Johns Hopkins University professor Martha S. Jones is one of the country’s leading historians and public intellectuals. In Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), she chronicled how free Black residents in Baltimore asserted their citizenship rights, ultimately helping enshrine the principle that all persons born in the United States are citizens. Her 2020 book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, won The Los Angeles Times book prize in history.

Jones’ newest book, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, tackles a more personal history, however. She investigates five generations of her own lineage, from rural Kentucky to small-town North Carolina to the Long Island suburbs where she grew up, each generation complicated by an ever-evolving color line. With painstaking archival research and graceful prose, Jones blends a legacy of enslavement, passing, Jim Crow, and colorism into a complex portrait of an American family over time in an all-too-often racist land and legal system.

There are people in this book, like your great-great-grandmother Isabella, whose stories I don’t think I’ll ever forget. As an enslaved woman, she gives birth to nine children by the man who owned her. Then, after the Civil War, she has the courage to go to court for child support.
My goodness, right? Isabella endured that hell, if I could put it that way, and she still had the presence of mind to get a complaint written out and take it to the Freedmen’s Bureau. And when she got no satisfaction, she had to find a way to raise her children. When we visit with our ancestors, they challenge us to learn, to understand them, and to live with them. I thought, if she could do that, I surely could learn her story and tell it in a fuller way than she ever was able to, at least on paper.

The anecdote about the college classmate who questions your right, because of your light skin, to be in a Black Studies course becomes more resonate as the memoir moves along.
He may have taught me something [about identity]. He certainly did about how I was going to hear a version of that question again and again across my lifetime. As a scholar of Black Studies, I could give a whole semester of lectures on how to answer that question. A family memoir is another one way to answer that question. The crux of it for me was how personal, how intimate it was, and only later I learned how to think of [race and color] in sociological terms, legal terms, and historical terms. In that moment, the searing part is how personal it feels.

Still, a memoir is a such departure from your previous books.
I had tried to write a family story like a historian, with some objectivity, with some distance, with historiographic questions in mind. I was holding back too much. The example of memoirists, novelists, and poets reminded me there are other ways of writing that let you put yourself and your imagination on the page.

The thing that really opens up the book for a broader understanding of race and color in this country is this legacy of so-called “mixed marriages,” segregation, and the societal rules around “whiteness.” Your parents’ marriage was not the first such marriage in your family.
The story of Mary Jones [a great-great-grandmother, who had lived as a white woman and married a free man of color in 1827], I had heard, but I hadn’t taken it seriously or I hadn’t really thought about what it meant to live by those terms. Then, to appreciate that her story opens up stories of many families, certainly where they lived in Central North Carolina, is humbling. They wrestled with the same questions about not fitting in, culturally and legally, into a nation that had tried to draw this indelible color line between so-called Black people or colored people, and so-called white people.

The current White House administration is banning books and has tried to erase certain stories. Have you considered how timely it is to bring forth these lives and stories that most people would’ve believed were not even knowable?
It’s a strong juxtaposition, right? There’s an insistence, which I hope the book makes, that we can learn and know a lot more than we think. The archives are not generous, but they give up more than they maybe were ever intended to give up, if we work them deliberately. The book absolutely sits for the proposition that there are still stories to tell and that these are American stories.

Walking into her first home health care visit 10 years ago, registered nurse Keli Gallagher didn’t know exactly what the next hour or  two would hold. Would her patient be doing well in his transition from hospital to home? Open to working with a stranger to move
toward better health and independence? Or struggling with his new reality?

Whatever the case, Gallagher knew that to really succeed—to ensure a patient recovering from a serious health crisis could heal and even thrive outside of a hospital setting—she’d need to provide more than medical care.

“Your first goal is to build that bond of trust,” says Gallagher, who provides services in Baltimore City and County for Bayada Home Health Care. “Then you get them to understand why you are in their home and what they can do themselves. Once you get that to happen, it’s amazing how much better people feel.”

Like many people released from the hospital to recover at home, Gallagher’s first patient was nervous. An avid baseball and football fan, the elderly man had suffered a serious exacerbation of his chronic illnesses and, though he was home, his challenges were far from over.

“He was overwhelmed and anxious about everything he had on his plate,” Gallagher recalls. After assessing him and ensuring he was safe, Gallagher got to work providing nursing care, plus a healthy dose of education and assurance. “I taught him and his wife how to manage his wounds and explained the chronic disease processes,” recalls Gallagher.

Over the next few weeks, Gallagher would return to the home regularly to provide care, assess her patient’s progress, offer encouragement, and connect the couple to community resources.

“The goal is to allow the patient to be confident and independent and then we just back off and supervise for a while,” she says.

Home health nurses like Gallagher are increasingly in demand due to an aging population, a rise in the prevalence of chronic conditions, shorter hospital stays, and a strong desire by many patients to remain in their home while they receive care. Such nurses provide essential skilled services—wound care, medication administration, post-surgical care, and disease management—and prepare patients and their families to manage their own treatment longer term.

For a patient hobbled with a fractured hip and newly home from the hospital, for example, Gallagher might visit one to three times a week for several weeks. “We go in to educate them on pain management, medications, diet, fluids, and fall prevention,” she explains. “I’m responsible for ensuring patients are safe and that they and their families are comfortable, confident, and competent in managing their care independently.”

To get the job done, Gallagher often coordinates with physical, occupational, and speech therapists, caregivers (like a spouse), and other health professionals involved in a patient’s care. She is among the roughly three percent of registered nurses who work in home health care, according to National Council of State Boards of Nursing.

Home health care is not the same as a private duty nurse, who may visit for longer blocks of time, for longer-term care, or to provide respite for family members or caregivers, with patients usually paying out of pocket. Home health nursing is often paid for by insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid for a limited period of time for patients deemed unable to leave their home for outpatient care.

“The benefit to the patient is that they get to stay in their home environment, they get one-on-one attention, a personalized plan of care, and a complete focus on them to meet their goals,” says Sarah Caro, a registered nurse and clinical assistant professor for Towson University’s Department of Nursing.

“Medicine is such a scary endeavor for so many people…I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, ‘I’ve never had a nurse who taught me this,’ or ‘I didn’t know this is available.’”

Caro, a nurse for 30 years, has worked in hospital settings as well as in home health care and hospice. “We know people do better at home. With proper support, they really can have positive outcomes.”

It’s a benefit that has ripple effects beyond the patient, with care provided in a patient’s home—whether it’s in a house, apartment, assisted living facility, or other space—freeing up inpatient resources and lessening the burden on families once a patient is discharged.

For nurses, home health care offers autonomy, flexibility, and the chance to move beyond the confines of a facility. There’s also—for patients on the path to recovery—the reward of seeing someone regain independence, says Caro.

“Often in the hospital we don’t get to see that,” she says. “We’re happy when they get to go home, but we don’t get to see that independence come back.”

Even when recovery isn’t in the cards, there is the opportunity to develop deep and lasting connections with patients and their families. Caro’s career is peppered with such connections, including a special bond with one elderly patient in failing health. She’d often linger to chat—and frequently laugh—with her after the visit.

“I would usually save her for late in the day because we sure did enjoy visiting,” Caro recalls. “We worked together so long and she sat me down one day and she said, ‘I just need to tell you—and I don’t want you to argue with me—I am ready to be comfortable.’ She felt like she had to break it to me gently that she wanted to be a hospice patient. It was really precious.” (Caro’s response: “Sweetie, we can do whatever you want.”)

Beyond the relationships there’s also the opportunity for nurses to employ a wide range of skills as they encounter varied health conditions. While some care boils down to the basics, home health nurses also may also find themselves providing the type of complex care that was once limited to inpatient settings. Thanks to increased access to telehealth, remote monitoring, and other advances, these services can now be delivered at home.

“One of the things I really like about home care nursing is it gives me the opportunity to really use all the tools in my toolbox and to continue learning as well,” says Dawn Workman, a clinical nurse manager with Johns Hopkins (JHU) Care at Home’s Personal Care division, which provides private pay services for patients seeking the care of a nurse or certified nursing assistants.

On a typical day this spring, Workman started her day with a visit to a post-partum patient, then moved on to an elderly woman who needed drain and dressing care, plus help with medications, then on to a kidney transplant patient to draw labs and collect a urine sample. The day ended with a quick check-in on a patient who had a debilitating medical condition that has required extensive surgeries.

The variety requires home health nurses to be “expert generalists,” as JHU’s Care at Home likes to think of them. “There is really nothing typical about it,” says Workman, whose 26 years in nursing have included time in emergency care and as an EMT and a medic. “It is truly ever evolving.”

At times, the work requires tackling problems with skills you might not think of as traditional nursing. Polly Easton, a Stella Maris start-of-care nurse, recalls one patient early in the pandemic who was COVID-19 positive and recovering at home.

