instructs Isaac Bolton (left) and Bill Fan. She later praises the now attends a mixed class on entire class. “Good, boys! It always amazes me how musical you all are.”

Wednesday afternoons, boys and girls, and recently began a stage and makes me cry.” Then she tells them that she second Saturday class. Says his is 84 years old. Two of the moms exchange glances mother, “Devonte kind of sprang that last class on me. and one of the students, Corey, blurts out, “Jeez!”

He said, ‘Mom! I can go to another class on Saturday The first-year boys and the adults stay to observe the afternoons!’ I said, ‘Ohhhh, what time, baby?’ He said second-year class. This group is older, and many of the 1 o’clock and I said, ‘That’s really cutting into my sleep boys are strikingly good. The grown-ups are rapt, but time.’” But his grandmother agreed to take him; Cherry after an hour, most of the younger kids have found other gets him there on Wednesdays, the one weeknight she ways to amuse themselves. There’s only so much ballet a doesn’t have to work.

9- or 10-year-old can take. In the alcove that houses the On Saturday mornings in class, he is quiet and well rehearsal piano, there’s another barre, and a handsome behaved. “He’s going to pay attention because he really, kid named Devonte Tasker has his leg on the top rung, really wants to master the dance, he really does,” Cherry above shoulder height. Just because he can. Just because says. “Whatever he does, he wants to do it well. If he doesn’t it makes him happy. do well, he’s disappointed with himself. Sometimes I have to cheer him up.” His focus throughout a 90-minute class atch Devonte simply walk down a hallis not the rule among the other boys, at least not yet. From way and you’ll see him dance. He can’t the start it was clear to Bartlett and the second Saturday seem to help it. He’s a lithe African morning teacher, dancer Meredith Rainey, that the class has American kid with a sweet smile and a problems with focus. A strong, lanky boy named Stephen quiet nature. He lives in the Belair-Edison section of Balhas the natural grace and coordination of a born athlete but timore with his mother, LaTanya Cherry, and has been cannot resist clowning in the studio’s big mirrors, throwing dancing since he was 6 or 7 in a modern dance group punches and kung fu moves at his reflection when he’s at the New David Baptist Church of Christ. His mentor supposed to be learning how to plié with a straight back there, Ronald Malone, heard about the Peabody program and his butt tucked in. Ameer frequently interrupts with and suggested that he give it a try. Cherry took him to superfluous questions. TJ and Thomas are brothers, diminuthe audition. “Oh, he was so excited!” she recalls. “But he tive, good-looking kids who can’t seem to pay attention for didn’t know it was going to be ballet. He thought it was longer than five minutes. Bartlett, who can be stern in class going to be modern dance.” After the first class in Sepbut tends to call the boys “sweetheart,” says, “It’s not their tember, he came home and said, “Mom! It’s ballet! It was fault. It’s their homes, their schools, the culture.” Some of

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38 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

the boys have parents, some have guardians.

Several are on medication for attention deficit problems. Some are tightly wound and cry a little or bang their heads when they fail to do a sequence properly.

By October, the boys have begun to pick up a new French vocabulary: chassé, plié, relevé, tendu. “What is ‘port de bras’?”

Bartlett asks. Devonte answers, “Carriage of arms,” then demonstrates. Some are starting to look like dancers, at least now and then, and beginning to realize that the foundation of formal dance is the exacting practice of the same movements over and over again.

At the barre, one boy clowns with another.

Bartlett spots him and waits, silent. He’s oblivious. She waits longer. Finally he notices her gaze and shuts up. “You took 16 seconds to get into focus,” she says. “I’ll not have you waste that kind of time in class.” A week later, Rainey conducts the class and the boys are so squirrelly he makes three of them take timeouts and leave the dance floor, a disciplinary practice that Bartlett frowns upon. At the end of class, eyes wide, Rainey says, “I am never having children.” Another morning, Bartlett is on a kid who keeps messing up at the barre.

“You don’t learn it because you’re not paying attention.” “Sorry,” he says. She responds, “There’s no point in apologizing because this isn’t for me, it’s for you.” Later, however, when talking about the boys, Bartlett says, “What amazes me is how focused they are. It actuThomas Langston's posture receives an adjustment from ally amazes me how long they can work at Meredith Rainey. Serious ballet training is an exacting process. the barre.” How many of these kids have ever been in a situation where they’re asked to concentrate for 90 minutes on moving their bodies in fully pretends to rub them off with her thumbs, making strictly defined ways, over and over and over again? “I him grin. Bill Fan, a stocky Asian American kid who also couldn’t ask for anything more than I’m getting.” studies violin at Peabody and sometimes shows up for dance with his violin case slung over his shoulder, strugome November, the boys still stick their butts gles but keeps at it, and by mid-December, his determiout when they plié, still forget to count when nation begins to pay off. Peabody Dance hosts a Saturday doing a sequence of steps, still have trouble morning open house and invites all the parents to watch keeping head, shoulders, and hips aligned. a dancer named Kay Richards lead a special class for But they have an innate musicality, and they’re starting boys and girls in African dance. Richards has the kids to grasp what real dance training is about. A few who stretch, plié in first position, and bounce on their feet to had chronic problems with focus have been moved to African drumming. She asks them to bend at the waist, more suitable classes, some to classes that include girls. backs flat, arms out to the side, and undulate their arms Put boys in with girls, Bartlett says, and you’ll be amazed like wings. When she tells Bill he’s doing it perfectly, he at how fast they start to behave. looks up startled and says, “Me?” Later, when a series of They progress at different rates. The tallest boy in steps brings him up close to his mother in the audience, class, and at 12 the oldest, Isaac Bolton looks the most he gives her a high-five. like a ballet dancer. His carriage is erect, he has good In the middle of the class, one of the fathers, who is point and turn-out, and he learns new series of steps at least 30 pounds past a svelte dancer’s body, takes off quickly. Bartlett likes his dark eyebrows and once playhis shoes and socks, rolls up his chinos, and joins the

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Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 39

class. He’s a big guy but he can move. Before long, there are a half-dozen other parents gamely hopping about with the kids. It’s hard to say who’s having the most fun.

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n the hall before class one day, Isaac says to Devonte, “Can you do this?” Then he rolls on his back and like a contortionist tucks his heels behind his ears.

Isaac came to dancing through community musical theater, which he first got involved with on the technical side, “operating lights and special effects and stuff,” he says. “It looked really cool and fun. But then I had to do some acting and really liked acting after that.” He has played Dodger in excerpts of Oliver!, Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, the wizard in Once Upon a Mattress, and a narrator “in the one where the guy tricks his friends into painting the fence for him” (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). He was cast as the young Prince of York in the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival’s production of Richard III. He has a large collection of hats, likes film noir and Pokémon, and, his mother, Elizabeth, reports, “He likes to talk about yucky, gross body things like a 12-year-old boy should.”

Elizabeth is a rabbi at Congregation Beit Tikvah in Baltimore, but before taking up rabbinical studies she was a professional mezzo-soprano in Montreal. Her 17-year-old daughter, Doriya, also studied ballet at Peabody and is keenly interested in musical theater. After her own career in performing arts, Elizabeth observes her kids with mixed emotions. “I watch with bated breath and delight, and hopefulness that wherever they take their interests in the arts, I know with 100 percent certainty, it will feed them for their whole lives. I can’t tell them not to go for it, because I did it. But I know how hard it is, and how potentially heartbreaking.” She’s not surprised to hear how Isaac concentrates, and sounds like Devonte’s mom when she talks about him. “He really wants to do well, and it can be difficult for him when he’s critiqued. He’s a perfectionist and just wants to get it right. He is so hard on himself. Very self-critical.” But he likes to show her ballet positions in the kitchen, and sometimes when he’s frustrated about something he’ll chill himself out with a little yoga. His mother smiles and says, “He’s really something.”

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he day before St. Patrick’s Day, Wednesday afternoon, 4:30. Tim Rinko-Gay teaches a mixed class, 13 girls and, in a cluster along one section of the barre, five boys from the Saturday morning posse. More than half of the first-year boys have taken on one or two additional classes a week.

This is a demanding class. Ballet requires constant attention to posture, a lengthened spine, an elongated neck, a foot curled and pointed just so, shoulders and arms and hands in proper attitude. Rinko-Gay has them at the barre in fifth position. “Shoulders down, 40 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Beatrice. Back knee, Tabitha. Stand tall, pull up your ears. Push your toes down. No elf toes! Push them down like I’m standing on them. Stiff knees, Anthony, pull your hips up!”

Rinko-Gay is both strict and playful. He has the kids stand on one foot, one leg bent and off the floor, and jump.

They try several times. It’s hard, and Rinko-Gay stops them and says, “Don’t get goofy, please. What was that? That was a chicken jump!” He makes a clownish leap, arms flopping all over the place. The kids and their parents, who are observing today, laugh. Working with one little girl at the barre, he tries to correct her stance. With one hand he squares her hip, with the other hand he aligns her foot, and lacking the third hand needed to straighten her posture, he bows his head and uses the top of it to push in her bottom, making the parents all laugh again.

At the far end of the room, Anthony Johnson works soberly. His mom says he calls this his “scary class.”

Heather Johnson is a freelance writer and photographer and a single mother. She grew up in Sacramento, where she danced for 10 years, mostly jazz, tap, and musical theater. She started taking classes when she was two years younger than Anthony, and at times took up to a dozen a week. She is surprised to find herself shuttling her son to Peabody. “I’d always had the idea for my daughter, Tally, who has been dancing since she was 2,” she says. But every December she takes the kids to see The Nutcracker, and about 18 months ago Anthony asked her about taking a ballet class himself. “I have to admit that at the time I sort of steered him away from that by suggesting break dancing instead. There’s that stereotype of boys in ballet and I didn’t want him teased at school.” But when Anthony learned that a friend of his was auditioning for ballet at Peabody, he asked to do it, too. “He’s not the one with the stereotype in his head,” his mother says. “That’s me.”

At home, the kids practice, with Mom sometimes correcting a move or posture. “Tally points her toes and he tells her what to do,” Heather says. “They’ve got this whole thing going on. It’s quite interesting. One thing I think he’s looking forward to is when he gets to partner with a girl. I think he has it in his head that there’s going to be this little girl in a tutu and he’s going to be able to lift her up. I try to tell him that he doesn’t have that kind of strength yet.”

Heather is ambitious for her children. She takes Anthony to ballet on Wednesdays and Saturdays, break dancing on Tuesdays, and next year hopes to involve him in a couple of musical theater productions as well as two or three weekly dance classes. She laughs when she talks about how the parents usually are not allowed into the studio on Saturday mornings. “I want to know what’s going on in there, and it’s killing me. Because of my background, I want to go in there and take his foot and turn it out, and take his arms and place them in the right position. Maybe it’s a good thing I can’t watch.”

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or several weeks in January and February, Bartlett had problems with a painful back. But today it’s much better and she’s in a bright mood. At the barre, she’s drilling 10 boys on proper movement of the arms from one position to another. She attends to a boy named Dakota.

“Strong!” she says. “Strong!

Feel your biceps!” She takes his scrawny arms and makes him smack the top of his head with his own hand.

He giggles and so does she.

They work through a variety of sequences and positions. Isaac displays perfect turn-out, and he’s not the only one having a good day.

Bartlett says, “Yes, Bill! Look at your beautiful feet!” The boys get down on the floor for a new routine called roly-poly. They roll onto one side, straighten their bodies, Noah Schwartz (left) and T.J. Langston watch intently in an April class. Eight months pull their legs back into a after first setting foot in the studio, they are preparing for their first performance. curl, then roll over onto the tried to slip unnoticed into a corner of the studio and other side. They like this and sometimes has not looked much like a little boy enjoying laugh as they roll around the floor. Bartlett smiles. himself, has come to life; learning a part for a real show Peabody’s year ends every May with two perforseems to have energized him. mances by its dance students. This year the school will When Rainey, who teaches the first half of today’s stage Bartlett’s choreography of A Midsummer Night’s class, spots Anthony standing at the barre yawning, he Dream. There will be 170 students dancing in the prosays, “Long day?” Rainey commutes to Peabody on a very duction, and at the end of the first Saturday morning early train from Philadelphia, and now he puts his hands class in March, Bartlett gathers the boys around and on Anthony’s shoulders. “I feel you. I feel you. I had to announces that they will be elves. Bartlett cues up Menget up at 5:30 to get here.” When Rainey walks away, delssohn’s score on the sound system and explains that Anthony yawns again, and the contagion spreads. Aidan their job on stage will be to escort Oberon, king of the yawns. Isaac yawns, a big one. forest. They look excited by this.

At the barre, the boys now know the routines, and She shows them a sequence of wood-elf steps, and remind Rainey of what they need to practice. runs them through it once, then again. They pick it up “What do we do now?” he asks. fast and practice, a bit ragged but enthusiastic. Bartlett “Dégagé,” says Alex. smiles broadly, turns to Mark Williams, the rehearsal pia“Dégagé? Good man.” nist, and says, “How about that! And it’s only March!”

Eight months ago they were a gang of undisciplined, A month later, she has taught them more steps, and squirrelly little boys. Today they’re a ballet class. All in in mid-April they’re doing well with it. Bartlett says, a line, in their black tights and white shirts and white “Good, boys! It always amazes me how musical you all shoes, they dégagé. are. It’s difficult music.” Today is one of the days when parents are in to watch, and despite that and the presDale Keiger, A&S ’11 (MLA), is associate editor of Johns ence of a photographer and bright photo lights, the boys Hopkins Magazine. stay focused. Aidan Mellin, who in previous weeks often Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 41

The Johns Hopkins Magazine

Not-Exactly-WhatYou’d-Call-Breezy Summer Reading List

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he idea was to pull together a list of great hot-weather reads penned by Johns Hopkins faculty and alumni. Books that would be light and intellectually airy and perfect for tucking under your arm on the way to the pool.You know, vacation reading—engaging but nothing you’d take notes on.