“So here I am with a double mask, gown, and shield, sitting in someone’s bedroom to go through her medications. She brought out a rolling suitcase filled with medication, and I was like, ‘What do I even do with this?’” Easton recalls with a laugh. A little digging revealed that the patient wasn’t actually taking the medications, unbeknownst to her doctors.

“They’d see her blood pressure was high and add another prescription, and she’d collect them all but never take them because she was too overwhelmed,” says Easton, who quickly devised a solution, working with the medical team to whittle down the medication list. “This is nursing,” she says, “but it’s not really what they teach you in school.”

As rewarding as it can be, providing nursing care outside of a facility brings its own challenges, the least of which may be the logistics of handling weather and traffic when you travel to multiple homes each day. While the autonomy that comes with the job can be appealing, it also brings weighty responsibility. While home health nurses work within a care plan, with an interdisciplinary team, and with a support team a phone call away, “you really are out there by yourself,” says Caro. “It can be a little daunting,” especially for nurses just starting out in home health care.

Home health nurses may also have to push past the worries patients and their families have as they take on medical responsibilities for themselves or their loved one.

“Medicine is such a scary endeavor for so many people and that creates more fear and more resistance,” says Gallagher. Often, she finds patients are surprised by what they can accomplish. “I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, ‘I’ve never had a nurse who taught me this,’ or ‘I didn’t know this is available, I didn’t know that I could do this.’”

Another possible roadblock is the home itself. Easton has encountered patients whose homes had already been modified—with grab bars, wide doorways, even an elevator—for a parent or spouse. But often, homes are not ready to be makeshift care centers. Loose rugs, stairs, and slippery showers pose hazards for the elderly and infirmed. And then there are the pets.

“The pets are always interesting. There have been some that were small and mighty and gave me a run for my money,” says Caro, who once had a patient with a pet duck that would greet her at her car with a few not-so-friendly ankle pecks.

For Easton, the challenges of providing care in a home are also an opportunity. Walking into someone’s kitchen for example, Easton might notice their food is stored in hard-to-reach cabinets, or that their walk from the living room to the bathroom requires navigating a walker through a too-narrow path.

“I love that I can really figure out what people need that they may not be able to verbalize for themselves but that can really change their quality of life,” she says.

“The pets are interesting,” says Caro, who once had a patient with a pet duck that  would greet her at her car with a few not-so-friendly ankle pecks.

One of her easiest problems solved didn’t require any in-home modifications but instead involved removing a logistical obstacle. The elderly patient had always walked to a local pharmacy to pick up prescriptions, but after a hospitalization could no longer make the trip.

“He had been home from the hospital for three days and he didn’t have his meds yet,” she says. A quick call to switch the patient’s prescriptions to a pharmacy that delivers resolved the issue.

Of course, sometimes the problems are trickier, with medical needs that can’t be met in the home. “You come into the house and they’re like, ‘I don’t know if this looks good,’ and you’re like, ‘No, that does not look good, we’re going to call 911,’” says Easton, who developed the knowledge and skills to make such decisions over nearly 20 years of nursing.

Many home health nurses get their start in other branches of nursing, and some aren’t even aware the career path exists. For Caro, an introduction to in-home care came while she was working full-time on a telemetry unit in a small community hospital that sent nurses into the homes of congestive heart failure patients.

“Had I not had that opportunity early in my career I don’t know that I would have known how amazing home care is,” she says.

As a professor, Caro often encounters students who envision themselves tending to patients in an emergency room or an ICU after graduation. But she believes that nursing’s varied career paths are part of its appeal. “I don’t think people realize just how broad the field is and what can be done.”

The national nursing shortage has tightened the supply of all nurses—and that includes home health nurses. In response, the Home Care Association of America and the National Association for Home Care and Hospice have proposed a range of efforts, including implementing more loan forgiveness programs for nurses entering home health care, making salaries more competitive, and getting the word out so that more nurses consider home health nursing as a career option.

For Gallagher, home health nursing has been not only a viable and exciting career path, but also thoroughly rewarding. “It’s a really emotionally draining position but there are so many instances where it’s just a beautiful thing,” she says.

Often, the payoff comes as patients progress to confidently managing their own care. “I tell people all the time, the best thing is when I see them smile, when I know that they are comfortable enough and happy enough to be able to look forward to tomorrow instead of being scared,” says Gallagher, who recently had a patient burst into happy tears because she could finally leave the house on her own and take a bus to her doctor’s appointment.

Other times, the reward comes later. Gallagher will always remember her first home health patient, not just because she built trust and saw him improve enough to no longer need her care, but because a year later she got a call from his cardiologist with an update.

“He said, ‘I just saw the patient, he was in my office with his baseball cap on and he was about to go to an Orioles game,’” Gallagher recalls. “He thanked me and said, ‘You really made a difference.’”

Being an integral part of the team that helped the patient return to health and independence was its own reward, says Gallagher.

“That’s what makes us motivated to do what we do.”

Deep in the labyrinth of Johns Hopkins’ sprawling Homewood campus, Vesla Mae Weaver sits at a desk that is as stacked with mail as a village postmaster’s—piles of essays, all handwritten, from across the country. Because Weaver, 44, is not only Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins but also, as of 2022, the co-director of the American Prison Writing Archive, the country’s largest digital collection of writings by incarcerated people, all accessible to the public.

There are now almost 5,000 first-person accounts—essays, diaries, poetry—each addressing the experience of incarceration from over 400 facilities across 48 states, with more coming in, essay by longhand essay, hundreds of pieces of mail every month.

The APWA was founded in 2012 at Hamilton College, a small private college in upstate New York, by Doran Larson. Larson, 66, a Hamilton literature and creative writing professor, was teaching a writing class at Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison infamous for its deadly 1971 revolt. Larson, who still teaches at Hamilton and is the APWA’s co-director with Weaver, had put out a call for submissions for a book—Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, published in 2014—and was astonished at the amount of writing he received from incarcerated people across the country. The writings also gave him a rare window into America’s massive, dysfunctional, impossibly overloaded prison system. While Larson continued teaching and writing, the submissions also continued and the archive grew, as incarcerated writers sent essay after essay, like messages in paper bottles.

After more than a decade at Hamilton, in late 2022, the APWA moved to the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins and received a $2.3-million grant from the Mellon Foundation. Hopkins not only had Weaver, but was a larger, research-based university better able to accommodate the growing archive. Weaver had met Larson when she gave a talk at Hamilton, and had become involved with APWA after a student of hers wrote a thesis based on the archive, which became the basis of an animated series with The Marshall Project, the nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system.

Of the nearly 5,000 accounts in the APWA, only 75 are currently from Maryland writers, a number that Weaver hopes will increase with the move to Baltimore. As of 2020, the number of people under the jurisdiction of the State of Maryland was just short of 16,000, in 24 state prisons, plus private prisons and local jails. With an increase in funding and staff, and a larger presence, Weaver thinks it’s just a matter of getting the word out.

“Old-school and old-fashioned snail mail is the way we do things,” says Weaver of the archive, which does not take digital submissions due to issues of both privacy and accessibility. This means that the mail must be opened by hand and read, then entered into the archive and digitized—a process that is time-consuming, especially as the handwritten pieces, sometimes difficult to read, must first be digitized, then transcribed so that a digital image of the scanned essay is on the site as well as the transcription, and some identifying information removed. Although the names of the writers are shown—unless the writer asks to be anonymous—where they are incarcerated and why they are there is not. The entire archive is available online at prisonwitness.org.

“I intend to continue to find and create whatever meaning I can in my days, to tend to my little carceral garden,” writes Nicholas W. Browning in a 10-page 2019 essay, one of those 75 Maryland submissions. “It is not particularly fulfilling, nor is it easy to live with the knowledge of my crime. But, each of us in here, juvenile lifer or otherwise, has a choice: to stagnate or grow—however fitfully, and in spite of the circumstances.”

One of the many things that makes the archive so powerful is that the handwritten submissions are scanned as they are and transcribed exactly, with misspellings and odd punctuation intact, which translates not only voice but context. And the entries are often decorated—Weaver says many of the submissions contain art of some kind—like an illustrated manuscript; there are hand-drawings of birds and trees, architecture, maps, and landscapes filling up the available space. On one essay, a drawing is watercolored in the margins with coffee; on another, a rose is etched up the side of a page, then painted mauve with packets of Kool-Aid. The writings are also often redacted, like classified documents, so the pieces can read like medieval church manuscripts written by spies.

“My name is Andrew R. Sumahit, Jr.,” writes a man held in New York in a 2010 essay, “but for the past two years I have been a prison in- mate. In the past two years, I have only seen my daughter three times, but I have seen at least five people stabbed or cut. I am sharing the story of my life, one man’s struggle to break the cycle, the story of the incarcerated father.”