Well . . . It turns out that Johns Hopkins doesn’t do light and airy, at least not that often. And you probably wouldn’t want to read an entire summer’s worth of those books anyway. So instead, we worked our way through the stack of impressive Hopkins-affiliated tomes on the editors’ desks, looking for titles that promised a good read, even if they required a little effort.

What did we find? A book about Maryland oysters and their gradual demise, scary cell phone science, a poetry book, a history of liberal democracy, and psychiatrists’ truth-telling about their profession. We even found a novel.

We don’t expect you to read every book on the list, and we wouldn’t really recommend taking more than one or two with you on a cruise unless you’ve got a Kindle.

Look at it this way: It’s summer. Things are slowing down, vacation lies ahead. You’ve got a little extra time. Use it smartly.

42 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Martin Jarrie

By Michael Anft, Ann Finkbeiner, Dale Keiger, A&S ’11 (MLA), Gadi Dechter, A&S ’03 (MA), Kristen Intlekofer, Hollis Robbins

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 43

Shucking open a tale A little local (science) history about Maryland’s favorite mollusk

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ou can see a whole world in an oyster.

(And by that, I don’t mean a perfectly milled pearl.) Just ask those who have made extraordinary claims, often competing ones, about Crassostrea virginica, the prized Eastern oyster—a culinary gem that once encrusted the entire bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. For the watermen whose livelihoods have risen and fallen with it, the oyster has become the slimy symbol of the bay’s ongoing decline and their sad fortunes. For environmentalists, the humble bivalve embodies perhaps the last chance to filter out tons of the harmful “nutrients” that come along with booming populations and large-scale shoreside agriculture. And for elected officials who have vacillated between bending over backwards for watermen or rolling over for corporate dredging-andleasing interests, the oyster has provided a centurieslong conundrum: How much political capital can I expend (or gain) by coming down on one side or the other?

The Oyster In the past century or more, Christine Keiner, Question: Scientists, A&S ’01 (PhD), writes in The Oyster Question, all Watermen, and the churning currents surrounding the oyster—the the Maryland gustatory oyster, the economic-engine oyster, the Chesapeake Bay political oyster—have hardly done it any favors. since 1880, by The bay now yields about 1 percent of the 15 milChristine Keiner lion bushels it did annually around 1885. The phe(344 pages, nomenon is not limited to the bay. Worldwide, 85 University of percent of natural oyster reefs are gone. Those that Georgia Press, remain are about 10 percent as productive as they $44.95) were during their historic peaks. To invoke the mollusk today entails a sigh and a shrug as much as a smacking of the lips.

Keiner, who investigated the machinations surrounding the oyster as ballast for her dissertation, comprehensively charts the course of its decline. From cannon-fueled wars between oystering boats in the 1880s; to a state districting system that endowed watermen early on with too much political power, encouraging overfishing; to bat44 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

tles between large-scale dredging operations and traditional hand-tongers (who decried those who would more completely exploit “the commons” of the bay’s bottom); to the melancholy surrounding the industry today, Keiner unstrings a yarn that is by turns bizarre, jaw-dropping, and maddening. While her painstaking book lacks the spark and sprawl of Mark Kurlansky’s 2006 opus, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, which utilized the oyster as a prism through which to explore New York’s economic and social history, it gets at the questions oyster lovers have long asked: Why is it so hard for the oyster to stay healthy and reproduce? Why hasn’t science devised a way to turn its fortunes around?

Keiner also captures just how central the oyster became to the region’s cultural and economic identity, spurring new rail lines and canning industries, and encouraging health and ecological improvements. Baltimore became the first American city to build a wastewater treatment plant, not because of water quality concerns, she notes, “but to protect the lucrative oyster trade from sewage contamination.”

Woven throughout Keiner’s historiography is the Crassostrea-centric work of three Johns Hopkins giants who introduced the voice of science into the ongoing what-shall-be-done debate over the oyster, and maintained it for decades. In doing so, they furthered the university’s interest not only in highlighting its research locally, but aiding the state economy. One of them, William K. Brooks, a late 19th-century biology professor, investigated ways to artificially reproduce oysters, and argued in favor of turning over large chunks of the bay bottom to the seaside equivalent of the mechanized agriculture that had reshaped the North: corporate interests and small-time operators with incentive to tend to the beds and reefs.

Two others—Abel Wolman, Engr ’15, known globally as the godfather of water purification, and Isaiah Bowman, a geography professor—made similar arguments later (as did a young environmental journalist, Rachel Carson, A&S ’32, during the 1930s). None of them got what they wanted—to the delight of oystermen, who long and viciously fought privatization of the bay.

The Hopkins trio was certainly well intentioned, Keiner implies, but they probably were wrong about what could save the oyster. She points to another embattled concept—climate change—as a possible culprit for the bivalve’s ongoing demise. As warmer waters made their way up the bay, so did the viruses that killed or stunted the oyster’s growth. By the 1980s, the plummeting catch had turned oystermen into crabbers, charter boat captains, and prison

guards. “Today’s working fleet can be counted on one hand,” Keiner laments.

The world of the estuary may no longer be our oyster, but that doesn’t stop all interested parties from eagerly awaiting word of a revival. Bay harvests in 2010 were still measly, but the numbers of disease-resistant spat—larval oysters—were on the uptick. All of which proves that while the salty, sought-after critters’ best days are likely behind them, they can always inspire hope. —Michael Anft

Hold the phone?

What you didn’t want to know about your mobile device

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just joined the gazillion cell phone users on the planet and bought one, a fancy 4G model that meets my every communication/information/ entertainment need. Then I opened the flyleaf of Disconnect, by Devra Davis, SPH ’82, and read the flat statement, “Cell phones are not safe.” What’s a person to do? What are a gazillion people to do?

Davis, who holds a PhD in science studies and an MPH in epidemiology, writes a lively, readable book explaining cell phones’ lack of safety. First, she’s careful with a caveat: The frequencies of electromagnetic radiation used in cell phones are in the microwave range, orders of magnitude less energetic than the x-ray and ultraviolet radiation that clearly break the bonds of DNA and thereby can cause cancer. Whether microwave frequencies can otherwise affect human health, though, is a vexed subject. Many studies have been done, many find no harm, they all have limitations, and they may or may not contradict each other.

For example: The DNA in the brains of rats exposed to radio frequencies (those longer than microwaves) show some sort of damage. Rats exposed to microwave frequencies can’t remember how to get out of their swim tanks and just swim in circles. Radio frequencies can penetrate a few centimeters into the human brain. Russian children who use cell phones have problems with learning and behavior. Men who keep cell phones in their pockets have lower sperm counts. A large study of cell phone users in Denmark found no higher incidence of brain tumors, but Davis objects that the results weren’t analyzed for amount of use.

Another large study of people around the world who had brain tumors found no correlation with cell phone use, though the study ended in 2004 and since then cell phone use has risen dramati-

cally. Most epidemiological studies find no increased risk of brain tumors, Davis says, but “those few studies” that follow heavy users for a decade do.

An April New York Times article made an extensive case that cell phone research was at best inconclusive: “Thus far, this extraordinarily wide-cast net has yet to find solid proof of risk for cell phone radiation,” wrote author Siddhartha Mukherjee of the large body of research to date. “Not a single trial or test that has attributed carcinogenic potential has been free of problems.

Population-wide studies have failed to demonstrate an increased incidence; retrospective trials have been contradictory and riddled with biases; animal studies negative; human physiological experiments inconclusive; cellular studies inconsistent and weak.”

Yet Davis is clearly a believer. Her language is emotional; she intersperses her arguments with hair-raising anecdotes of people who used cell phones heavily and got brain tumors. She weights small, dicey studies that show dangers equally with large, more controlled studies that don’t. She interviews a number of scientists, all of whom cite the uncertainties and dangers of cell phones. Scientists who remain unconvinced by the dangers, she implies, are influenced by the multibillion-dollar cell phone industry.

In fact, it all sounds like the argument over climate science: The possibility of harm is great; the debate is partisan, emotional, and cherry-picks its scientific evidence; the science is necessarily incomplete and hard for the innocent bystander to assess—partly because that partisan debate gets in the way. And all I want to know is, what to do about it now?

Ask the feds: The government regulates cell phones via the Federal Communications Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. Davis argues that the regulations were set up over a decade ago and without accounting for children’s smaller heads and developing brains. But the websites of both agencies advise what Davis herself advises: If you’re worried, limit use and either put the phone on speaker or use a headset; get your children to do the same. The cell phone industry agrees, but in small print.

Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family, by Devra Davis (271 pages, Sutton, $26.95)

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 45

Ask the usually neutral National Research Council: It reviewed the research and advised scientists what to do next. Study the health of people with “long-term, low-intensity” exposure. Figure out whether children are more susceptible, especially given that more of them are using cell phones earlier. And do the fundamental science: controlled, replicable studies of exactly how microwaves might affect cells and at what doses.

Meanwhile, for the case against, ask Davis.

—Ann Finkbeiner

Beautiful and taxing A book of poetry that’s worth the effort

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Amy Clampitt: Selected Poems, edited by Mary Jo Salter (352 pages, Knopf, $19.95)

rinnell College in Iowa, Amy Clampitt’s alma mater, once prevailed upon her to answer the question, “What do you need to know to be a writer?” The poet’s response was an essay, “Predecessors, Et Cetera,” written in 1986 and answering the college’s query in the essay’s last paragraph: “In one word, I’d say, predecessors. There is less originality than we think. There is also a vast amount of solitude.

Writers need company.

We all need it. It’s not the command of knowledge that matters finally, but the company. It’s the predecessors. As a writer, I don’t know where I’d be without them.”

In the years since Clampitt’s startling 1983 “debut,” The Kingfisher, critics have compared her to a gallery of predecessors (with a few contemporaries tossed in) that bespeaks their admiration: John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore. The Kingfisher, technically her third published volume of poetry but the first by a major publisher and the first one that anyone noticed, came out when its author was 63 years old. Clampitt got a late start as a major poet, but before she died in 1994, she created a body of substantial work that has won a legion of admirers.

46 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Mary Jo Salter, professor in the Krieger School’s Writing Seminars, knew Clampitt for 15 years, from when she first wrote her a fan letter as a 24-year-old editor at The Atlantic Monthly. Clampitt responded to young Salter’s note immediately and generously, and the two became friends. Thirty-one years later, Salter edited Amy Clampitt: Selected Poems.

Do not approach an Amy Clampitt poem, even one of the shorter ones, without sufficient time and patience to read it five or six times. Your labor will be rewarded as, by the fourth or fifth reading, you begin to appreciate the working of an erudite, alert, reflective, active mind as it wielded memory, extraordinary powers of observation, decades of astute reading, and strong beliefs to create what critic Helen Vendler once accurately called “a beautiful, taxing poetry.” Nor should one approach a Clampitt poem without a good dictionary. Her vocabulary in the verse collected by Salter in Selected Poems is extraordinary (and irritating to some of Clampitt’s detractors, including poet and memoirist Mary Karr). The first 10 or so poems in this anthology yield the following list: dado, trig, panicle, corolla, campanula, filigree, plissé, lacuna, gall (the verb form), ruching, echinoderm, cumber, chrysoprase, damascene, transhumance, and coracle, all employed with precision and sometimes digging into deeper historical recesses of the English language. In “Gradual Clearing,” Clampitt wrote: “Late in the day the fog / wrung itself out like a sponge / in glades of rain, / sieving the half-invisible / cove with speartips.” Look up sieving in most dictionaries and you’ll find only a verb meaning, “to pass through a sieve, to sift,” which makes no sense here. But consult the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ll find a 19th-century meaning, “to perforate with holes.”

Salter has compiled a generous and judicious miscellany, selecting verse from all five of Clampitt’s books and a bit of her unpublished work. There is the 12-line “Dallas–Ft. Worth: Redbud and Mistletoe” and all of the eight-poem sequence “Voyages: A Homage to John Keats.” Bolstering the collection as a sort of appendix are notes that Clampitt herself wrote for each of her books, notes in which she might describe her puzzlement on first encountering a sea mouse, explain that spleenwort is a kind of fern, or record that some Iowans claim that an anonymous Iowa farmer invented barbed wire.

Ask me for an exemplary poem and I might suggest “Procession at Candlemas.” The narrator is on a long, sad drive, back to her childhood home, back for her mother’s funeral, “bereavement altering the moving lights / to a processional, a feast of Candlemas.” Candlemas celebrates the purification

of the Virgin Mary, and Clampitt wryly notes, “such a loathing / of the common origin, even a virgin / having given birth, needs purifying.” The poet’s eye notices the name of a highway rest stop, “Indian Meadows,” and her dexterous mind leaps to another sad procession of indigenous Americans driven from the land in “westward-trekking transhumance,” transhumance—“transfer of livestock”—the perfect word for both its denotation and the meaning lurking in its sound. On into the Midwest, the grieving driver rolls through morning “grey as zinc” and past “the sullen stare of feedlot cattle,” driving “in falling snow, the stillness and the sorrow / of things moving back to where they came from.”

—Dale Keiger

Getting to Denmark A hefty intellectual history of liberal democracy

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he Arab invention of military slavery in the mid-ninth century was a “brilliant” counterweight to tribalism that may have saved Islam as a major world religion.

Europe became the cradle of liberal democracy in part because the Roman Catholic Church systematically severed family bonds in the Middle Ages. And China, home to the world’s first modern state, has never known the rule of law or accountable government because of its weak religious foundations.

These are just some of the provocative conclusions former Johns Hopkins political scientist Francis Fukuyama draws in The Origins of Political Order, an epic tale of how political institutions developed from prehuman times to the dawn of modern politics after the American Revolution.

Fukuyama wrote this first of two planned volumes while he was a professor at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. (He is still a senior fellow at SAIS’ Foreign Policy Institute.)