Sumahit is one of an overwhelming number of parents in American prisons: A 2016 survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 47 percent of state prison wards and 58 percent of federal were the parents of at least one minor child. Through the intimacy that only writing allows, the APWA asks you to imagine what it means for those parents behind bars, and for the over five million American children who have experienced the incarceration of a mother or father.

“The number-one indicator for future imprisonment is having an incarcerated parent or familial role model,” writes Corey John Richardson, in a 10-page 2016 essay from a Kentucky facility. “In this way, prison is a self-perpetuating reality, like a gene passed on generation after generation.”

“It grew rather slowly,” says Larson about the archive he started over a decade ago. “At first, it was basically the people who wanted to write and knew about the print collection, knew that the deadline had passed, but nonetheless wanted to send their stories out. Just to have someone, anyone, read about their experiences.”

Larson says that the quality of the submissions from the start was remarkable. “Our default position is to take everything, as long as it’s actually dealing with the criminal legal system,” he says. “Somebody sends a short story about a fishing trip with their father years ago, that doesn’t go in. If they say at the beginning, this is what I think about when I’m in solitary, it goes in.”

When considering what conditions inside prisons are truly like—as well as how to improve and reform them—it is the imprisoned people themselves who are uniquely able to give the most accurate representation.

“People who are the most subjugated often have the most to say and the best theories about how power actually works and what it means to live as a marginalized group in a democracy,” says Weaver. “The archive is not just one thing. Some are talking about prison conditions in very raw ways, others are just narrating their life experience, discussions of relationships they have built inside, and how they’re surviving.”

One of the biggest goals both Larson and Weaver have for the APWA is to give incarcerated writers a sense of continuity. “There was so much taken away—arbitrarily, all the time—ripped out from incarcerated people’s hands. People have little to no control, no agency, no autonomy in the institution. So continuity is important,” says Weaver. To this end, as well as to further add to the context of the collection, writers can continue to submit pieces after their release. They can be prolific; some have 40 pieces in the archive.

If the goal was to provide continuity for the archive’s writers, and an outlet for their writings to be preserved, it is also to provide—and grow—accessibility for its readers.

“Our mission is to have as many people engage in this work as possible, and to not be overly prescriptive in how they engage it. It may be policymakers,” says Weaver. But it can also be students, researchers, journalists, historians, criminal justice reformers, or those who are simply interested. “This is a hub, a resource, so that multiple different non-overlapping communities can engage with it.” This isn’t a digital literary magazine, although it can sometimes read like one, but an extraordinary catalog of narratives, of communiques, of witness. What incarcerated people go through on a daily basis, says Weaver, “has to be told through stories and direct experience, it can’t be told through statistics and abstractions.”

“Wouldn’t you feel rage if your every day existance was spent 23 hours a day in a space the size of a parking space? These are just some of the reasons I feel rage,” writes Tracy L. Skinner from a Maryland facility in 2020. “My voice is not loud enough to shout for the 2.8 mil- lion people in the U.S. prison system.”

The move to Hopkins and the increase in funding have led to a larger staff, in addition to expanded resources. Working with Larson and Weaver are associate manager Hannah Young, program coordinator Tristan Gordon, Sheridan Library’s metadata librarian Noah Geraci, and three new program assistants, Maura Cheney, Emily Sanchez, and Tirzah Sheppard. Sanchez and Sheppard are also Spanish-speakers, a valuable skill not only for reading submissions in Spanish but for eventually making the archive itself multilingual.

Weaver and her staff have not only been busy digitizing the backlog of submissions, but are also working to make sure that when writers’ pieces are republished, they are paid for their work, itself a difficult and labor-intensive effort. (If outlets do not offer compensation, the APWA will pay on the publication’s behalf—$98 per item, so as not to flag tax issues for the author.) Some of the publications that have featured work within the archive include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Solitary Watch, and The Marshall Project.

To make the site as user-friendly as possible, the archive is searchable by keywords and phrases, author, and by some author demographic information—though many writers choose not to disclose this information. A new push is to curate the archive’s contents, to gather writings on certain subjects (family issues, solitary confinement, mental health) into more easily navigable sections. That’s because the archive is meant to be accessible, the messages unfolded from their bottles and read.

“In my building two cellies stabbed each other. Went to the medical. Then to the main office and the only thing that happen was they got separated. There was blood everywhere,” writes Jamilah L. Knox from California in 2020. “There is no Rehabilitation at all . . . Education is limited. No real workable career choices. So before you get on jury duty. Read this. Because it might give you second thought about sending a petty crime offender to prison. Its not worth it. Thank you.”

Historically, what little information we have about prisons comes from those who run the institutions, not the people inside them. Prison writing is a way to widen that perspective.

“I’m not a specialist in prison writing,” says Weaver. “My past work is about the democratic consequences of incarceration. Fifteen years ago, there wasn’t a sense that prison was deeply implicated in shaping citizenship and shaping carceral lifeworlds and shaping how people, ordinary people, experience government,” she continues, noting that much has changed since then, in the wake of uprisings and court cases and as America incarcerates more and more people.

While Larson, as a creative writing professor, has long realized the value of prison writing to illuminate what life is like inside, it’s not often that policymakers have been willing—or able—to access those writings.

“We want to make this work not just available,” says Larson, “but unavoidable. So it will seem naive not to take into account what incarcerated people are saying about policies and practices. This archive was really built by incarcerated people, by the writers inside. They quickly just broke through the gates of analog publication. The platform has really just been about catching up and giving them a platform for the enormous amount of work that’s coming out. I don’t think people have any conception of how much writing incarcerated people do. I had a man in my class who’d written seven 400-plus-page novels and lost them all in a cell search.”

“Living in prison as an inmate is: 1. humiliating 2. heart braking 3. boring 4. stressful 5. mind altering, and these are just a few issues,” writes William Liepe from a New Jersey facility. “I find that we are existing not living in conditions much like animals in a zoo. At 68 I wonder if death is not better. If I can’t be working my farm, why has god kept me, I ask him a lot.”

Over the years, the archive has called for solicitations primarily through Prison Legal News, a monthly magazine published by the Human Rights Defense Center, a Florida-based nonprofit. But PLN does not circulate evenly across the country, and was, according to Larson, recently blocked by Florida courts. The APWA is looking for other ways to call for submissions, particularly “prison witness gatherers”—the term used for those who are able to write or collect prison narratives—volunteers who are going directly into prisons, or the formerly incarcerated who are still involved in the institutions. There’s also an acute awareness of how many states and populations are underrepresented. Right now, the archive skews to populations from California, New York, and Texas.

Of the essays by authors who have chosen to disclose their gender, just over 4,800 are men, 300 are women, and fewer than 70 are by people who self-identify as trans or “other.”

While the goal of the archive hasn’t changed, it’s now reaching a broader audience—and further broadening that audience is a major goal. “I can tell you from experience that students who read this work, whatever images they had of prisons and incarcerated people essentially just dissolve,” says Larson. “And what they’re then thinking about is the people whose work they’ve read.” And while there haven’t yet been any specific policy shifts as a result of the archive, that is the hope. “We are just at the beginning of our efforts toward amplification,” says Weaver.

From a Texas prison in an essay dated 2020, Roy Shiloh Bryant writes: “‘They’ are now claiming ‘electricity failures’—shutting the electricity off for four/five hours during 96/98 degrees with a heat index 106 confining us to these cells i.e., great dane dog houses 24/7 no air (by the way, the hogs have air conditions, all 39,000 convicts have no in cell air). These cells are about 4 1/2 ft. by 8 1/2 ft. improper venti- lation, from 1925)… We have ate cold food for three months. Dear editor, if you know anyone willing to write my book, refer them? I have a story. Keep in mind, I don’t have long to live. I’m turning seventy (70).”

The aging of America’s prison population is just one of many issues demanding change from politicians and policymakers.

“What I’m hoping in the future is that this will actually have an effect on people thinking about policy,” says Larson. “We still use the terms ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘containment’ and ‘deterrence,’ and the institution just isn’t achieving any of those things. I want people to understand that and understand that this is essentially one of the greatest policy disasters in the history of the US. It’s just never worked; it’s never achieved the things it’s claimed to have achieved.”

“In Texas Prisons even more guys think about and do commit suicide. This is not only because of the guilt they feel for what ever crime they may have or did commit. Its because of The Loneliness, Isolation, Boredom and so on,” writes William T. Jacobsen from a Texas facility. “The suicide rate in Texas Prisons is worse than anyone will admit.”

Giving voice to those inside this country’s prisons is valuable to those outside the system and within it.

“Incarcerated people mostly can’t see this,” says Weaver of the archive, but they know it’s there. And even if they can’t see it, their family members can, as well as any member of the public with an internet connection. The visibility of the narratives is as crucial as it is compensatory, a way to give voice to those who have lost it. The hope is for journalists, lawmakers, students, reformers, and politicians not only to read these narratives but to use them—as primary sources from an institution that’s almost as walled-off as its inhabitants.