A former Reagan State Department official who influenced and then distanced himself from the neoconservative movement, Fukuyama is now at Stanford University.

Readers expecting a polemic from the author of 1992’s The End of History and the Last Man will find instead a dispassionate and engaging mix of anthropology, economics, and intellectual history. As in the older book, liberal democracy is held up as the apotheosis of human political organization, but here Fukuyama wants to explain why some societies made it there and others didn’t “get to Denmark.”

For Fukuyama, liberal democracy has three essential ingredients: a sovereign state, a rule of law that transcends state authority, and an accountable government.

He moves from chimpanzees to the world’s major human societies to explore how various major civilizations acquired, or failed to acquire, these three qualities.

Fukuyama’s central thesis is that human beings are inherently social creatures with biological attributes that encourage bonding.

As agricultural production forces people to live near each other and share common resources, nuclear families band together with cousins who share similar ancestor-worship religions. Kinship groups throughout history have resisted the centralized authority of strangers but relented when geographical constraints and the threat of violence persuaded them to submit to protective sovereigns in territory-based states.

A main force that drives societies from a “tyranny of cousins” to the modern state is religion, according to Fukuyama. “It is hard to see how human beings could have evolved beyond small band-level societies without it,” he writes, because the worship of a common supernatural authority makes it easier for people to forsake tribal allegiances. Strong religions also create rules that transcend secular authority, readying the ground for the rule of law that is the second leg of Fukuyama’s democracy tripod. And when central authorities are well matched against strong legal traditions, governments evolve toward accountability, the third ingredient.

Thus, China, which developed the first modern state and bureaucracy as early as 770 B.C., “never succeeded in suppressing the power of kinship on social and cultural levels” and therefore failed to create a rule of law to balance authoritarian rule. Early Arab and later Ottoman rulers, on the other hand, bypassed potentially competing kinship bonds among the tribal population by enslaving foreign boys, converting them to Islam, and raising them to be elite members of a warrior class. And the statelike Catholic Church and its legal system in the Middle Ages taught kings that they were not above the law—a lesson that would be critical for accountable governance to emerge.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama (608 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35)

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 47

While holding up the accomplishments of liberal democracies like the United States as an ultimate goal, Fukuyama cautions that one lesson of his comparative survey is to be ever vigilant against the constant threat of political decay, suggesting darkly that the U.S. political polarization and deficit are red flags. “Once a society fails to confront a major fiscal crisis through serious institutional reform,” he writes, “it is tempted to resort to a host of short-term fixes that erode and eventually corrupt its own institutions.”

Fukuyama will no doubt delve more deeply into these matters in his second volume, which will tackle political development in the contemporary world.

—Gadi Dechter

Psychiatrists talk shop A frank discussion of the field, with the doctors who practice it

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hat is the difference between psychoanalysis, p s y c h o t h e r a p y, and psychiatry? Why do psychiatrists respond to patients’ questions with a question? Do psychiatrists still use shock treatments? How, exactly, does the insanity defense work? What’s so bad about Xanax, anyway? Psychiatrists Dinah Miller, Annette Hanson, and Steven Roy Daviss answer these questions and more in Shrink Rap, their straighttalking guide to psychiatric care.

When Miller, a consulting psychiatrist for the Johns Hopkins Community Psychiatry Program, returned home after spending two weeks in Louisiana working with Hurricane Katrina victims, she needed to write.

Shrink Rap: Three “At first I couldn’t write, and then I couldn’t stop Psychiatrists Explain Their Work, writing,” she says. So, along with two tech-savvy colleagues—Hanson, a prison psychiatrist with

by Dinah Miller, appointments at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Annette Hanson, University of Maryland, and Daviss, a hospitaland Steven Roy based psychiatrist and assistant professor at the Daviss (272 pages, University of Maryland School of Medicine—she Johns Hopkins created the blog Shrink Rap. On the heels of their University Press, blog’s popularity and at Daviss’ insistence, the $19.95) doctors also embarked on a podcast, which they named My Three Shrinks.

The book grew out of these successful efforts.

In it, readers are afforded a “behind the curtain” 48 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

view of psychiatry from the eyes of patients and from the perspectives of doctors. Each chapter begins with a brief narrative vignette that anchors the information in real-life experiences. Meet Eddie, for example, a young man suffering from mental illness who is arrested on rape charges.

Instead of talking in abstract terms about psychiatry in the correctional system, the authors follow Eddie’s story from the time he is a middle school student diagnosed with ADHD through his difficult teenage years with an unstable home life to his struggles with substance abuse and eventual incarceration. Using his story as a jumping-off point, they explain concepts such as mental health court, antisocial personality disorder, forensic psychiatry, and why the insanity defense isn’t exactly a getout-of-jail-free card.

Although the patients and doctors portrayed in the vignettes are fictional, the authors write, “it’s probably safe to assume that there is a little bit of us in these responses and reactions that we’ve borrowed from our own internal lives to make our fictional psychiatrists all the more real.” In a profession where they are required to be a blank slate—not cultivating friendships with their patients or divulging details about their own personal lives—they remind us that shrinks have feelings, too.

Shrink Rap provides a little something of everything. Because the authors work in diverse areas of psychiatry—Miller works in clinic settings and has a private psychotherapy practice, Hanson works in a correctional facility, and Daviss works in ER and hospital settings—they each bring a distinct area of expertise to the issues they tackle. The authors have an easy rapport, occasionally trading jokes with one another on their blog and in their podcast episodes. The book reflects their collaborative effort and offers insight into a number of different issues and settings. The doctors see eye to eye on many things; however, they don’t shy from issues that psychiatrists often disagree on. In fact, an entire chapter is devoted to “Things We Argue About,” covering everything from health care reform to medical marijuana to which disorders should (or shouldn’t) be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Reading this book is like having a significant other who happens to be a psychiatrist—it’s more information than you’d get talking to someone at a cocktail party, but at 272 pages, it avoids being as dense or exhaustive as a textbook. Miller, Hanson, and Daviss confide the things that frustrate them (convoluted insurance practices that hinder good patient care) and the shortcomings of their field (disagreement over classifying disorders).

Using this tell-it-like-it-is approach, they demystify

psychiatric practices that have long been stigmatized, such as electroconvulsive therapy (which, as it turns out, is still used today, although it looks nothing like the punishment wielded by Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). They also shed light on the insurance process, explaining why a patient might be stuck waiting hours in an ER and why some private practice psychiatrists don’t accept health insurance.

Although they explain psychiatry in all its merits and failings, acknowledging the limitations of their field, these are clearly three shrinks who love their jobs. “This is an exciting time to be a psychiatrist,” they write. “It is also a hopeful time for our patients.”

—Kristen Intlekofer

Fun with the family A novel, at last . . .

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rinking Closer to Home, by Jessica Anya Blau, A&S ’95 (MA), is a diverting summer read—a story of three quirky adult siblings, Anna, Portia, and Emery, who are thrown together after their chainsmoking, pot-toking artist mother, Louise, suffers a heart attack. The time is 1993, that surprisingly recent and laconic era before cell phones, tablet computers, and Google. In their childhood home in the hills of Santa Barbara, the children reflect on their past and their relationships with each other. Anna, the oldest and most confident, is a recovering sex addict who struggles to stay true to her marriage vows. Portia, the prudent middle child, laments that her husband has left her for a younger woman. Emery, a gay television executive, arrives with Alejandro, his partner; the two men are hoping that one of the sisters will donate eggs for an embryo to be implanted in a surrogate mother. Buzzy, the quiet patriarch of the clan, has a secret that he’ll no longer be able to keep from his children. Nothing really happens in this entertainingly fitful story but the remembrance of pop-culture moments past. Sit back, put some Beach Boys in your iPod, and enjoy.

Drinking Closer to Home jumps back and forth in time between 13 days spent by their mother’s hospital bed and 11 memorable episodes from 1968 to 1990—car trips and visits from strange relatives—evidence of a colorful childhood.

Appropriate icons appear, signifying authenticity: The Courtship of Eddie’s Father in the late 1960s; Moshe Dayan and Texas Instrument calculators in

the 1970s; coke and contraceptive sponges in the 1980s; Hillary and Bill in the 1990s. The flashbacks provide context for the children’s edgy relationship with their mother and balance the static, reality TV mood of the present, where the siblings bicker, cook, air old grievances, and wait to see if their mother will recover.

Blau’s narrator is as eccentric as her characters: “It has only been recently that Anna forgave her mother for a litany of crimes Anna had been carrying in her stomach like a knotted squid.” In her hospital bed, Louise’s lips “are like two dessicated slugs.” Emery’s words “are stuck in his throat like a lineup of golf balls.” Sometimes these similes are thrilling; sometimes they’re obtrusive and inapt. The story’s rhetorical quirkiness helps hold the reader’s interest. Drinking Closer to Home is not a novel with a palpable narrative arc; the only real source of tension is whether Emery and Alejandro will get their eggs.

As she did in her first novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (2008), Blau flaunts her ability to describe odors, filth, and bodily fluids in stark detail. Readers should be warned: Nearly everybody vomits, pees, poops, and oozes. As the family moves from Michigan to Santa Barbara in a blue station wagon with a playpen in the way-back, baby Emery hurls in his sisters’ hair. In California, the pet cockatiel escapes to the curtain rod to spend years encrusting the living room couch with its droppings. Portia’s mattress is “slick and shiny-gray from body oil and dirt.” Louise relieves herself by standing next to the family car and lifting her skirt. The hospital scenes are gratifyingly sanitary and refreshing.

Drinking Closer to Home inhabits the narrative space between the unanticipated and the unexpected: The reader expects that quirky things will happen to the characters (this is the whole point of her novel) but cannot guess precisely what these things will be. The story is not without its surprises, though more might have happened, and perhaps Buzzy, the father, might have been more fleshed out. But the pleasure of Blau’s novel is in the details, offbeat but often on target.

—Hollis Robbins

Drinking Closer to Home, by Jessica Anya Blau (368 pages, Harper Perennial, $14.99)

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 49

Oh, the Places TheyGo Thinking about a trip this summer? Our researcher/tour guides are, too. In these pages, we travel—vicariously at least—with Johns Hopkins faculty to Cuba, Germany, Syria, Nepal, and Italy.

By Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson Illustrations

by

Paul Cox

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altimore may be home base, but for many in the Johns Hopkins community, travel is an essential part of the job. Research, scholarship, and clinical trials take faculty all over the world, and for some, years of dedicated study have fostered an intimate relationship

with a particular locale. Here we talk to five Johns Hopkins faculty about the research that keeps them traveling to one place year after year and the lessons they have learned, not only about their area of interest but also about the people, the culture, and the place. From Cuba to Kathmandu, Syria to Italy and Germany, consider this your insider’s guide to some of the world’s most enticing destinations.

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Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 51

Destination: Cuba

Guide: Franklin W. Knight, professor of history, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

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ranklin Knight’s first research trip to Cuba was in 1977, four years after he joined the Johns Hopkins faculty. Knight had studied comparative history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which sparked an interest in the social, political, and cultural aspects of Latin America and the Caribbean. He has since traveled extensively in those countries, examining everything from American slave systems to trade in Atlantic port cities. Knight frequently shares this knowledge through Johns Hopkins Alumni Journeys, including a cruise to the Lesser Antilles this past March. But a primary focus over the years has been Cuba. “I have an interest in looking at the general history of the New World and its contributions to world history. I think the modern face of world history began with the integration of the Americas,” Knight says. “That includes everything from Columbus through Castro.”

That first trip to Havana 34 years ago was “surreal,” Knight says. “When I first arrived, the country was in an optimistic mood. Money was still pumping in from the Soviets; there were new cars from Argentina and Italy.

There was this optimism that the revolution had arrived and would achieve all that it said it would.” This was the last period when Cubans were on a nonmonetary economy, Knight notes, so there were no charges for rent, or riding the bus, or electricity. “The country just had this vibrant feeling. People called Castro ‘Fidel’ in those days, not ‘El Comandante.’”

Knight has made 58 return trips to Cuba to conduct research, participate in panels, and study the culture and evolving politics of the country. His focus of late is the relationship between nationalism and state in Cuba. “In 1977, the government was your friend. An official notice would begin, ‘Comrades,’” Knight explains. “Today the government is separate from the people. There is a distancing and an exaggerated formality. A government notice now reads, ‘Citizens, it is requested of you . . .’”

Knight is currently writing a general history of the country and credits the many Cuban scholars he has encountered over the years with aiding him greatly in his work. “They have helped me to understand better their surrealistic native land,” Knight says.

Knight’s Guide to Cuba Best time of year to go: Anytime, but for those in the far Northern Hemisphere, winter would be superb. It does get cool occasionally in Cuba, but that never lasts long.

Best way to get there: There are several charter flights from 52 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Miami. Air Canada has daily flights from Toronto, and Aeromexico has flights from Mexico City and Cancún. Air Jamaica has flights from Kingston and Montego Bay. From Europe the choice is even wider. Knight recommends going the official route and securing a license to travel in the country from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Travel tip: Cuba requires that all foreign currency be changed to Cuban pesos. Cash is far better than traveler’s checks. U.S.issued credit cards are not acceptable in Cuba, and U.S. currency is exchanged at a punitive exchange rate. Canadian or European currency and credit cards are a good bet. Be careful with how much money is exchanged at any time because it is difficult to re-convert unspent Cuban pesos.

Getting around: Navigating Havana and Santiago is relatively easy.

Long-distance travel requires careful planning. Rental cars and mopeds are available, but gas stations outside well-traveled routes are few and far between. Tours arranged by your hotel will take you to all well-known sites.

Be sure to bring: Anything you think you will need, from toothpaste to toilet paper. Aspirin and small batteries are particularly difficult to find.

Book a room at: The Meliá Cohiba, the Parque Central, or the Habana Libre hotels, in that order.

Restaurants: Steak at La Brasa restaurant in the Meliá Cohiba hotel or at La Pampa restaurant in the Hotel Comodoro; international fare at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba or at La Torre restaurant; chicken and local dishes at El Ajibe, La Cecilia, La Divina Pastora, El Barracon, El Patio, La Torre, and Tocororo; Chinese food at El Pavo Real, El Polinesio, and La Torre de Marfil.

Try the: Rice in all forms, with various beans or with chicken; fried ripe plantains; pork served in various styles; lobster.

Best off-the-beaten-path place: The interesting limestone formations called mogotes, near Viñales in Pinar del Río.

In advance of going, read: Aviva Chomsky’s A History of the Cuban Revolution or Miguel Bretos’ Matanzas: The Cuba Nobody Knows.

Destination: Germany

Guide: Andrew Talle, faculty, musicology, Peabody Institute

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n accomplished cellist and researcher, Andrew Talle has spent more than a decade studying the early influence of J.S. Bach on his contemporaries.

For this work, Talle heads to Leipzig, Germany, where he first began researching the composer in 2000. He lived in the city for three years to write a dissertation on Bach’s keyboard partitas and their early audiences, then returned to Leipzig every summer to continue his research. Since June 2010, he has been on sabbatical there, preparing a book with the working

title “J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Music in the Lives of His Contemporaries.”

Talle’s research explores the influence that harpsichord and organ playing had on 18th-century social life. That work relies on documents Talle has discovered in archives all over Germany and beyond. “It is very difficult to find descriptions of solo keyboard performances from the early 18th century,” he says. “Most of the time, daily events in private homes did not make it into the official record. While institutions need paper trails for payment purposes, there is no reason to record someone’s sister sitting down to play the harpsichord for free, [noting] what she wore, what time of day it was, who was listening, etc.” So Talle reviews materials that shed light on these intimate performances, from poems and novels to travel reports, diaries, and paintings. “Diaries are the best sources because it is only there that one finds reliable descriptions of actual concerts in private homes,” he says.

How does Bach fit into all of this?

“He published quite a lot of his keyboard music, and I’ve been trying to figure out who bought it,” Talle says.

He has been examining all of the manuscript copies of Bach’s music and the prints that he sold in an effort to identify who might have purchased them. Once he has a name, Talle searches archives to flesh out the person’s biography. “In the end I will have around 200 people who knew Bach’s keyboard music before his death in 1750, which should offer a fairly comprehensive picture of his audience, and a good basis for asking, ‘What role did Bach’s music play in the lives of his contemporaries?’”

Talle has had a few dramatic research breakthroughs.

For years he studied a collection of music prepared for

two countesses in Darmstadt in the 1740s.

There were about 50 manuscripts copied by the same hand using the initials “Me” or “Mrle.” Searching in a Darmstadt archive, Talle found that one of the countesses studied theology with a private tutor named “Merle” from Rauschenberg. After more sleuthing, Talle discovered a living descendant of Merle who helped determine through handwriting analysis that the man from Rauschenberg was, in fact, the countesses’ music teacher.

“This opened up entirely new avenues for research, and eventually allowed me to illuminate a great deal about the collection,” Talle says.

As for the city of Leipzig, Talle has established a comfortable routine, enjoying the friendly nature of the local residents and the custom of afternoon tee und kuchen (tea, or coffee, with cake). “There is no better place for this than the coffeehouse Café Kandler, directly across from the entrance to the St. Nicholas Church,” Talle says.

For a Bach-inspired trip, Talle suggests visiting the Bach Museum as well as taking the “Bach’s Eye View” tour of the St. Thomas Church. “Every Sunday Bach would perform from the balcony at the back of this church. From here he had a good view of the pulpit and the entire congregation, and could coordinate his musical performances with the pastor,” Talle says. Next year, Talle says a new hotel called Hotel Bach is scheduled to open across from the church in an 18th-century house.

Talle’s Guide to Leipzig Best time of year to go: June for the Bach Festival.

Before you go, read: Christoph Wolff ’s Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. Or listen to Philippe Herreweghe’s recording of Bach’s Cantata BWV 2 (“Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein”), which was first performed in Leipzig in 1724.

Tips for getting around town: Leipzig is very walkable. It takes about 15 minutes to walk from one side of the inner city to the other. Regular trams run between the city and the surrounding suburbs.

One phrase to know in the native language: “Ich hätte gern ein Stück von diesem Kuchen,” which translates, “I would like to order a piece of this cake.” (Then point!)

Try the: Heisse Birne, hot pear juice, at the Telegraph Restaurant and Café.

Where to eat: Talle, who lived in Hanoi and Hue on a scholarship in the late 1990s, recommends Sakura, which is popular with locals for sushi, and Umaii, which has delicious noodles. For German food, try Weinstock.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 53

Nightlife: Visit the Barfussgässchen, a small alley with lots of cafes and restaurants, or the Gottschedstrasse area in the inner city. Südvorstadt has the best bars and lounges.

If you only have a few days: Visit the Bach Museum; take the tour of the tower at St. Thomas Church for a spectacular view of the city (weekends only); see a concert at the Gewandhaus or an opera or the Leipzig Ballet at the Opera House. And visit composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s house museum with its wonderfully preserved interior.

Best off-the-beaten-path place: Völkerschlachtdenkmal, a monument built in 1913 to commemorate victory over Napoleon in 1813. It is the largest monument in Europe, a massive, dark stone structure with statues whose toes are bigger than the people standing next to them.

Where to stay: Downtown at the Hotel Seeblick, across from the main train station. For visitors who want to see more of the city and the locals (and hear considerably less English), try the Balance Hotel or the Lindner Hotel. Both are about 15 minutes outside of downtown via tram.

For a truly East German experience: Visit Sachsen Therme, which offers massages, pools, saunas, and a water park for kids.

Destination: Syria

Guide: Glenn Schwartz, professor of archaeology, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

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lenn Schwartz knew he wanted to become an archaeologist when he was 8 years old. “I saw a Hollywood movie about ancient Egypt called The Egyptian, and I fell in love with the idea of old civilizations that were so exotic and like us at the same time,” Schwartz recalls. Not long after, Schwartz borrowed a history text from his older brother and read about ancient Syrian culture. He was hooked.

His first archaeological trip to Syria came in 1978, when he was a graduate student. He’s been traveling to the country ever since, studying, among other things, the emergence of urban life and societies in early history. In 1986, he joined the Johns Hopkins faculty and soon partnered with a colleague at the University of Amsterdam on an excavation of a Syrian site. That collaboration continues today in western Syria, with field research at Tell Umm el-Marra. Though the area was once a center of Bronze Age activity, it has been the subject of little focused excavation. “Until recently, Near

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East archaeologists interested in the birth of urbanization have focused on Mesopotamia, but we discovered that Syria also had early urban sites,” Schwartz says.

Tell Umm el-Marra, occupied primarily between 2700 and 1200 B.C., has yielded exceptional finds, including an intact royal tomb from about 2300 B.C. with three layers of bodies and gold and silver objects (discovered first in June 2000 by Schwartz’s graduate student Alice Petty). Initially, Schwartz was disappointed with the discovery. “The structure we were exposing was not what I expected,” he says. “I had anticipated a different kind of building from a later period to answer some research questions I had. A tomb from 2300 B.C. confounded my plans.

However, when I realized that this tomb was undisturbed and contained a wealth of information about mortuary practices and elite ideologies, I was happy to change my research plans. It was a good lesson on the need to be flexible and not to be too wedded to one’s expectations.”

Schwartz calls Syria a “hidden gem” and suspects most Americans avoid traveling there because of safety concerns. He says those fears are mostly unfounded (though he does acknowledge that, given current political events in the Near East, the situation may be tense and uncertain for travel right now). “In reality, it’s extremely safe and wonderful to travel as an American in Syria.”

Tourism infrastructure is bountiful, with hotels for every budget and many fine restaurants and historic sites, he adds. “Hospitality is important and Syrians are friendly, welcoming people.”

Schwartz’s Guide to Syria Best time of year to go: Fall or early spring. It’s rainy and chilly during the winter and very hot in summer and late spring.

Before you go, be sure to read: Ross Burns’ Monuments of Syria, an excellent guide to the historic and archaeological sites of the country.

Don’t forget to pack: A hat and layers of clothing to protect against the sun.

Getting around: The buses are efficient, inexpensive, and relatively comfortable if you can endure the crazy scene of porters trying to apprehend your luggage and bus company representatives feverishly trying to get you into their buses when you arrive at the station.

One phrase to know in the native language: Shukran or “thank you.” There’s also maalesh, which means “It doesn’t matter, never mind, don’t worry about it.”

Best places to stay: There are wonderful boutique hotels in the larger cities that are situated in renovated antique houses, full of charm and historical interest.

Best places to eat: The Old City of Damascus really comes alive at night, with lots of interesting spots to eat, drink, and have a good time in the warren of ancient passageways and old buildings. Aleppo’s similarly picturesque Jdeideh quarter is also great, as are the restaurants around the Aleppo Citadel (if you don’t mind a “dry” locale). The outdoor cafes in front of the gate of the Aleppo Citadel have a boisterous and fun atmosphere, crowded with people having a good time, in the evenings.

Destination: Nepal

Guide: Joanne Katz, professor and associate chair, director of the Global Disease Epidemiology and Control Division, Bloomberg School of Public Health

J

oanne Katz says that growing up in apartheid South Africa greatly influenced her decision to go into public health. “I saw enormous injustice as a child,” she says. “I have always wanted to mitigate, in some small way, what I witnessed there. I believe public health is one way in which one can live out the ideal of social justice and help to repair the world.”

For years, her research has focused on maternal and child health in Nepal. Katz’s early studies explored what impact nutritional deficiencies or the burden of infectious disease had on mothers and their children.

Today, Katz has three major trials running. The first looks at the damaging health effects of traditional mud-brick cook stoves, which create an exceptional amount of indoor air pollution and lead to respiratory infections, as well as reproductive issues such as prematurity and low birth weight. Katz and her team are replacing these mud stoves with ones that vent to the outdoors and measuring whether the new stoves reverse negative health effects.

A second trial studies the Nepalese practice of massaging infants with mustard seed oil, which mothers

Try the: Muhammara, a piquant paste made from local red peppers and onions, crushed walnuts, and cumin (a popular spice in Syrian cuisine). Schwartz’s favorite beverage is the local brand of beer called al-Sharq (“the East”). “You never know what you’re going to get from one bottle to the next,” he says, “which is part of the adventure.”

Remember that: Modest dress is appreciated. Don’t wear shorts in public, whether you are male or female. Also, Friday is a Muslim day off.

Nightlife: When they dine out, Syrians eat very late, so the restaurants and cafes are hopping well into the evening.

Be sure to visit: Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra (Roman period ruins in a desert oasis), and Krak des Chevaliers (a very well-preserved Crusader castle).

And don’t miss: The “Dead Cities” in the rocky area west of Aleppo, which are the remains of hundreds of villages from the late Roman period.The most famous is the church of St. Simeon Stylites. Simeon was a monk who lived on top of a pillar for 40 years in the sixth century A.D.; after he died, a huge church was built around the pillar. The remains of the building are located on top of a hill, with a dramatic view, and the ruins themselves are strikingly beautiful. (Schwartz says to pack a picnic, since Syria is no Disneyland and concessions don’t exist in the Dead Cities.)

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 55

believe encourages health and strength, and examines whether using sunflower seed oil instead might benefit infants by regulating body temperature or supporting growth. The third trial attempts to quantify the benefits of giving the influenza vaccine to pregnant women (already recommended in the United States) to protect mother and infant in the first few months of life. “If this is beneficial, the flu vaccine could be added to the program that provides tetanus vaccines to pregnant women without too much additional cost,” Katz says.

In addition to the trials, Katz tracks the impact of hiring local women to help execute the research. “We have been able to document how employment in our research has transformed the lives of these women and their families,” she says. “Women have low status and are much less likely to be literate than men. These women were provided training, uniforms, and a worker ID badge, and went out to collect data.” As a result, their status went up within the community. “Their advice was sought, they became lenders of money to other village women, and the community approached them to run for political office. I love that our research has affected the lives of those we have employed, not just those who were the recipients of the findings of our research.”

In her 23 years traveling to Nepal, Katz says her greatest discovery has been the interconnectedness of humanity. “Even though I am a world away from where I come from, women are just the same as me, wanting the same things for their children, health and well-being, education and happiness,” she says.

And as for the country itself? “It is the most different place from my own culture I have ever been to, and its tolerance, diversity, and cultural richness make it a unique destination,” Katz says. “Everyone will find something they seek here.”

Katz’s Guide to Nepal Best time of year to go: October, early November, or March.

What to pack: Rain gear in monsoon season, medicines you may need, a flashlight (electricity is notoriously unreliable), and a good camera.

Getting around: Do not use the three-wheeled taxis. Regular taxis are fine, but make sure to fix the price before you get in. Buses are very crowded.

One phrase you should know in the native language: Namaste, which is an all-purpose greeting, said with your hands together, as though in prayer.

Where to stay: Dwarika’s Hotel is a beautifully restored set of Newari buildings (Newars are the indigenous ethnic group of the Kathmandu Valley). Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates Sr., and Prince Charles have all stayed there. The restaurant, Krishna Pan, serves 56 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

traditional Newari food and servers wear the varied dress of different tribes of the Kathmandu Valley.

Be sure to avoid the: Water. Do not take ice in any drink. Do not eat salad anywhere.

Be sure to try: Tumba, a Tibetan drink made with fermented millet and hot water consumed from a wooden mug through a bamboo straw; it is wonderful during the cold winter evenings. Sukati, a spicy fried meat, and momos, dumplings stuffed with meat or vegetables and dipped in a spicy tomato sauce. There’s also dal bhat, literally lentils and rice, a traditional dish of Nepal, eaten as both breakfast and dinner.