“I think the greatest common denominator is our profound sense of loss,” writes Kristine Cosgrove in looping cursive from a California prison. “Something has been stolen, lost, taken, or broken in the blink of an eye, and I find myself tearing up with them—when they feel safe enough to let me in,” Cosgrove writes, about her fellow incarcerated women. “And when someone who’s suffered for so long in silence without ever trusting anyone to just SIT and be quiet; to grieve with another human being; well—it changes you. It changes your perspective about a lot of things.”

Changing perspectives is exactly what the APWA would like to accomplish, by further opening the windows—and the mailboxes—into and from the some 7,000 state and federal prisons, correctional facilities, and other systems of confinement across 21st-century America. The number of people in those systems has dropped in some states, while other state populations are still growing.

And in a Johns Hopkins mailroom, the letters keep coming

Nicole Baumgarth was first bitten by the tick bug (metaphorically speaking) at the University of California, Davis, back in the early 2000s. At the time, she knew nothing about the parasitic insect, or the increasingly prevalent Lyme disease associated with its bites, but a colleague was conducting early research and finding unusual results. “I had been studying influenza, so I thought, how hard can this be?” says the immunologist, who grew up in Germany. “But it was actually really difficult.” It turned out ticks were a complex area of study, and she was hooked.

Fast-forward to 2022, when Baumgarth, now a leading expert, was named inaugural director of Johns Hopkins University’s new Lyme and Tickborne Diseases Research and Education Institute, where her work aims to address this rising public health issue, which includes other illnesses like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and alpha-gal syndrome, which causes a red meat allergy. “If we do this right,” says Baumgarth, “we could really make an impact.”

What is the institute’s mission?
We hope to be the basic research arm of the work surrounding tick-borne diseases at Hopkins. We are focusing on the fundamental research that is so critical, and so lacking, when it comes to understanding ticks, the pathogens, such as Borrelia burgdorferi, and the host’s response to infection.

Why is research lacking?
Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses have been quickly on the rise. That’s a combination of factors: It’s the changing climate, it’s humans moving into areas that were not previously inhabited. It’s also really complicated, and there are just not that many people who know anything about ticks. Lyme disease was discovered in the 1980s. That’s a blink of an eye. So one important thing we want to do is increase the number of students and researchers who are excited about working on this.

What are your main areas of focus?
One is the tick itself—we need to understand its biology. And then the tick’s ecology, or the environment in which the tick is in, and how they interact with one another. The third is, of course, the pathogen. And then the last piece is the immune response—the host, and how the host responds, which is an area I’m working in, mainly with mouse models, the normal natural host, but having the proximity to the Lyme Disease Research Center [at Hopkins’ School of Medicine] will allow us to also start looking at human samples to understand where there are similarities and differences.

Why is the pathogen difficult to study?
In order to understand how a pathogen works, how it interacts with the host—and by host, I mean humans or rodents or ticks, really—what researchers usually do is they knock out certain genes and learn what parts of the pathogen are causing disease. But Borrelia has a very unusual genetic structure, which makes it hard to do that. Only a handful of people know how to manipulate the genome, and even then, when you do it successfully, it’s not perfect. That really restricts how fast we can make progress in understanding the pathogen, what it does, and how it works.

There is currently no vaccine for Lyme disease. Is that a goal of your research?
The long-term goal is to make a [Lyme] vaccine. I don’t think that it is a problem that cannot be solved. But I’m even more excited about the prospect of some work going at Yale University, thinking along the lines of making an anti-tick vaccine rather than a pathogen-specific vaccine. While everyone talks about Lyme, we want to be prepared for a novel pathogen that we may not even be thinking about yet.

If we could actually stop the tick from efficiently and effectively biting us and transmitting a pathogen, then we are protecting ourselves from multiple pathogens—not just one. And just like with every vaccine, not everybody will want it or be successfully vaccinated, so you always need to find new therapeutic approaches. Antibiotics are very important in the treatment of Lyme disease; the earlier you take them, the higher your chances are that you’ll be fully cured after the infection. But there are also people who take the course of antibiotics and still have lingering symptoms, similar to what is now sort of described as long COVID, so that’s why we really need to understand the immune response to the pathogen first.

How is climate change impacting all of this—milder winters mean more ticks?
Right. The factors that are affecting ticks are humidity and temperature. So in warmer climates, it is very clear that you can get more spread of ticks in areas that previously were too cold for them to live. That’s an obvious one. We’re also having changing weather patterns and changing rainfalls, and with humidity being so important for them [needing a certain level of moisture in their environment to survive], it will change where the ticks lives.

If you had a message for the public, what would it be?
I don’t think anybody should panic. And while it’s wonderful to go out into nature, just make sure that you protect yourself, either by wearing long trousers or long sleeves, and check yourself afterwards. Ticks are very, very small, so they can easily be overlooked.

It’s a conundrum: Do you go to college to study what you love or land a career?

For many students and families planning for or applying to college, this question weighs heavily—especially with the existing economic uncertainty. But administrators from colleges in the Baltimore region say it’s not a matter of one versus another, and they’re finding ways to help future and existing students carve out paths to meaningful lives and careers.

“It’s absolutely a myth that students need to know their major when they apply,” says Katherine Cole, the vice provost and dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). “Most majors don’t correlate directly with a career, and roughly 80 percent of undergrads nationwide end up changing their majors.”

To help students find the right fit, UMBC offers freshman seminars that integrate personality and strength tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Seminars also teach students about the multiple avenues they can take to arrive at the same career—a concept that Cole calls “parallel pathways.” This means, for example, that students interested in law school might take the traditional route by majoring in political science. Or they might enjoy analytical thinking and major in something like sociology, or plan to pursue environmental law and study marine biology or environmental science.

Towson University (TU) offers a similar two-credit Personal Life and Career Planning course, which teaches students about existing and emerging careers, while helping them dive deep into self-exploration to determine who they are as individuals. “We want students to major in something that matters to them personally, and we tell them their major doesn’t dictate their career,” says Lorie Logan-Bennett, the assistant vice president of career services at TU.

At the same time, TU urges students to take advantage of the university’s experiential learning opportunities that let them “build skills by doing real-world work, while deciding what they like or dislike in a career,” says Logan-Bennett. Opportunities range from for-credit, in-person internships off campus to remote projects known as “micro internships,” made possible by TU’s partnership with the Chicago-based company Parker Dewey.

“Micro internships are time-delineated projects that students can take on without quitting their part-time jobs or giving up other obligations,” Logan-Bennett explains. For instance, a company in California might hire a student to compile or analyze data in a spreadsheet or synthesize research for a report. Students work on projects for a designated period and gain experience they can then use to bolster their résumés.

At Johns Hopkins University (JHU), too, opportunities abound in experiential learning, with programs and resources guiding students through the arduous process of identifying and honing values, interests, and goals. In addition to having access to a robust career center, Hopkins Hire, students benefit from the school’s innovative Life Design Lab (LDL), which, “takes an iterative, problem-solving approach to life- and career-planning,” explains Matthew Golden, LDL’s executive director. “The process involves doing research and coming up with a hypothesis based on your interests, talking to people, getting experience in that area, and then doing it all over again, building on what you’ve learned about yourself and that particular kind of work.”

The key, Golden says, is for students to keep an open mind as they follow their curiosity and determine or refine what they want—a process he hopes will stay with them forever.

LDL works closely with Hopkins Hire, JHU’s career center, which launched the DEI Collective to boost internship access for students from underrepresented communities. “In the past, unpaid internships were more common, and this created a disparity gap,” given that some students needed to earn money from part-time jobs and couldn’t sacrifice a paycheck to work as an intern, explains the executive director of Hopkins Hire, Alia Poonawala. “But through the DEI Collective, we require companies to pay students a minimum of $15 an hour,” eliminating the need to forego meaningful work experience.

As application deadlines near, and students and families weigh college options in the Baltimore area, remember that support exists to help you figure out and fine-tune your education, career, and life plans. “The key is to spend your time in college taking advantage of those supports and experiential learning opportunities,” even if you have a concrete path, says Logan-Bennett at TU.

Don’t worry about the lack of a clear-cut career connection to your major, advises Cole of UMBC. The liberal arts get a bad reputation, but, “we hear from employers all the time, whether it’s NASA or the NSA, that the soft skills students gain from a liberal arts degree are exactly what they look for in employees,” she says. “Academics make the individual disciplines, but the reality is that real life—and real work—are interdisciplinary.” And the college major is just one small piece of a larger puzzle.

If you are looking for the perfect fit for your college experience, look no further than Baltimore’s annual guide of regional academic institutions. Here is a roundup of what’s happening on area campuses.