Whatever you do, don’t: Show the soles of your feet to anyone.

Never put your feet up on a chair or desk. When receiving something from someone, take it with your right hand or both hands but not the left one.

For souvenirs: Tibetan carpets, pashmina shawls, carved wooden windows in the Newari style, brass bowls, Buddhist religious paintings called thangkas, and paintings from the Maithilee people who live in southern Nepal. There is a shopping area called Babar Mahal Revisited where you can find many of these items.

Best off-the-beaten-path place: The temple of Changu Narayan, in the Kathmandu Valley.

Be sure to see: Bhaktapur, a medieval city in the Kathmandu Valley that is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site with restored Newari temples and palaces. Also go to the Patan Museum and the Patan Durbar Square, where the architecture dates from many different eras and the artwork provides a history of the valley region.

If you can’t make it to Nepal, read: Love and Death in Kathmandu: A Strange Tale of Royal Murder, by Australian journalists Amy Willesee and Mark Whittaker, about the murder of the king and his family in 2001.

Destination: Italy

Guide: Stephen Campbell, professor and chair, Department of the History of Art, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

W

ith an interest in Italian Renaissance and baroque art, Stephen Campbell’s second home has been Florence, Italy. Campbell began traveling to the city in 1990 as a student at Johns Hopkins (before joining the faculty in 2002) and has returned at least once every year. He also lived there for several years. The majority of his research happens in Florence’s Kunsthistorisches Institut, a German research institution dedicated to the history of art and architecture in Italy. The library has more than 310,000 volumes, some extremely rare. “If you do Italian Renaissance art, you have to use this institute in Italy. It’s the center of the industry, like Hollywood is to movies,” Campbell says. “You see everybody there.

People I’ve known for 20 years. Everybody passes through Florence.”

Campbell’s intensive study has resulted in several books on key Renaissance artists, including Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450– 1495 (Yale University Press). Tura was a famous painter living in the city of Ferrara and working for the Este court. Campbell’s book offers new insights into Tura’s status in the court and the urban culture of Ferrara and how those environments impacted his distinctive artistic style. Campbell has also studied Paduan artist Andrea Mantegna, and he has just completed a general history of Italian Renaissance art. In addition to the hours spent at the German institute in Florence, Campbell conducts research at the State Archive of Mantua in Lombardy, Italy, which offers a rich repository of information on the Renaissance, as well as in libraries in the northern city of Modena.

Because Florence is such a tourist destination and because the dollar has been weak of late, Campbell says it takes a little more tenacity to navigate the city as a scholar when it comes to affordable lodging and seeing artworks. Crowds at the famous Uffizi Gallery, for instance, make scholarship access in off-hours paramount

to his work. “There are parts of the Uffizi that you can’t normally get into easily, like a corridor that goes across the Arno River.” Known as the Vasarian corridor, it is a kilometer-long passageway that once connected the museum to the Medici offices across the river. Today it displays paintings from the 600s and 700s.

There are also many private collections that touristsin-the-know may access. One of Campbell’s favorites is the Palazzo Corsini, a baroque castle near the Arno that was built in the 1600s and is still owned by the Corsini family. “Private collections are only open on certain days,” Campbell notes, so it’s important to check schedules if you hope to get inside.

Campbell’s Guide to Florence Pack: Comfortable shoes. Taxis are plentiful but most of downtown is for pedestrians only and not accessible to automobiles.

Be sure to try: Peposo, a peppery beef stew from Impruneta outside Florence, traditionally made by ceramic workers slowcooking the beef in the embers of their kilns.

Avoid: Wearing clothes more appropriate to a beach. Men over 20, for instance, should not wear shorts.

Nightlife: Nightlife is generally for a very young crowd, Campbell says, but there is plenty of jazz in Tuscany for a more grown-up night on the town.

Best off-the-beaten-path places to visit: La Specola, an 18th-century medical museum near Palazzo Pitti, and the Museo degli Argenti, a spectacular collection of decorative arts and other precious objects from the Medici court, located in Palazzo Pitti.

If you only have a few days, be sure to see: The Battistero di San Giovanni and the Duomo Cathedral; the Bargello palace and museum, which houses masterpieces by Michelangelo and Donatello’s David; Museo dell’Opera del Duomo; the San Marco church and its Fra Angelico museum located in the convent; the Galleria Palatina in Palazzo Pitti with significant works

by Titian and Raphael; San Miniato, Santa Maria Novella, and Santa Croce basilicas; and, of course, the Uffizi, but be prepared for the enormous crowds.

Travel guide: Blue Guide Florence.

Before you go, read: David Leavitt’s Florence, A Delicate Case and The Last Medici, by Harold Acton.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 57

M a r k e t p l a c e Attire The Bow Tie Club: The finest silk bow ties available! Shop online at www.bowtieclub.com or call 800-269-5668 to request a free catalog.

and fireplace. Beautiful yard, ancient shade trees, 50-year-old organic garden. Easy access to Balt./Washington area. JHU alumni owned.

Option to rent. 480-481-0009.

Furniture Cleaning Services Scrub-A-Dub Cleaning: Bonded & insured.

410-667-8714.

True Cleaning Service: Residential/commercial. Excellent references. Insured. Free estimates. waira224torres@yahoo.com. 443204-9760.

Dating Services

Eden, UT: 5BD/4BA home, wireless, mountain views, sleeps 2-10. Hike/bike/paddle/golf.

775-825-4304, amkhan@jhsph.edu.

Party Planning

Sanibel Island, FL: 2BR/1BA piling beach house. Walk to beach, private deck. Trades considered. 410-692-0200, bdat08@gmail.com.

Professional Services In Need of a Mortgage? Purchase or refinance, please contact Bruce Kane, BA ’81, MBA ’95. 443-722-2845, mail to: bkane @monarchmtg.com.

24-7 RN’s, LPN’s, and CNA’s available for all shifts including emergency care.

Office 410-321-4785 after hrs contact line 800-374-2669 http://www.Heartsof Ireland.org/

For Sale Baltimore Real Estate–Discover Hampton–Just North of Goucher: 15 min to JHU, 30 min to JHH; private acreage, hiking and biking in watershed, swim club, 2 min to 695 & major conveniences. $370K$1M+. Vicki Sindler, MS, JHU ’78, Long Foster.

C: 410-215-5234/O:410-453-0500. EHO. Exceptional Large Home: Includes great room/apartment, plus office w/private entrance; zoned medical. Large living room, dining room, kitchen, 3BR/3BA. Wood floors throughout, with enormous sunny windows

58 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Beach House—Lewes, Delaware: Walk to beach and town, sleeps 8, 2 baths, outdoor shower, hot tub, fireplace. 410-375-8661, dunk5106@aol.com.

Arista Custom Furniture: We build to your specifications, specializing in professional offices, entertainment centers, bedroom furniture, bathroom vanities, kitchen cabinets and countertops, buffets, dining tables, coffee and end tables, children’s furniture. Call Gus for a free estimate. 410-371-1589 and visit us at www.aristafurniture.com.

Playhouse Parties LLC: Book your child’s celebratory event today. We incite “Wow Moments” leading to unforgettable memories. Relax! We take care of ever ything!

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Elder Care

Vacation Rental/Domestic

Robert Moll – Architect – Inc: New homes, additions, renovations. Initial consultation is complimentary. 410-952-4302, rdm @mollarch.com, www.robertmollarchitect.com.

Tidewater Remodeling: Interior & exterior services, additions, handyman, or anything in between. Prompt, professional, courteous, MHIC 12152, since 1980. tidewaterbuilt.com, 410-592-9993.

Tyrone’s Custom Painting: Beat any price! 443-680-9417.

Tours/Travel Explore Newfoundland and Labrador: Whales, icebergs, lighthouses, puffins, Gros Morne, the Vikings' New World home.

Award-winning local hosts. Gentle 7-day adventures. Wild days. Comfortable hotels.

Wildland Tour s, 8 8 8 - 6 1 5 - 8 2 7 9 , w w w .wildlandtours.com.

Nantucket Cottage: On 8 acres at surfside. Sleeps 6. Spectacular view of beach, ocean. Completely equipped kitchen, fireplace, decks. June, July, September. $3,000/week.

410-653-0252.

Southwest Florida Vacation Rentals: Many to choose from, luxury to economy. www.time-realty.com, 239-699-4493, Della Booth, broker (JHU parent), TIME Realty.

Vacation Rental/Foreign Italy, Tuscany-Umbria Border: Beautiful 5-bedroom country villa, designer interiors, stunning views, heated infinity pool, private grounds, available year-round! www.poderepalazzo.com.

Wanted to Buy Cash/Consignment: I buy one item or entire estate. Call Joseph: 443-695-4707.

Mr. Bob’s Antiques: Buying now. Antique furniture through 1950s. $Silver, jewelry, lamps, clocks, watches, complete estates.

410-371-3675.

For Johns Hopkins Marketplace rates and information, please contact Ira Gewanter, Alter Communications, 443-451-0720, or email jhu@alteryourview.com.

Alumni

News & Notes from our graduates and friends

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Michael DeRosa, A&S ’86, aka the alumnus Hopkins Blue Jay, works the crowd during the men’s lacrosse game at Alumni Weekend 2011. DeRosa has officially shed his feathers after appearing as the mascot at multiple alumni weekends since graduating in 1986.

To thank him for his dedication to Johns Hopkins,

university president Ron Daniels, Alumni Association president Ray Snow, A&S ’70, and director of athletics Tom Calder presented DeRosa with a framed No. 25 jersey (in honor of his 25th reunion). To view more pictures of Alumni Weekend 2011, please visit alumni.jhu.edu/reunion.

60 60 62 63 64 67

World Lit Etude, Chopin?

Bird by the Hand Lost and Found Learning in the Digital Age Alumni Notes

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 59

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Erin Ganju, A&S ’91, SAIS ’92

World Lit

W

hile so many young college graduates prepare to climb up the corporate ladder, dreaming of six-figure salaries and personal assistants, Erin Ganju jumped off.

Her leap from a rung near the top landed her a dream job—teaching the world to read with the help of her nonprofit organization, Room to Read.

Room to Read brings books— and learning—to rural villages around the world, focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. In just over a decade, it has helped to establish more than a thousand schools and built or stocked over 10,000 libraries of various sizes; it has published 553 local-language children’s titles and has given more than 10,000 long-term scholarships to girls.

A native Californian, Ganju grew up in a progressive family— her mom, a social worker who had been in the Peace Corps and earlier taught English in Japan; her dad, a marketing professor. They traveled and instilled in her the importance of being engaged in and improving the world. Those values brought her first to the Homewood campus and then to the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where she earned degrees in international studies and economics.

Her career began as a financial analyst with Goldman Sachs in New York and then in Singapore. After a few years, she joined Unilever as an operations manager in Vietnam, then worked for two technology startups. But as much as she loved the country and its people, she was never satisfied. “I figured if I was going to work this hard, it should be for something I was really passionate about.”

Thus began the second chapter of her life. More than 10 years ago, she met John Wood, founder of Books for Nepal, a project that established libraries in that country. Ganju knew Vietnam, and Wood was looking to expand, so the two combined their efforts and created Room to Read. Their goal: to create a world where all children, no matter what their circumstances, have quality education to help them reach their goals.

And because two-thirds of the world’s 759 million illiterate people are women and girls, the organization focuses on gender equality in education as well.

60 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Erin Ganju traded corporate success for her dream job—increasing literacy around the world.

Now at the end of its first decade, Room to Read has helped improve the lives of 5 million children in 10 countries in Asia and Africa. With volunteer chapters in 53 cities around the world, Room to Read continues to increase awareness and raise funds while advancing world literacy.

From awareness come understanding and tolerance—even more important today, as technology blurs borders. Ganju celebrates the world’s cultural differences daily. “We try to really live our values of respecting diversity and supporting local initiative in everything we do at Room to Read.”

—Leslie F. Miller

Brian Ganz, Peab ’93 (AD)

Etude, Chopin?

I

n 16 hours, you could drive from any Johns Hopkins Baltimore campus to Memphis, with time to stop for lunch in Nashville along the way. You could run the New York City Marathon three and a half times. You could watch Gone with the Wind four times through, including a bathroom break or two.

For Brian Ganz, playing Chopin is a labor of love.

the first was written when Chopin was just 7. Ganz arranged the show around an idea he calls “musical gardening”—playing an early form of a work (say, a rondo) and then playing one from later in the composer’s life— to show the extent of Chopin’s artistic development.

“The early works sowed the seeds,” he says, “and the more mature ones showed the full flowering.”

At the series premiere, Ganz performed early polonaises and an early waltz and mazurka, following them with later works, such as Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat (Heroic), op. 53, composed in 1842, when he was 32. The setup introduced audiences to the breadth of the artist’s career, his progression from child prodigy to major composer, and also helped prepare Ganz for the challenge ahead.

“There’s a lot of joy, a lot of beauty,” he says of the remaining performances. It will be a challenge but one he faces with excitement and dedication, declaring simply, “It’s a labor of love.”

—Laura Dattaro

Sam Kittner

Or, if you’re Brian Ganz, you could use those hours to play every piano piece Frederic Chopin ever composed—a project he has begun, though he will be spreading out the works with a few concerts each year over the next 10 years.

Ganz grew up listening to his grandfather play piano, and started playing himself at age 9. His parents, both English teachers and music lovers, exposed their children to all kinds of art, literature, and music. Chopin, though, touched him like no other, beginning a lifelong passion for the composer’s work.

An accomplished recording artist who has performed across Europe, Asia, and America, Ganz always dreamed of playing Chopin’s oeuvre in its entirety. So, when music director and National Philharmonic conductor Piotr Gajewski called him to suggest a project doing just that, he was thrilled. “It’s what I’ve been aiming for, working for, dreaming of,” Ganz says.

Most of Chopin’s works are for solo piano, but he also wrote chamber music and pieces for piano and orchestra. For the latter, Ganz will be accompanied by Gajewski and the National Philharmonic; other times, musicians will be selected to accompany Ganz as needed.

Two-thirds of the pieces he has performed previously, but with this run, he’ll be starting fresh, relearning those he already knows and getting to know the rest for the first time. The feat requires an intense practice regimen—Ganz is aiming for 15 hours of practice every week. It will be a hard task, he says, to fit in the time around teaching at both Peabody and St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where he is an artist-in-residence, and raising his 13-year-old son. But for him, Chopin is worth finding the time. He prefers practicing in the morning, when the day is fresh, but sometimes finds himself practicing in the middle of the night. “Practicing is sort of catch as catch can,” he says. “Life is quite full and it can be quite challenging to find a steady practice schedule.”

Still, Ganz and Gajewski already have their first performances under their belts. The opening concert started with the composer’s early works;

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 61

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Abby Glassenberg, A&S ’97

Bird by the Hand

A

s a student, Abby Glassenberg was the girl who had all the stuff: She had thread, she had scissors, she had glue, material, glitter—anything and everything crafty and creative.

She even had the sewing machine she bought in eighth grade with her bat mitzvah money. She was also the only one, she thinks, who took every art class Johns Hopkins had to offer. Glassenberg won the Eugene Leake Award for achievement in the Homewood Art Workshops (along with Kenjiro Tajima) the first year it was offered.

A history major, she became a teacher after graduation and earned a master’s degree in education from Harvard, but she never truly strayed from her artistic tendencies. About five years ago, in search of a hobby after the birth of her daughters, she began creating plush toys for kids. The toys gave her an outlet for the skills she’d harbored all her life, and opened up an online community of like-minded women with whom she could bond.

But she soon found plush was not quite her style.

“I have a harder-edged aesthetic,” she says. “I like things that aren’t so cute.”

And so were her bird sculptures born. Inspired in part by her husband’s interest in bird watching, and by the multitudes of shapes, sizes, colors, and personalities in the avian world, she began creating “toys for grown-ups,” little decorative birds made from wire, fabric, recycled materials, and anything Glassenberg felt would accentuate them.

The whimsical little birds became popular at craft shows. She hosted her own trunk show and contributed to other crafters’ books. Now, after two and a half years of bird making, she has her own book, released in January. The Artful Bird: Feathered Friends to Make and

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Recycled materials create new beauty in Abby Glassenberg’s imaginative bird sculptures.

Sew (Interweave Press, 2010) includes 16 patterns for birds ranging from a simple wren to imaginative flamingos and colorful peacocks. They can be made with natural colors to create a realistic model, or with colorful materials and kitschy accents to create a wholly different animal.

“Each bird is like a little canvas that you can embellish and decorate and set up like an installation,” Glassenberg says of her birds, which can stand alone with the support of wire legs and innards.

Glassenberg remains loyal to her roots. She still uses the same sewing machine she bought all those years ago, and continues to actively participate in the online craft world through her blog whileshenaps .typepad.com, named for her practice of sewing and stitching while her three young daughters sleep.

—LD

Abraham Akoi, A&S ’10 (MAG/MBA)

Lost and Found

Getty Images

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young boy can experience few hardships greater than the loss of his family—a father and three brothers killed in a civil war. Factor in hundreds of miles traversed on foot to flee the fighting and years spent in refugee camps, and you have described the difficult early life of Abraham Akoi.

Akoi was only 11 when he was separated from his family while South Sudan was under siege during the country’s second civil war. More than 27,000 boys met similar fates. They came to be known as the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a name bestowed on the orphaned refugees by relief organizations searching for international help.

“The label reminds me of what I went through as a child,” says Akoi. Though his early life was a constant struggle, Akoi says it taught him to be strong—and even optimistic. “While we Lost Boys were deprived of parental love, care, and guidance, we organized to care for each other.” He adds, “I found great joy in shouldering responsibility for others and was very enthusiastic about life, even after spending days without anything to eat.”

In 2001, various international relief organizations relocated the Lost Boys all over the world, with about 3,800 Sudanese refugees arriving in Atlanta, Georgia.

Akoi, then 21, was among them. Although a few of them had trouble assimilating, many, like Akoi, excelled. He earned undergraduate degrees in history and economics, then came to Johns Hopkins to pursue a dual master’s in government/MBA. “I knew my education was not for me alone,” says Akoi, who always had in mind the goal of returning someday to help his country.

In 2009, Akoi became a professional consultant to Sudan’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning,

Orphaned at 11, a Lost Boy returns to South Sudan in a new role: founding father. assisting government agencies with 2010 budget plans.

Earlier this year, after an overwhelming majority of South Sudanese voted to secede from the North, Akoi began working for South Sudan’s Ministry of Finance team drafting the country’s new development plan.

Before that monumental vote, provisions had been made for the Lost Boys to cast their ballots from various sites in the United States. However, Akoi and many of his lost brothers chose instead to return to their homeland to cast their votes and contribute to the new government. “My dream is making South Sudan a place of hope where business can grow and people can prosper—by creating opportunities, improving public services, raising government efficiency, and enforcing law and order as well as accountability.”

In a life already full of long and difficult journeys, perhaps the most challenging of all will be from Lost Boy to founding father. Still, it is a role Akoi relishes. “I love the United States,” he says, “and it is my hope that South Sudan models itself after the USA.” —LM

Shelf Life

We’ll always have Paris Five Hundred Buildings of Paris, text by Kathy Borrus, A&S ’98 (MA), photos by Jorg Brockmann and James Driscoll (Black Dog & Leventhal) At 3 pounds and over 600 slick pages, this guidebook extraordinaire is worth any overage on your flight to Paris. Maps and photos are arranged according to the city’s 20 arrondissements, with Île de la Cité and La Défense as bonus chapters. This reasoned approach distills the enormity of Paris into accessible walking tours. One-paragraph histories of each building and neighborhood tell walkers all they are likely to absorb between cafe stops—with evocative images of architectural curiosities along the way.

French Lessons, by Ellen Sussman, A&S ’78 (MA) (Ballantine Books) If your purpose in Paris is romance, tuck these 256 pulpy pages—in their way, a guidebook, too—in a pocket. The novel accompanies three Americans who find that flings are the thing in the city by the Seine. The male falls in with a lovely tutor his actress wife hired to sharpen his skills in the local idiom—proving that a little French can go a long way. Rendezvous culminate in the beds of various locals, and these chapters also start with maps of Paris. But the love and sex lost and found here are universal.

—Lew Diuguid, SAIS ’63 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 63

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Johns Hopkins Volunteer Summit

Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age

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partnership with the University of Baltimore’s School of Communications Design, aimed to create a literary database via wiki application of the neighborhoods to the south of the Homewood campus. Students used photography, essays, and fiction to explore the neighborhoods and their histories. “Young, creative people will put any medium to good use to express and explore ideas,” says Davies. “And they don’t think or worry about the things we often worry about with socalled new technology. They’ve been using it for most, if not all, of their lives.”

Another example is the Interactive Map Tool, a Johns Hopkins–developed program that supports “digital field assignments,” or course activities in which students collect and analyze data from the field using digital technologies such as cameras and audio recorders.

Originally designed for large lecture courses in general biology, the software has since been adapted for course

ohns Hopkins University’s first website, JHUniverse, debuted in 1994. That’s the year most of this fall’s incoming freshmen were born. Those students may search “the catalog” online, but it’s unlikely that many of them have actually thumbed through a card catalog looking for a call number. They probably remember the launch of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, which were all founded within the last seven years, but today’s freshmen were only about 7 years old when Wikipedia went live, and 4 years old when the rest of us started Googling. For Johns Hopkins undergraduates today, social media, handheld computing, and high-powered search engines are as much a part of the university experience as a cappella groups, all-night study sessions, and lacrosse games.

And it’s not just “One of the things we are seeing across campus students. Digital communication technology is the desire—from faculty and students alike—to has had an undeniable impact on everything we leverage students’ facility with technology to create do at the university, from researchers sharing data what we’re calling ‘authentic learning experiences.’” across disciplines to faculty using technology in the classroom. “Teaching and Learning in the Digital work in the humanities, with Museum Studies students Age” was one of the topics discussed at last fall’s Volcurating virtual exhibits using floor plans from venerunteer Summit, a gathering of more than 350 Johns able institutions like the Louvre. Reese believes this is Hopkins University leaders, faculty, alumni, parents, just the kind of tool that foretells the future of digital students, and friends. Of particular interest were the technology in education: “Basically, we are using techchallenges of data management and using technology nologies our students are already familiar with to proto enhance traditional classroom learning. mote critical thinking, help facilitate research-infused “One of the things we are seeing across campus is education, and increase student-faculty and studentthe desire—from faculty and students alike—to leverstudent interaction.” age students’ facility with technology to create what As faculty deal with how to use technology in the we’re calling ‘authentic learning experiences,’” says Mike classroom, they also grapple with how to use it in their Reese, assistant director of the Center for Educational research. Data collected and stored electronically has Resources at Johns Hopkins and a Volunteer Summit made life easier for everyone—few are the hardy souls participant. Reese says he shares concerns expressed by who would rather comb through medical journals by many faculty about students’ ability to focus while swimhand than search using a database like PubMed—but ming in a stream of texts, Tweets, and status updates. issues of storage, retrievability, and integrity have only But he also suggests that the kind of hybrid model gotten more challenging. Massive amounts of data crealready employed in many classrooms around Johns ated by researchers need to be preserved and curated Hopkins—where students and faculty capitalize on the so they can be accessed and built on with confidence best of both the virtual and the actual world—may be by future generations. For example, when in 2000 the the most appropriate response to so much of the handSloan Digital Sky Survey began gathering and analyzing wringing that takes place among the punditocracy about images of the universe, it collected more data in its first “kids these days” and how they learn. few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history A class like Writing Central Baltimore, for example, of astronomy. would not be possible without digital technology, says To complicate matters, researchers are beginning session participant Tristan Davies, A&S ’87 (MA), senior to see how those huge datasets can be used across lecturer in the Writing Seminars. The class, offered in disciplines. “Data from one discipline may be incred64 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Wesley Bedrosian

Chiao says Cairo and other cities suffer from an “epidemic” of routine stalking, grabbing, and molestation of women on public streets.

ibly useful for researchers in an entirely different field,” says session participant Sayeed Choudhury, Engr ’88, ’90 (MS), director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries. Choudhury is the principal investigator on the $20 million National Science Foundation DataNet project and is leading an effort to safeguard the long-term integrity of data and encourage data sharing and collaboration. Over the next few years, Choudhury’s team, which includes researchers from the Whiting School of Engineering, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Medicine, will be developing a data-management infrastructure that should make interdisciplinary research easier.

Clearly, digital technology has fundamentally changed the education landscape for faculty and stu-

dents alike. Those changes must be engaged and wrestled with—at Volunteer Summit sessions and beyond— in the Johns Hopkins tradition of taking the world’s problems into labs and classrooms and figuring out solutions. Interestingly, students participating in the session were eager to point out the limits of the virtual world, at least insofar as it relates to getting a college education. Digital media is an integral part of student life, they said, but they bristled at the suggestion that online education could replace the traditional, hands-on model of learning. The social interactions, the lessons learned around the seminar table, and the bonds forged through shared experiences remain to them central to the larger idea of getting an education.

—Brian Shields, A&S ’08 (MA) Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 65

Mo Fun, Mo Adventure: Mo Baldwin Getting to know the new executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association

L

ong before anyone heard of a “bucket list”—where you write down all those things you intend to do before you kick the bucket—Mo Baldwin kept a running tally of her dreams and goals in the back of her Day-Timer. She still has that piece of paper. It’s looking a little dog-eared now, but when she runs her finger down the well-worn list, the stories tumble out.

Run the Boston Marathon: “I did that with a friend in 2001. It was a blast; there are people with you literally every step of the way.” Check.

Exotic travel: “I learned how to ride and guide elephants at a training camp in the Golden Triangle in Thailand. Growing up on a farm riding horses, it wasn’t all that different—just much bigger.” Check.

Skip Barber Racing School: “Well no, not yet anyway, but I’d love to learn to drive a formula race car.

It’s still on the list.” No check.

And her new job as executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association? “It’s not specifically on the list, but it definitely marks the fulfillment of many of the things I wrote down, especially involving leading a really dynamic organization with a multifaceted mission.” Check, check, and double check.

Throughout her career, Baldwin has helped both for-profit and nonprofit companies—ranging from Owens Corning to the Enterprise Foundation— meet new goals and realize new opportunities through thoughtful analysis and big-picture brainstorming. Baldwin is all about creating synergy, a word she likes to use in her new job to describe the ability to connect alumni to each other and to the university “I love going to the unexplored,” says Mo Baldwin, who ran the Boston Marathon and learned to guide elephants in Thailand.

66 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

in sometimes surprising ways. She says, “I see my role as helping to foster the alumni community by capitalizing on existing successes.”

A Maryland native (that family farm she grew up on was just north of Baltimore City), Baldwin left home to attend Princeton University, where she majored in art history. As an undergrad, her work included a senior thesis that delved into the emotional intentionality of the artwork of American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. She laughs about her attempt at formally explaining the emotional power of Rothko’s famous blocks of color, saying that project may have been at least partially responsible for her subsequent decision to go to business school at Northwestern.

Prior to assuming her new role in February, Baldwin worked as a consultant for multiple national clients, including Johns Hopkins University, where she helped conduct qualitative research to help different Johns Hopkins schools and centers plan for future growth. “Working with different parts of the university gave me a unique perspective and especially gave me some insights into the graduate experience,” she says. “What I like to do is pull together various threads, form new combinations, and in some way create a new picture. Johns Hopkins is a wonderful place to do that.”

—Mike Field, A&S ’97 (MA)

Alumni

News & Notes

1943

Alan Schwartzman, Engr ’43, a retired architect, writes that his son Paul Schwartzman, Engr ’82, is working with a wind energy company in Dublin and his other son, Eric, is teaching in Moscow.