BOWIE STATE UNIVERSITY
Bowie State University in Prince George’s County began with a mission to provide educational opportunities for Black citizens and, more than a century after opening, has consistently ranked among the best HBCUs in the country, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees, as well as specialty certificates and doctoral programs. It also has a solid reputation for being one of the best values around.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 5,381
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 18:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $8,753 in-state, $19,544 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 87 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Criminal Justice, Radio and Television Broadcasting Technology/Technician, Psychology, Biology, Computer/Information Technology, Child Development, Nursing, and Sociology

COPPIN STATE UNIVERSITY
A historically Black institution founded in 1900, Coppin State University is situated in the heart of Baltimore City in the Mondawmin neighborhood. Part of the University System of Maryland in Baltimore, the school offers 57 undergraduate, graduate, and certificate degrees. It’s been rated in the Top 50 Best HBCUs in the Nation (College Consensus), the Top 5 Best Value Online Schools in Maryland (Online School Center), and No. 7 Best Colleges in Maryland by Salary Score (GradReports).

In 2022, CSU received two large-scale federal education grants, including a $3.7-million Teacher Quality Partnership grant from the U.S. Department of Education to increase teacher diversity, while boosting student success in high-needs urban and rural schools across Maryland. CSU also recently created the Freddie Gray Student Success Scholarship, which is available to graduates of Carver Vocational-Technical High School, where Gray was a student.

Coppin takes esports (competitive video gaming) seriously. In the fall of 2021, Coppin became the first HBCU to open a building on campus exclusively devoted to esports. The Premier Esports Lab opened in September, with a guest appearance from Grammy-nominated artist Cordae.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,108 undergraduates, 240 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 0:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $6,904 in-state, $13,560 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 54 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Business, Biology, Education, Criminal Justice, Rehabilitation Counseling

FROSTBURG STATE UNIVERSITY
For those who want to escape to the Appalachian Mountains while still benefitting from the low cost of in-state tuition, Frostburg State University in Western Maryland offers more than 100 bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs, as well as miles of wilderness areas nearby to explore. On that note, its online M.S. in Recreation & Parks Management is ranked the No. 2 most affordable program in the U.S. by GetEducated.com.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,677
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 14:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $9,804 in-state, $24,684 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 86 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Economics, Nursing, Business Administration and Management

GOUCHER COLLEGE
A private, liberal arts college spanning 287 wooded acres in Towson, Goucher College takes pride in its close-knit community and leadership in global education. One hundred percent of Goucher students study abroad, and the college offers more than 60 flexible programs around the world for students to develop international experience.

Goucher has continually ranked among U.S. News & World Report’s best and most innovative national liberal arts colleges. Goucher ranked in the top four percent of all public and private colleges nationwide for its impact on social mobility, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

In the last few years, Goucher began exciting partnerships with other schools, such as Johns Hopkins University, Loyola University, Middlebury College, and more to come, to provide a pathway for students to continue their education beyond Goucher. For instance, their 4+1 MBA Program allows students to earn an advanced business degree through Loyola via a “Fast Track” admission process, and at a 15-percent discount on tuition.

Also of note: Goucher’s unique First-Year Village, which opened between 2016 and 2018, offers a unique space for 450 first-year students to live, work, and socialize. It features a sound-proof study room and communal spaces for students to cook, learn, and interact on each floor.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,100 undergraduate students, 900 graduate students
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $48,200
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 82 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Psychology, International Relations, Economics, Political Science, Business Administration

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Johns Hopkins University (JHU) offers nine academic divisions and hundreds of courses of study, with campuses spread throughout Baltimore, including the Peabody Institute, a music and dance conservatory in Mount Vernon. Its main Homewood campus is located on North Charles Street.

The prestigious, world-renowned university has a strong reputation for its public health and medical studies and has been compared to Ivy League schools.

One point of pride is its financial aid program, which covers 100 percent of calculated need for every admitted student, without loans. This means JHU works with families to calculate what they can afford to contribute toward the total cost of attendance—including meals, books, travel, and other expenses—and JHU covers the rest with grants that don’t need to be repaid.

Last year, JHU added two new minors: Latin American Studies and Writing Seminars.

It also announced new efforts to move toward a broader, more flexible undergraduate educational experience that will include a required first-year seminar and the streamlining of major requirements to allow for greater intellectual exploration.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,331 undergraduates, 22,559 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $59,128 for Peabody Institute, $60,480 for the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 10.9 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neuroscience, Economics, Public Health Studies, International Studies

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY MARYLAND
This private, Jesuit institution offers undergraduate and graduate programs on a beautiful urban campus strewn across 81 acres in northern Baltimore City. Education at Loyola is based in the Jesuit tradition of scholarship, cura personalis, or care for the whole person. Loyola is known for its academic rigor, while helping students lead purposeful lives. Seventy percent of students study abroad, and the school currently ranks fourth in “Best Regional Universities in the North,” according to U.S. News & World Report.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,822 undergraduates, 1,460 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $53,430
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 84 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Journalism, Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, English Language and Literature, Engineering and Education

MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ART (MICA)
Located in the heart of Baltimore, MICA is the oldest continuously degree-granting college of art and design in the nation. According to U.S. News & World Report, it ranks among one of the top schools for its fine arts, graphic design, painting, drawing, and sculpture programs. MICA also offers graduate-level degree programs including Master of Fine Art, Master of Business Administration Art, and Master of Professional Studies. According to its website, MICA offers, “education and experience that will prepare you to be a creative leader in the 21st century.”

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,500
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 8:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $51,870 undergraduate
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 90 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Graphic Design, Illustration, Multimedia, Painting, Sculpture, Fine Arts, and Photography

McDANIEL COLLEGE
Founded in 1867, McDaniel College sits in a bucolic setting near Westminster in Carroll County. The private, four-year liberal arts college offers more than 70 undergraduate programs of study and more than 20 graduate programs. A recent addition to McDaniel’s curriculum is a National Security Fellows Program that provides students with knowledge, skills, and experience in national security, along with the ability to specialize in an area of interest, such as interstate conflict, intrastate political violence, cybersecurity, ethics, and human rights.

The school also recently launched a new STEM Center to serve as a physical hub to support students studying the sciences. Equipped with adaptive workspaces and collaborative technology, the STEM Center hosts workshops focused on both the professional world and course-specific content, along with tutoring services and a study environment for students.

McDaniel earned a spot as the top-ranked Maryland institution on U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Value Schools” list among regional universities in the North for academic quality and affordability. The college also ranked as one of the “Best Regional Universities in the North” in their “Best Colleges” rankings for 2022-2023.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,681 undergraduates, 1,208 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $46,336
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 87 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Kinesiology, Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Political Science, International Studies

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The largest of Maryland’s HBCUs, Morgan is a public institution founded in 1867. It is situated in northeast Baltimore. As a Carnegie-classified high research (R2) institution, Morgan provides instruction to a multiethnic, multiracial, multinational student body and offers more than 140 academic programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. Recently, Morgan launched the state’s first bachelor of science degree in cloud computing. As Maryland’s Preeminent Public Urban Research University, Morgan fulfills its mission to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment through intense community level study and pioneering solutions.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 7,034 undergraduates, 1,435 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $8,008 for in-state and $18,480 for out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 87 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Civil Engineering, Communications Engineering, Business Administration and Management, Social Work, Biology/Biological Sciences, Architecture, Finance, Psychology, Sociology

MOUNT SAINT MARY’S UNIVERSITY
Located in rural, mountainous Emmitsburg on a massive 1,500-acre campus, “The Mount” is America’s second-oldest Catholic university. It offers more than 80 undergraduate majors, minors, concentrations, and special programs grounded in a Catholic liberal arts tradition, and several bachelor’s/master’s combinations in partnership with other universities. It’s a degree that pays: The Mount ranks in the top 10 percent of colleges and universities nationwide in terms of the long-term earnings for a four-year college degree. As an extra bonus, the school offers a rich NCAA division I athletic program.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,570
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $44,330
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 82 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Social Sciences, Computer and Information Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, Communication, Journalism, Education, Family and Consumer Sciences/Human Sciences, and Health Professions

NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY
A private, Catholic liberal arts university in northern Baltimore, Notre Dame of Maryland University offers programs ranging from undergraduate to doctoral degrees, as well as Maryland’s only women’s college. It recently launched the first master’s of art degree in art therapy program in the state.

The beautiful, wooded campus is just steps from the bustling downtown Baltimore culture. With values rooted in Catholicism, the school focuses on service to others and social responsibility.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 807 undergraduate students, 1,377 graduate and professional students
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $39,250
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 86.5 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Education, Biology, Art Therapy, Pharmacy

ST. MARY’S COLLEGE OF MARYLAND
A state institution founded in 1840, St. Mary’s College of Maryland was recently ranked among the best public liberal arts colleges by Money magazine. Located on 361 acres in rural Southern Maryland, it is also know for having one of the lowest student-to-faculty ratios in the U.S. While its waterfront campus in historic St. Mary’s has the feel of a private institution, it offers all the affordability, accessibility, and diversity of a public school.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,526
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $15,184 in-state, $31,260 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 77 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Social Sciences, Psychology, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, English Language and Literature/Letters, Visual and Performing Arts, Computer and Information Sciences, History, Mathematics and Statistics, Foreign Languages, Literature, and Linguistics

SALISBURY UNIVERSITY
For those who want to be close to the ocean, Salisbury University offers undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs at its campus in Salisbury, about a 40-minute drive from Ocean City. In 2020, Money magazine named it one of “America’s Best Colleges.” A public institution, Salisbury is a NCAA Division III Capital Athletic Conference school.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,695
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 14:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $10,396 in-state, $20,872 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 86 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Education, Communication, Journalism, Psychology, Public Administration and Social Service Professions, Health Professions, Parks, Recreation, Leisure, Fitness, and Kinesiology, Social Sciences, Computer and Information Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences

STEVENSON UNIVERSITY
Stevenson University is a liberal arts school on a suburban campus in Baltimore County. It offers bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and preprofessional programs, as well as its Bachelor’s to Master’s option, which allows students to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree in five years. The school is growing, having recently opened a 117-acre recreational and athletic hub on its Owings Mills campus.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,979
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $38,738
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 91 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Health Professions, Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Computer and Information Sciences, Education, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts, Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting and Related Protective Services, Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies, and Legal Professions and Studies

TOWSON UNIVERSITY
One of the largest public universities in the state, Towson University offers more than 110 undergraduate majors, 47 master’s degrees, six doctoral programs, and 36 graduate certificates. The university continues to draw students from other states, though it remains part of the University System of Maryland.

Its campus continues to expand, with a huge new dining hall, a 23,000-square-foot recreation and fitness facility with an indoor swimming pool, and its 5,200-seat arena for sporting events and concerts. In 2021, it opened its new Science Complex, the largest academic building on campus at 320,000 square feet. Towson also opened its StarTUp at the Armory, a space for startups and new businesses to engage with the broader community and larger businesses. It serves as a home to Towson’s entrepreneurship programs and student competitions and events.

While Towson remains the largest supplier of medical professionals and educators in the state, the university has also built a strong reputation for its College of Fine Arts and Communication, as well as its Asian Arts & Culture Center, both of which bring students and the wider community to Towson for enriching performing arts, music, and visual art programs.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 18,730 undergraduates, 3,187 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 16:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $10,818 in-state, $26,820 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 88 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Education, Nursing, Exercise Science, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, Information Technology

UNIVERSITY OF BALTIMORE
The University of Baltimore is situated in Mount Vernon, a Baltimore neighborhood rich in art, architecture, and history. UB has gained a solid reputation for its law and business programs, but it offers a wide spectrum of undergraduate and graduate degrees and doctoral programs, with an intense focus on connecting students to community and jobs, ensuring a sustainable career path post-graduation.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,605 undergraduate
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 11:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $9,506 in-state, $22,956 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 89 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Forensic Science and Technology, Animation/ Video Graphics/Special Effects, Healthcare Management, Criminal Science, Digital Communication and Multimedia/Media, Psychology, Political Science and Government, Human Services, Information Science

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE
The University of Maryland, Baltimore is the state’s only public law, health, and human services university. Located in downtown Baltimore, it offers 90 degree and certificate programs through its six nationally-ranked professional schools—dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work—and an interdisciplinary graduate school.

The school’s 14-acre BioPark is Baltimore’s biggest biotechnology cluster, employing more than 1,000 people in nearly three dozen life science companies, university-based startups, and bioscience industry leaders like BD, Illumina, Catalent, and Pharmaron. With more than 250,000 square feet of lab and office space, the BioPark has been named an Outstanding University Research Park of the Year by the Association for University Research Parks. It’s located in the heart of the university’s medical campus.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,931
ANNUAL TUITION: Varies by school
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Medicine, Law, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Social Work

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY
University of Maryland, Baltimore County educates a student population of more than 10,000 students in programs spanning the arts, engineering, information technology, humanities, sciences, preprofessional studies, and social sciences. Located on the edge of Baltimore County, it allows easy access into the city and all the conveniences of suburban life and housing. It also offers plenty of opportunities for study abroad.

In the fall of 2021, UMBC opened the Center for Well-Being, a new two-story complex that houses Retriever Integrated Health, Student Conduct and Community Standards, and i3b’s Gathering Space for Spiritual Well-Being. UMBC’s already significant NASA partnerships have continued to grow, with NASA announcing a major award of $72 million over three years, from 2021 to 2024, for the new Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research II center. UMBC is leading the national consortium and will receive over $38 million. The GESTAR II consortium will support more than 120 researchers, creating extensive opportunities for breakthroughs in Earth and atmospheric science research, and providing major opportunities for students to conduct research and be mentored by NASA scientists and engineers.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 10,625 undergraduate students, 3,366 graduate students
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 17:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $12,606 in-state, $28,370 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 69 percent POPULAR
AREAS OF STUDY: Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, EASTERN SHORE
The University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES), the State’s Historically Black 1890 Land Grant Institution, is a teaching, research, and doctoral institution that nurtures and launches leaders in a student-centered environment. Located on over 1,000 acres in Princess Anne, UMES was ranked among one of the top HBCU’s by U.S. News & World Report in 2020. It is home to many unique programs and partnerships in health sciences, agricultural and environmental sciences, and renewable energy research and implementation, including a novel, three-year accelerated Pharmacy program and the UMES Coastal Ecology Teaching and Research Center, which plays a significant role in the diversification of the workforce of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,812
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $8,724 in-state, $16,467 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Aviation Science, Agriculture, Environmental Science, Applied Design, Kinesiology, Education

WASHINGTON COLLEGE
Founded in 1782, Washington College became the first college chartered after the American Revolution. This small, liberal arts school is based on a bucolic campus in Chestertown and offers more than 50 academic programs, small class settings, and a rich study abroad program. Recent news on campus includes the receipt of a gift of over $2 million to endow merit-based scholarships.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,026
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $50,842
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 70 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Business, Management, Marketing, Psychology, Physical Sciences, English Language and Literature/Letters, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Visual and Performing Arts, Communication, Journalism, and Computer and Information Sciences

Cited tuition costs may exclude room and board, books, and other fees.

Four years ago, NPR visited an animal lab at Johns Hopkins University to highlight the research of Shreesh Mysore, an assistant professor who was conducting experiments to understand the brain circuitry of barnyard owls.

Specifically, Mysore hoped to learn how they processed sights and sounds, and how they focused their attention amid competing stimuli. Adept nocturnal predators, owls parse a lot of visual and audio information. Not only do their enormous eyes possess superpower-like night vision, their satellite-dish-shaped faces and asymmetrical ears enable extraordinary hearing even by the standards of other birds of prey.

The ultimate purpose of his research, Mysore told NPR, was to figure out what goes awry in the brains of people with attention problems, for instance, children diagnosed with ADHD. His work, he offered, could also provide help for those with autism or schizophrenia.

“Pretty much name a psychiatric disorder,” Mysore said, “and there is some kind of attentional deficit associated with it.”

It was the kind of attention researchers hardly ever receive. Mysore posted a link to the segment on his lab’s blog and included it in subsequent grant pitches to The National Institutes of Health (NIH.)

Alarm bells, however, went off at the Maryland-founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) when they heard the NPR story, which had not revealed how the research was being done. They asked experts to read Mysore’s published papers, which described cutting open the owls’ skulls, inserting electrodes into their brains, and bolting their heads in place while they were exposed to speeding dots and bursts of noise from computer screens and headphones for 12 hours at a clip. It was also learned that with the exception of pairs maintained for breeding, the owls were euthanized and their brain tissue harvested for further research. Not only was this treatment barbaric, PETA argued in its quickly launched effort to stop the testing, it was ineffective—such experimentation rarely leads to human therapies.

Since an initial petition drive, which has now collected nearly 500,000 signatures, PETA’s campaign has grown into a multi-pronged crusade to end the experimentation on the 20-30 owls currently caged at Hopkins. They’ve filed FOIA requests and a lawsuit, organized a letter-writing effort and media outreach, held more than a dozen on-campus demonstrations—the most recent in mid-July—and picked up the support of Maryland state senator Ben Kramer and former Maryland secretary of health and mental hygiene Dr. Martin Wasserman.

In signing on as a plaintiff in the federal suit to stop Hopkins’ testing on the owls—which, like all birds, rats, and mice, are excluded from Animal Welfare Act protections—Wasserman emphasized he “wanted to be viewed as a physician-scientist, not a moralist.”