1946

Sarah V. Bangs-Dinehart, Nurs ’46, is retired and living in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

1948

Eugene Blank, A&S ’48, Med ’54, has published two books: Pediatric Images (Lippincott-Raven, 1995) and USMC 457703 (Trafford, 2006).

Graycie M. Cameron, Nurs ’48, is living closer to her sister in Palm Harbor, Florida.

Patricia G. Moulis, Nurs ’48, has moved to Louisiana to be closer to two of her children and gets to enjoy Mardi Gras every year.

from our graduates and friends

1962

James Alex Gardner, Med ’62, took the Johns Hopkins University alumni cruise to the Lesser Antilles islands in March.

Larry F. Pifer, Engr ’62, is retired and lives in Tilghman Island, Maryland. He and his wife have three sons and eight grandchildren.

Ralph V. Turner, A&S ’62 (PhD), will have his book, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Yale University Press, 2009) published in French and German translations.

Fred P. Yoder, Engr ’62, who retired from Smith Barney in May 2009, enjoys time with his family and traveling with friends.

1965

George C. Buzby Jr., A&S ’51 (MA), ’55 (PhD), is an Episcopal Eucharistic visitor and chaplain.

Brian D. Briscoe, Med ’65 (PGF), is an attending radiologist at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Joan Ellen Corbett, SAIS Bol ’65 (Dipl), SAIS ’66, is retired from active duty in the U.S. diplomatic foreign service.

R. Bruce Fisher III, Engr ’65, Bus ’68, was the business planner and manager for the volunteer committee that published The History of Utica (2010).

Margaret Huff Leiendecker, Nurs ’65, is retired and living in Virginia.

Her son Drew has returned home from his fourth deployment and her family will be traveling to Hawaii in April for her other son’s wedding.

Benjamin Rosenberg, A&S ’65, has stepped down as managing partner of Rosenberg, Martin, Greenberg LLP, a business law firm in Maryland, but is staying on as chairman of the firm.

Cecelia Tichi, A&S ’65 (MA), published Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us) (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

1953

1966

1949

Harry B. Marcoplos, A&S ’49, ’58 (MA), enjoyed participating in the reopening of Gilman Hall in 2010.

William F. Rienhoff III, Med ’49, HS ’50, ’58, Med ’58 (PGF), is a retired surgeon living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

1951

Richard E. Edwards, Engr ’53, ’56 (MS), is proud to announce the addition of two more great-grandchildren to his family.

T. Scott McCay, Med ’53, retired from radiology practice in 2007 and is keeping busy with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Catherine Gontero Ryder, Nurs ’53, regretfully informs her classmates that her husband, Al S. Ryder, died February 3, 2010.

1954

Henry J. Doherty Jr., A&S ’54, who has 21 grandchildren, has been spending time boating and fishing.

1956

Norma G. Jackson, Nurs ’56, volunteers at a health care facility in Melrose, Minnesota.

Rowland King, Engr ’56, will be attending a wedding on April 30 and is sorry to miss his 55th reunion.

Dale D. Stewart, A&S ’56, is a consultant who deals with issues relating to disaster preparedness, risk analysis, and operational security planning.

1958

Anthony W. Salem, A&S ’58, an orthopedic surgeon, writes that his son Jonathon L. Salem, A&S ’10, recently graduated from Johns Hopkins.

1959

Edmund L. Auchter, SAIS ’59, is retired and living in South Florida.

1960

June M. Pankey, Ed ’60 (MAT), and her husband celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last July.

1961

Julia G. Bolton, Nurs ’61, is beginning her second three-year term as a trustee of the Northern Berkshire Health System in Massachusetts.

Diane D. Fortuna, A&S ’61 (MA), ’67 (PhD), published Cent’Anni!

(Authorhouse, June 2010), a story of an Italian immigrant family.

Daniel Gordon, A&S ’61, is a semiretired lawyer and a private pilot who has been happily married for many years and has six grandchildren.

Clarinda Harriss, A&S ’61 (MA), is a professor emerita at Towson University in Maryland, as well as editor and director of BrickHouse Books.

Newsmaker

Glen R. Grell, A&S ’78, was re-elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in November 2010, serving his fourth two-year term.

Bruce D. Fisher, A&S ’66, presented “Tuberculosis in History and the Arts” at the 48th annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, which took place October 2010 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Don Mankin, A&S ’66 (MA), ’68 (PhD), an adventure travel expert, was quoted in the January-February issue of National Geographic Traveler.

1968

Vernon T. Tolo, Med ’68, HS ’70, ’75, is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery.

1969

Dennis A. Estis, A&S ’69, was elected a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

Kathleen M. Hunter, Nurs ’69, is an associate professor at Chamberlain College of Nursing in Arlington, Virginia.

Irving A. Williamson, SAIS ’69, was named vice chairman of the U.S. International Trade Commission in November 2010.

1971

Stephen L. Bartlett, A&S ’71, will be retiring in June from the McCallie School, a private boys boarding and day school in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Edward Dougherty, A&S ’71, a dentist in Ocean City, Maryland, traveled to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands during a January intersession course.

Thomas C. Knott, A&S ’71, has retired from the Food and Drug Administration and is now an independent engineering consultant.

J. Brent Ricks, A&S ’71, an attorney in Albuquerque, has started several companies, ranging from book publishing to fiberglass tank manufacturing.

J. Ronald Rowes, A&S ’71, became director of medical management and utilization for the North Shore Long Island Jewish Healthcare System, effective April 1.

Elliot Sirkin, A&S ’71, is a midcareer graduate of the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard. His articles, interviews, and book reviews have appeared in several national publications.

1972

Romesh Batra, Engr ’72 (PhD), has been selected to appear on ISIHighlyCited.com because of his exceptional citation count in the field Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 67

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

of engineering. Thomson Reuters’ ISIHighlyCited.com is a free, publicly available website intended to highlight the world’s most cited authors from the past 25 years.

1973

Newsmaker

John R. Chiles, A&S ’73, a partner at Burr and Forman LLP in Alabama, was selected as a fellow of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers in January.

Abdul Ilah Khatib, SAIS ’88, former foreign minister of Jordan, was named the new U.N. special envoy for humanitarian affairs in Libya on March 7.

1974

Maria Cordova, Med ’74 (PGF), retired from dentistry in March 2010.

1977

Alan A. Abramowitz, A&S ’77, is practicing law in Baltimore and has two grandchildren.

1978

David E. Lilienfeld, A&S ’78, Engr ’80 (MS), Bus ’01 (MBA), runs the Drug and Safety Department at Ambit Bioscience Corporation in San Diego, California.

Gary Schaake Stewart, SPH ’78, a pediatrician practicing in Virginia for 26 years, also serves as chairman of the contract committee of Piedmont Community Health Plan.

1979

John A. Bannigan, SPH ’79, an international consultant and editor, lectures on Middle East politics for senior citizen organizations.

Wendy Prioleau, Ed ’79, mentors first- and second-year teachers in Baltimore.

1980

John A. Akinyemi, SPH ’80, retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in September 2006.

1981

Catherine Borrie, SPH ’81, has written two books on Alzheimer’s: You Say Goodbye and I Say Hello (Nightwing Press, 2010) and The Long Hello: The Other Side of Alzheimer’s (Nightwing Press, 2010).

Jack Kushner, HS ’81, has two new publications: When Universities Are Destroyed: How Tulane University and University of Alabama Rebuilt After Disaster (iUniverse, 2010) and Courageous Judicial Decisions in Alabama (iUniverse, 2011).

Shelia Faith Weiss, A&S ’81 (MA), ’83 (PhD), a history professor, has published The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

1982

Michael A. Bruno, A&S ’82, writes: “When I brought my daughter to attend a Hopkins open house, we were assigned a student tour guide to show us around campus. We discovered that he was living in the same Wolman Hall apartment that I had occupied in the early 1980s. What this young man had learned about the unit, which I never knew, was that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had once rented the same apartment in the 1920s!”

1984

Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center in Garrison, New York.

Mary Donofrio, A&S ’85, is an associate professor in pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine as well as a cardiologist at the Children’s National Medical Center.

Andrew J. Patrick, A&S ’85, is a security engineer at Secureworks.com.

1986

Nathalie Barbé-Coquelle, A&S ’86, spent 1991–2001 at the Council of Europe Development Bank in urban Paris, and now lives in rural Provence, making wine.

Laurence Mermelstein, Engr ’86, a partner with Long Island Spine Specialists, and his wife have two children: 16-year-old Ben and 14-yearold Sarah.

Robin (Gugenheim) Witkin, A&S ’86, a pediatrician in Silver Spring, Maryland, has three children; her daughter Rachel is a freshman at Johns Hopkins.

1987

Brenda Greenberg, A&S ’87, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Department of State, “encourages other Hopkins grads to consider public service as a career.”

Doug McLeod, A&S ’87, was appointed the energy commissioner of Maui County, Hawaii, in December 2010. McLeod, a former environmental lawyer, continues to work on renewable energy systems.

1988

Kenneth Harvey Homer Jr., Bus ’88, a senior analyst at BRTRC Inc., a technology resource organization, is assigned to U.S. Army Research Development and Engineering Command.

Maurice Linbergh Jones Jr., Engr ’88, is the owner of Jones Farm, located in Harford County, Maryland.

Amy Marshall Lambrecht, A&S ’88, is the associate vice president for resource development at Women in Cable Telecommunications.

1990

Scott A. Marks, Engr ’90, was promoted to director within the affordable housing section of Coats Rose Yale Ryman and Lee, a law firm in Austin, Texas.

Scott A. McWilliams, Engr ’90, the chief operating officer for Management Resources Group Inc., was elected to a three-year term on the board of directors of Baltimore Reads in February.

Richard Evan Steele, SPH ’90, is the co-founder and director of Vitacinternational, an enterprise dedicated to promoting and developing social justice and human capacity.

1991

Marc A. Cordaro, Engr ’91 (MA), is the director of research and development for Philips’ Emergency Care Solutions.

Patsy Tassler Kelso, A&S ’91, SPH ’00 (PhD), is the state epidemiologist for infectious disease at the Vermont Department of Health.

1992

Melisa Hayes, A&S ’92, and her husband are pleased to announce the birth of their third daughter, Miranda, born October 11, 2010.

Vlassis Travias, A&S ’92, and his wife welcomed their third daughter, Melina Haris, into their lives.

1993

Debra Kuchka Craig, SPH ’84, was elected to the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s board of directors, effective June 1, 2010.

Lester Martinez-Lopez, SPH ’84, is working as a senior medical consultant.

Louis Rosenblatt, A&S ’84 (PhD), has published Rethinking the Way We Teach Science (Routledge, 2011), which explores how to better engage students in the classroom.

John Garvish, A&S ’93, a litigator, was promoted to head McKool Smith’s office in Austin, Texas.

1985

1995

Norm Barker, Ed ’85 (MSEd), a biomedical photographer and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was appointed to the Journal of BioCommunications board in February.

Sharon Crockett, A&S ’85, graduated from Parsons The New School for Design and has been consulting on interior restoration at 68 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

1994

Rebecca Jo Plant, A&S ’94 (MA), ’02 (PhD), published Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Adam E. Bergman, A&S ’95, joined Deutsche Bank as a director in the cleantech investment banking group, which is based in San Francisco.

Jessica Anya Blau, A&S ’95 (MA), a teacher at Baltimore’s Goucher College, published her second novel, Drinking Closer to Home (Harper Perennial, 2011).

Donna L. Harrington, Bus ’95, an engineer for General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, is also opening a unique vacation spot in April 2011 on Kent Island, Maryland.

Thomas M. McNamara Jr., Engr ’95 (MA), a program area manager of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, was appointed president and CEO of Virginia Tech’s newly established Applied Research Corporation in January.

1996

Melissa M. Agoudemos, Engr ’96, is assistant professor of pediatrics at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

1997

Michael Lee Makfinsky, Bus ’97 (MS), ’02 (MBA), joined CSC North American Public Sector in November 2010 as the senior principal lead for cyber and information operations initiatives.

1998

Brian Wm. Higgins, Engr ’98 (MA), was elected partner to Blank Rome LLP in December 2010. Higgins is a member of the Intellectual Property Litigation Group and practices in the firm’s Washington office.

2000 Cyndie Chang, A&S ’00, and Philip Cheng were married August 21, 2010, in Malibu, California.

Kathryn S. Offringa, SAIS ’00, is president and CEO of North American Insulation Manufacturers Association.

2001 Christine Keiner, A&S ’01 (PhD), has published The Oyster Question (University of Georgia Press, 2009).

Renee W. Levine-Packer, A&S ’01 (MLA), has published her first book, This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo (Oxford University Press, July 2010).

Sharada V. Rao, Peab ’01, is an actuary with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Policy and Planning.

Meredith G. Safford, A&S ’01 (PhD), Med ’04 (PGF), has returned to Johns Hopkins as a full-time coordinator for the Center for Biotechnology for Advanced Academic Programs.

Pia Saunders, A&S ’01, and her husband, Robin Campbell, welcomed their son, Satya Christopher Campbell, on February 18.

2002

anticipates graduating from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2012.

Kelly Nettleton Kennedy, SPH ’07, has one son and another baby due in July. Kennedy has started a nutrition and public health communications counseling firm.

Ryan P. McCaffrey, Engr ’07, is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Richard Pardoe, Bus ’07, is a vice president at MT&T Realty Capital Corporation in Baltimore.

Newsmaker

2008

Amy L. Rohrbaugh, Ed Nicole K. Baur, Nurs ’08, is living in Minnesota and working toward her ’98 (MS), established the doctor of nursing practice degree in Frannie Foundation in July family care.

2010 to enhance the lives Michael Doneger, A&S ’08, a former Hopkins lacrosse player, produced of individuals who suffer a commercial, “Elevator Girl,” that was from diabetes and other a PepsiMax Finalist for the 2011 Super Bowl XLV. cardiovascular-related diseases.

Lisa Friedman, A&S ’08 (MA), has written several books and articles for national publication, including Nothing to Lose (Creative Arts Book Company, 2000) and Capital Baby (Resource Book, 1990).

Brooke Kenny, A&S ’08 (MA), wrote her first novel, Echoes of Her (All Things That Matter Press, 2011).

Rachel Poor, A&S ’08, will be attending the University of Oxford for a master’s degree in water science, policy, and management in the fall.

Sanjay Srikantiah, SAIS ’08, lives in Arlington, Virginia, and is a program analyst at the Department of State. He also advises young professionals in foreign policy strategy.

2009

Hannah N. Laberteaux, A&S ’09, is serving in the Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa.

Josiah Mark Mueller, Nurs ’09, writes that he loves working in the pediatric emergency room at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

James Robbins, A&S ’09, is an artillery fire direction officer and platoon leader in the storied 4th Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, based out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, deployed to East Paktika, Afghanistan, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

In memoriam Elizabeth M. Kanne, SPH ’33, died March 15, 2010, in San Jose, California.

Mathy Milling Downing, Ed ’02 (MS), was featured in a documentary, Dead Wrong, which addresses the potential adverse effects of overprescription, especially in children.

William McClean, A&S ’35, a retired teacher, football coach, and counselor, died January 26 in Baltimore.

2003

Stuart W. Bruchey, A&S ’43, A&S ’46 (MA), A&S ’55 (PhD), a teacher and author, died December 20, 2010, in Austin, Texas.

Mike Blaine, A&S ’03, was named the assistant men’s basketball coach at Cornell University in October 2010.

2005

Brigitta Kral, Ed ’05 (MA), has launched a line of bath and body products called Briggy’s Bath & Body.

Joseph Selba, A&S ’05, and Lindsey Kiddoo, A&S ’07, were married November 13, 2010. Both practice law in Baltimore.

Byung “Jason” Yoon, A&S ’05, received his PhD in physiology, development, and neuroscience from University of Cambridge, Trinity College, in November 2010.

2006

Walter S. Koski, A&S ’41, ’42 (PhD), died February 26 in Baltimore.

Burton V. Matthews, A&S ’43, a surgeon, died January 24 in Wyandotte, Michigan.

Frances (Wisnewski) Bailey, Nurs ’44 (Cert), an artist and WWII veteran, died December 10, 2010, in Bethesda, Maryland.

Charles D. Sherman Jr., Med ’45, a cancer surgeon, died February 8 in Pittsford, New York.

Betty F. Daskin, A&S ’46 (MA), a community advocate and educator, died December 10, 2010, in Baltimore.

Betty Carlson Campazzi, Nurs ’47 (Cert), a nurse and educator, died February 3 in Palm Beach, Florida.

Debra F. Charles, Bus ’06, is a senior research operations analyst for the U.S. Air Force.

Mark Nicastre, A&S ’06, ’10 (MA), has worked as a political consultant and communications director for a congressman on Capitol Hill since his graduation.

Caroline Powers, A&S ’06 (MA), works in the Washington office of O’Neil and Associates, a government and public relations firm.

Betty Lou Raskin, A&S ’47 (MA), Ed ’64 (Cert), A&S ’68 (PhD), a scientific researcher and spokeswoman, died December 17, 2010, in Baltimore.

2007

Thomas D. Dawes, Eng ’48, a retired civil engineer, died November 5, 2010, in Towson, Maryland.

Koyi Choi, A&S ’07, has started her fourth year of graduate school and

Henry Otto Schulze, Bus ’47, a biochemist for the federal government, who lived to the age of 99, died on January 2 in Towson, Maryland.

Charles Barlow, HS ’48, a pioneer in the field of pediatric neurology, died December 11, 2010, in Cohasset, Massachusetts.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 69

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Stanley I. Greenebaum, A&S ’48, a WWII veteran and business executive, died July 8, 2010, in Baltimore.

Charles Gordon Winter, Med ’66 (PGF), of Little Rock, Arkansas, who was a teacher and scientist, died on December 3, 2010.

Robert Wayne McCollum, Med ’48, an epidemiologist, died on September 13, 2010, in Etna, New Hampshire.

John A. Hammond Jr., A&S ’67, of Ohio, died March 1.

Charlotte Williams Allen, A&S ’49 (PhD), a political science professor, died January 23 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

William M. Benesch, A&S ’49 (MA), ’52 (PhD), a WWII veteran and physics professor, died September 17, 2010, in Washington.

Edgar A.C. Curran Jr., Engr ’49, formerly of Baltimore, died on January 28 in Syracuse, New York.

Louis V. Koerber, Engr ’49, an industrial engineer, business owner, and a past president of the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association, died February 18 in Towson, Maryland.

Newsmaker

Donald Harting, SPH ’50 (MA), an educator and community activist, died January 2 in Pennsylvania.

Shane Levesque, Peab ’03 (MA), has been appointed coordinator of the MMus Degree Programme at the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts, where he is a senior lecturer in Historical Performance Practices.

Vivian O’Brien, A&S ’50 (MA), Engr ’54 (MSE), ’60 (PhD), a former Johns Hopkins researcher, died December 24, 2010, in Baltimore.

Robert E. Sandell Jr., A&S ’50, a former college coach and sports official, died January 28 in Baltimore.

John C. “Jack” Kistler, A&S ’51, Med ’55, a WWII veteran and doctor of internal medicine, died January 7 in Louisiana.

Shepard Nash Dunn, Med ’52, ’54 (PGF), HS ’56, an ophthalmologist, died February 19 in Southport, North Carolina.

James C. Baatz, A&S ’53 (MA), a U.S. veteran and research chemist, died December 9, 2010, in Massachusetts.

Robert B. Hinman, A&S ’53 (PhD), a former English professor and WWII veteran, died January 2 in Pittsburgh.

George T. Nager, HS ’53, one of the world’s leading otological surgeons and otopathologists, died December 9, 2010, in Baltimore.

A. Jefferson Penfield, Med ’53, an OB/GYN for over 30 years, died February 5 in Longboat Key, Florida.

David G. Connor, SAIS ’54, Med ’62, a physician and Vietnam veteran, died January 14 in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Alvin J. Levy, Engr ’54, a U.S. Navy veteran and engineer at Martin Marietta Corporation, died August 6, 2010, in Florida.

Ambrish P. Mathur, Med ’67 (PGF), a thoracic cardiovascular surgeon, died January 12 in New York.

Louis J. Busby Jr., Engr ’68, who worked for MSA, a manufacturer of safety products, died February 28 in Damariscotta, Maine.

Kempton Dunn, SAIS ’68 (MA), former vice president of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, died January 25 in Hawaii.

Richard Francis Oles, Bus ’68, a former Johns Hopkins fencing coach and master fencer, died January 27 in Baltimore.

William Harry “Bill” Schwarz, Bus ’68, of Severna Park, Maryland, who worked for a Baltimore contracting company, died December 19, 2010.

David S. Bachman, Med ’69, HS ’73, ’76, a neurologist, died January 1 in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Lester Aubrey Wall Jr., HS ’69, a retired Baltimore internist, died January 18 in The Woodlands, Texas.

Claude Jean Aguillaume, SPH ’74, who was a consultant to the United Nations, died June 29, 2010, in France.

Hillel S. Panitch, SPH ’76 (PDF), HS ’76, a neurology professor and researcher, died December 23, 2010, in Williston, Vermont.

Bonnie McClellan Richards, Ed ’76 (MA), of Green Valley, Arizona, died January 24.

Iris H. Stevens, Ed ’78 (MA), an educator, of Columbia, Maryland, died November 8, 2010.

James T. Dwyer III, A&S ’79, Bus ’84 (MAS), a financial services executive, of Princeton, New Jersey, died February 28.

Robert V. Walsh, A&S ’82 (MLA), a retired advertising executive and meteorologist, died December 14, 2010, in Towson, Maryland.

Gary Kruh, HS ’85, former director of the University of Illinois at Chicago Cancer Center, died January 5.

David A. Newsome, Med ’85 (PGF), a researcher and former associate professor at the Wilmer Eye Institute, died February 27 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Amy Alison Otstot, SPH ’87, who worked in health care for over 20 years, died October 11, 2010, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

John William Esther, Med ’89 (PGF), HS ’90, an anesthesiologist, died January 24 in Missouri.

John Edward Hardy, A&S ’56 (PhD), of Louisiana, died August 13, 2010.

Alison Snow Jones, SPH ’91 (PhD), an associate professor at Drexel University, died January 17 in Philadelphia.

Raymond P. Srsic, Med ’57, HS ’58, ’60, a pediatrician and associate professor, died June 25, 2009, in Baltimore.

Keith E. Elsam, Bus ’96 (MS), a manager for John Deere Inc., died January 30 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

John P. Doering, A&S ’58, a former Johns Hopkins chemistry professor, died December 13, 2010, in Maryland.

John Daniel Fullmer, Ed (MA) ’00, a mental health therapist, died September 4, 2010, in Baltimore.

Charlene Nelso Hennessy Haun, A&S ’59 (MA), a tax assessor and activist, died February 17 in Phillipsburg, New Jersey.

Myroslaw Zobniw, Bus ’60, A&S ’68 (MLA), of Baltimore, died July 27, 2010.

Robert S. Warnick, Bus ’62, a sales engineer and WWII veteran, died January 22 in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

James “Jimmy” Boyd Zachary, Med ’63 (PGF), died February 15 in Towson, Maryland.

William J. Evitts, A&S ’64, ’71 (PhD), a historical writer, educator, and former director of Johns Hopkins Alumni Relations, died December 14, 2010, in Towson, Maryland.

James R. Mattoon, Med ’64 (PGF), a researcher, died December 24, 2010, in Loveland, Colorado.

John J. Stamm, Engr ’64, a U.S. veteran, died December 14, 2010, in Delaware.

Bruce E. Dahrling II, Med ’65, an ophthalmologist and Vietnam veteran, died February 10 in Hixson, Tennessee.

George E. Vargo, Engr ’65, a retired Bendix Avoinics employee, died December 19, 2010, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

70 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

Alumni News & Notes Alumni Association President: Ray Snow, A&S ’70 Executive Director of Alumni Relations: Mo Baldwin Editors: Mike Field, A&S ’97 (MA), Lisa Belman Contributing Writer: Lew Diuguid, SAIS ’63 Contact us at: The JHU Office of Alumni Relations San Martin Center, Second Floor 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218-2696 410-516-0363/1-800-JHU-JHU1 (5481) alumni@jhu.edu alumni.jhu.edu Please send class notes to magnotes@jhu.edu. By submitting a class note, you give Johns Hopkins University permission to edit and publish your information in Johns Hopkins Magazine and in online publications.

The Alumni News & Notes section of Johns Hopkins Magazine is made possible by your annual Alumni Association membership dues. Annual dues are $50, $25 for classes 2006–2010. Lifetime membership dues are $1,000 or four annual installments of $250 each. For more information, visit alumni.jhu.edu/dues.

Golomb’s Answers

“Deranged!” Solutions Puzzle on page 15.

10.

8.

1.

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or Notes:

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3.

i. Here are definitions for some of the rarer words: • stela An inscribed standing stone monument (also spelled stele).

• asper A former Turkish monetary unit (1/120 of a piaster).

9.

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• Earps Wyatt and family.

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• presa A music symbol indicating when a new voice enters.

4.

• tripes Entrails of ruminants used as food.

or

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iii. See if you can find other sets of five or more letters with three mutual derangements.

or

or

ii. No. 10 was suggested by computer expert Donald Knuth. (If phrases are allowed, you could also add to this solution the derangement LARGE TIN or RINGLET A—but not both, because their fourth letters are the same.)

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Johns Hopkins M ag a z i n e

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We couldn’t have done it without your help!

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Our readers’ contributions make it possible for us to rank among the nation’s

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very best alumni magazines year after year. Your generous support is crucial to maintaining the editorial excellence that has become a hallmark of Johns Hopkins

7.

Magazine. If you’d like to make a donation, please send your check to:

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P.O. Box 64759

T A

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Johns Hopkins Magazine Gifts

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011 71

H o w To :

Succeed at Johns Hopkins 1

coached students competing for Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, and Fulbright scholarships, has gathered his best advice into a new book, Dean’s List: 11 Habits of Highly Successful College Students (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

He says that for students to succeed at Johns Hopkins (or anywhere, for that matter), they need to focus on learning instead of grades, pursue the things that interest them, and —Catherine Pierre own their educations. Here’s how.

2

Answer the question: What do you want to learn? This is a different question from, What should you be taking? Use your freshman year to explore, to listen to your hear t. A great education should feed and develop your natural curiosity.

Understand that majors and careers are not the same thing.

Students often don’t study what they love because they’re afraid it will be professional suicide. But American higher education isn’t about pre-professional training. Majors are a teaching device; they are not the key to your future.

3

4

Work smart, not just hard.Your professors expect a higher level of analysis and thought than simple memorization. By working smart, you think strategically, decide what makes sense, connect one concept to another. This calls for thoughtfulness, not just slavery to the grindstone.

72 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2011

When you’re struggling, understand why. It’s important that you and your academic adviser, your counselor, your family talk about what is distracting you, what is handicapping you. If you don’t do that honestly, you’re not going to fix it. And if you’re just looking for excuses, you’re going to get in big trouble.

Wesley Bedrosian

“Johns Hopkins students are intense, ambitious, and highly motivated,” says John Bader, who has been associate dean for undergraduate academic affairs for a decade and is leaving to begin private practice as an adviser. “But it cuts both ways. They can also be too competitive, care too much about what other people think, and pursue things because they think they have to rather than because they are curious.” Bader, who has advised freshmen and

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