“I’m a pragmatist and the first thing we have to understand is that there are a limited number of research dollars, and we have a lot of illnesses that need cures and treatments,” says Wasserman, who is a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine graduate and member of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “With the technology we have today, computer modeling, non-invasive imaging, cell cultures, there are alternatives, much better alternatives, that also don’t kill any sentient being at the end of it.”

The lawsuit that PETA filed in U.S. District Court last year challenged the exclusion of the owls from Animal Welfare Act protections. Mice, rats, and birds make up 90 percent of all lab animals, yet are excluded from protections. The complaint was dismissed in February after a federal judge ruled the owls’ “next friend” plaintiffs—Wasserman; Lana Weidgenant, then a JHU student; and animal rights activist and actress Evanna Lynch, who starred in the Harry Potter franchise—did not have legal standing. But then in June, PETA declared victory on another front, prematurely it turned out, when the Maryland Department of Natural Resources revoked Mysore’s permit and granted a new one that prohibited the euthanasia of the owls—which seemingly put a stop to the experiments. Previously, PETA discovered Mysore had been operating without a state permit from 2015-2018. (DNR doesn’t oversee the testing, but researchers must apply annually for permits to keep animals.)

In a switch that garnered some local media coverage, the Department of Natural Resources reversed themselves over what they said was a clerical error. Mysore had applied for and been granted the wrong permit, according to DNR, which was intended for collected “wildlife.” In this case, that term literally refers to animals caught in the wild, which have stricter standards of care and cannot automatically be euthanized—unlike animals bred for lab testing, such as Mysore’s owls. He was granted a new permit to continue his work, including euthanizing owls.

While setting up a July protest at the Homewood campus, Alka Chandna, Ph.D, PETA’s vice president of laboratory investigations, expressed frustration with DNR, but also with oversight of animal testing more generally at NIH and Hopkins.

“This was a second strike [in terms of DNR permitting] and shows disregard and contempt for the process by Professor Mysore, and demonstrates that no one seems to be paying attention, not at NIH, where the money comes from, or Johns Hopkins,” she said.

“THERE ARE BETTER ALTERNATIVES THAT ALSO DON’T KILL ANY SENTIENT BEING AT THE END.”

Johns Hopkins University led U.S. institutions in NIH funding in 2021, with $825 million in awards. Studies estimate at least 40 percent of NIH’s annual $30.1 billion research awards have an animal-based component. To date, Mysore has received $1.9 million for his owl experiments since coming to Hopkins in 2014. Mysore’s postdoctoral mentor at Stanford, retired neuroscience professor Eric Knudsen, first began conducting research on the brains of owls in the late 1970s, and was closing his lab as Mysore was coming to Hopkins to open his own. (Knudsen’s wife raised owls for her husband’s research and has raised them for Mysore. Phyllis Knudsen is listed as “subpermittee” on DNR permits.)

“The other thing that remains frustrating,” Chandra continued, “is this is purely curiosity-driven research, there is no application. NIH grants are given to benefit human health. What part of assaulting owls, whose heads have been restrained and eyes pinned open, with various stimuli relates to ADHD? The priority should be studying and treating human beings who suffer with ADHD.”

Reached by phone, Mysore would only say he plans to continue his research and testing on both owls and mice, which are the subject of a new round of NIH grant-funded experiments. Johns Hopkins said in a statement it remains “unwavering” in support of Mysore’s research.

“Faculty proposing research involving animals are required to demonstrate the relevance of the work for human or animal health, the advancement of knowledge, or the good of society; why live animals are necessary for the study and why one species as opposed to another is to be used; and that the animals will be treated humanely.”

Ironically, Hopkins has been one of most significant players on both sides of the broader animal testing debate for the past 40 years.

In 1981, the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), affiliated with The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, was founded with $1 million from the Cosmetics, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association, which was coming under fire for the industry’s extensive animal testing. CAAT’s long-standing mission is to facilitate methods to replace the use of lab animals, reduce the number of animals in testing, and refine tests to eliminate  suffering. In a 2018 study, CAAT-led scientists found that computer-based modeling was not only less expensive and ethically sounder when it came to toxicology trials—it produced better predictive results. Relatedly, Maryland became the fifth state to ban animal testing in cosmetics this year.

Thomas Hartung, director of CAAT, notes that studies show 90-95 percent of the clinical trials and drugs successfully tested in animals fail when tested in human beings. However necessary animal experimentation may have been at one time, non-animal testing is more promising and cost-effective today, according to Hartung and other researchers. Dozens of HIV vaccines have been successfully tested in animals in recent decades, for example, but none have been shown to provide human beings with sufficient protection from the virus.

“We’ve been testing mice and rats for forever,” Hartung says. “We can cure and treat everything in mice and rats, but it doesn’t translate and isn’t the most effective means of research. Sixty percent of treatments successful in mice do not even translate to rats. Human beings are much more complex.”

Two years ago, CAAT received an $850,000 U.S. EPA grant, part of $4.25 million allocated to five universities to develop strategies that “reduce, refine and/or replace” vertebrate animal testing when it comes to toxic chemical testing. The EPA’s goal is to eliminate its funding of animal testing altogether by 2035.

There is no doubt the experiments on the owls—beautiful creatures by all accounts, including Mysore’s—remain a long shot to lead to an FDA-approved treatment for ADHD. In fact, NIH’s web-generated scoring system has put the likelihood that Mysore’s research will be cited in future studies at 5 percent—what NIH calls its “potential for translation.” (Knudsen’s average translation score was 6.8 percent over his decades of owl brain experimentation.)

Hartung is aware of the owl controversy. He says that he has not taken a close look at Mysore’s research, not because it isn’t troubling, but because he feels Mysore is being singled out.

“The animal testing that gets attention, it’s by happenstance,” Hartung says. “Owls have those large eyes and so people perhaps feel more affection for them. Is it different or worse than the experiments on the monkeys or guinea pigs?”

Confrontations between animal rights activists and Hopkins go back almost to the start of the movement, when the then-Anti-Vivisection Society of Maryland charged the School of Medicine with cruelty in 1890. Until it ended the practice in 2016, Hopkins remained one of two medical schools in North America still using live animals for surgical training. (The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga was the other.) More recently, Hopkins opposed the “Beagle Bill” in the Maryland legislature, which requires research labs to retire and adopt out dogs and cats no longer needed in testing.

The protests over the owl testing are also not the only concerns raised at Hopkins by PETA and Stop Animal Exploitation Now (SAEN, pronounced “sane”). A few examples: In April, the USDA, which inspects animal labs, cited Hopkins for cleaning, sanitization, housekeeping, pest control, and feeding violations, as well as failing to show they had investigated “alternatives to potentially painful surgical procedures” for testing on chinchillas, sheep, and rabbits. Last year, several monkeys suffered infections after cranial implant surgery and were euthanized.

In 2017, nine dogs were euthanized after complications during experimental surgery. (More than 41,000 animals were used in Maryland lab facilities in 2017, including 856 dogs.) The same year, a marmoset, a small monkey native to South America, was killed when a Hopkins laboratory worker unintentionally closed a cage door on its neck. (In one research project, marmosets were studied to tell if they could discern “pitch.”) In 2016, a macaque, socially advanced monkeys commonly used in animal testing, was found dead after it chewed a hole into a ball and got its head stuck inside. The same year, Hopkins received a USDA warning for failing to ensure the psychological well-being of its primates, eight of whom had significant hair loss.

“IS IT DIFFERENT OR WORSE THAN THE EXPERIMENTS ON THE MONKEYS OR GUINEA PIGS?”

In 2014, Hopkins disclosed three of its monkeys had died by accidental strangulation and a rabbit was killed when it was left in a cage sent for high-temperature disinfecting. Going back to a 2002 published study, to one of the more infamous episodes of animal testing at Hopkins, 10 squirrel monkeys and baboons were injected with overdoses of methamphetamine—instead of Ecstasy—causing two deaths. The $1.3-million study, the New York Times noted, was led by Dr. George Ricaurte, “probably the best-known Ecstasy expert in the war on drugs,” adding he’d received $10 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study so-called “club” drugs.

Currently, more than 840 animals that are neither rats, mice, nor birds are maintained at Hopkins animal testing, including more than 300 monkeys, 120 rabbits, 53 pigs, 32 guinea pigs, 31 baboons, 31 ferrets, 10 dogs, eight sheep, and five cats.

In September 2020 during an Albert Einstein College of Medicine virtual seminar, Mysore himself acknowledged the data from his testing on head-and-body-restrained owls could be misleading.

“There are lots of reasons that are emerging now, even more so than before, indicating [research should be done on] freely behaving animals because of the way they engage with the environment,” he said. The animal’s ability to move, he continued, “affects neuro-responses…and could change the way the brain is solving problems.” Working on head-fixed animals could cause him and others to “misinterpret” or “misunderstand” their responses.

Meanwhile, neuroscientist and PETA lab investigator Katherine Roe, who attended the Albert Einstein seminar, notes there are thousands of other researchers in quality studies with human volunteers, many using new neuroimaging tools beyond CT scans and MRI.

“The ability to study the human brain non-invasively has changed dramatically in my lifetime,” she says, mentioning non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation. “It’s being used to treat depression, but is also a tool that allows researchers to, very temporarily, disable a small region in a human brain and see what behaviors affects that region.”

State senator Ben Kramer, who sponsored the beagle adoption bill, says that, as an international leader in biomedical research, Hopkins’ opposition to that legislation was disheartening. So was the initial lack of response to a March letter he’d written to the school in reference to the owl testing. After a subsequent letter about concerns raised by DNR permitting issues, he did eventually receive a call from someone representing governmental affairs for Hopkins, indicating an interest in a meeting, which was more encouraging.

“I believe the way we treat animals is a reflection on who we are as human beings,” Kramer says. “This notion every other creature on this planet serves no purpose other than to support humankind is antiquated. It’s out of step with where we have evolved as human beings.”

he phrase “the new normal” has been thrown around since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and as America struggles to define—and design—what that is exactly, colleges are paving the way for what it might look like.

After the chaos and uncertainty of 2020, colleges and universities throughout the Baltimore region began to find their groove as they moved into the 2021-2022 school year. Coronavirus safety committees had been erected, new mandates put in place, safety protocols implemented—everything from vaccine requirements to temperature checks to quarantine procedures and wastewater testing that can pinpoint a COVID infection before anyone is symptomatic.

By some counts, colleges may very well be the safest places to live and work.

“Just following simple rules of wearing face masks and social distancing, using wastewater management and testing when we need to, we have, in many ways, been able to return to normal life,” says Goucher College President Kent Devereaux. “Full athletics, student clubs, dining in the dining hall, use of the library—everything that you’d normally have, we’ve been able to return to.”

Despite the challenges and anxieties faced by students, staff, and faculty alike, some unexpected silver linings have emerged.

“It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

The widespread adoption of technology across college campuses has proven to provide more flexibility, efficiency, and innovation—and even accessibility, in some cases. Counseling sessions, for example, began to be conducted remotely during the pandemic and many students found that they preferred it to in-person sessions. Students who cannot, for whatever reason, make it to an in-person class can now study from anywhere.

Challenging times, combined with advances in technology and the general acceptance of it, have also brought more cooperation and collaboration among schools. It’s becoming more common, for example, for schools that offer complementary programs to partner with one another to offer students an educational pathway to continue studies in their chosen areas. That may mean a discounted tuition rate, a transfer of class credits, or an internship through a partner school.

Maybe most importantly though, schools, at their best, foster an environment where students are supported, expand who they are, and connect with like-minded people. At a time when gathering together is not always safe, being in a community has become even more precious, and students have found new ways to connect.

OCA Mocha, a coffeehouse in Arbutus founded by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) students, is one example of how effective a gathering place can be at a time when people are craving human connection. What started as a class assignment—to design a community center of some sort—has become a gathering place not just for UMBC students and alumni, but the Arbutus community at large.

“We’ve heard a lot of stories from people who are extremely grateful to have this space,” says Michael Berardi, UMBC class of 2019 and co-founder and general manager of OCA Mocha, which stands for Opportunities for Community Alliances. The coffee shop includes a stage, a community room, and an art gallery, employs UMBC students and alumni, and provides internship opportunities for current UMBC students.

“We have local groups and organizations that meet regularly in our community space and are grateful to not have to meet in someone’s living room or church basement,” says Berardi. “We see a lot of connections being made. It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

We checked in with colleges and universities throughout the region to find out what’s new and what campus life and classes look like, two years into the pandemic.

COPPIN STATE UNIVERSITY
A historically Black institution founded in 1900, Coppin State University is situated in the heart of Baltimore City in the Mondawmin neighborhood. Part of the University System of Maryland in Baltimore, the school offers 32 undergraduate and 11 graduate degrees, along with nine certificate programs and one doctorate degree. It’s been rated No. 4 Best HBCU in the Nation (College Consensus), the Top 5 Best Value Online Program (Online School Center), and No. 17 Best Value in the Nation (College Consensus).

In the summer of 2021, CSU announced its Student Debt Relief Initiative, which clears roughly $1 million in student balances and provided a $1,200 credit to every student enrolled in the fall 2021 semester. CSU also created the Freddie Gray Student Success Scholarship, which is available to graduates of Carver Vocational-Technical High School, where Gray was a student.

Coppin also takes esports (competitive video gaming) seriously. In the fall of 2021, Coppin became the first HBCU to open a building on campus exclusively devoted to esports. The Premier Esports Lab opened in September with a guest appearance from Grammy-nominated artist Cordae.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,383 undergraduates, 341 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $6,809 in-state, $13,334 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 40%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Business, Biology, Education, and Criminal Justice, Rehabilitation Counseling

DICKINSON COLLEGE
Founded in 1783, Dickinson College is a liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with a suburban campus that spans 144 acres. The school offers 41 undergraduate degrees within 17 fields of study.

It’s been rated as one of the best schools in the country for its sustainability efforts, which include an 80-acre, USDA-certified organic farm. Princeton Review rated it No. 2 in the Top 50 Green Colleges, and it was rated No. 2 in Overall Top Performers among baccalaureate institutions in the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s “Sustainable Campus Index” in 2019 and 2020.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,345
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $58,708
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 52%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: International Business, Economics, Political Science & Government, International Relations & National Security, General Psychology

GETTYSBURG COLLEGE
Gettysburg College, a private, liberal arts school, sits on 225 acres adjacent to the historical Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. Many of the buildings on campus are historically significant, so it’s no wonder that it draws students interested in studying history.

The school offers 65 academic programs, more than 120 campus clubs and organizations, and 800 events on campus each year, plus more than 100 study-abroad opportunities open to students.

Its Majestic Theater serves as a venue for the greater Gettysburg community, hosting national acts as well as performances by the school’s Sunderman Conservatory of Music students.

It’s ranked No. 12 for “students who study the most” by the Princeton Review, which also ranked Gettysburg College’s dining hall No. 9 in the country for best campus food.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,600
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $59,960
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 56%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Political Science, Economics, Health Sciences, Organization and Management Studies, History, Psychology

GOUCHER COLLEGE
A private, liberal arts college in Towson, Goucher College prides itself on its close-knit community.

Goucher was extremely proactive when it came to COVID-19 precautions, being the first in the state to implement wastewater testing, which is able to isolate COVID infections by dorm.

Also of note: The college recently opened two new residence halls as part of the school’s First-Year Village. One hundred percent of Goucher students study abroad, and the school is committed to sustainability.

Most recently, Goucher has begun exciting partnerships with other schools, such as Johns Hopkins University, Loyola University, and more to come, to provide a pathway for students to continue their education beyond Goucher. For instance, their 4+1 MBA Program allows students to earn an advanced business degree through Loyola via a “Fast Track” admission process, and at a 15% discount on tuition.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,100
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $48,000
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 79%
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Psychology, International Relations, Economics, Political Science, Business Administration

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Johns Hopkins University (JHU) offers nine academic divisions and hundreds of courses of study, with campuses spread throughout Baltimore, including the Peabody Institute, a music and dance conservatory in Mount Vernon. Its main Homewood campus is located on North Charles Street.

The prestigious, world-renowned university has a strong reputation for its public health and medical studies and has been compared to Ivy League schools.

One of its points of pride is its financial aid program, which covers 100% of calculated need for every admitted student, without loans. This means JHU works with families to calculate what they can afford to contribute toward the total cost of attendance—including meals, books, travel, and other expenses—and JHU covers the rest with grants that don’t need to be repaid.

This school year, JHU added two new minors: Latin American Studies and Writing Seminars.

It also announced new efforts this year to move toward a broader, more flexible undergraduate educational experience that will include a required first-year seminar and the streamlining of major requirements to allow for greater intellectual exploration.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,333 undergraduates, 22,559 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 6:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $56,313 for Peabody Institute, $58,720 for the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 9%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neuroscience, Economics, Public Health Studies, International Studies

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
This private, Jesuit institution offers undergraduate and graduate programs on a beautiful urban campus in northern Baltimore City. Education at Loyola is based in the Jesuit tradition of scholarship cura personalis, or care for the whole person. Loyola is known for its academic rigor while helping students lead purposeful lives. Seventy percent of students study abroad. It currently ranks fourth in best universities in the North region according to U.S. News & World Report.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,787 undergraduates, 1,353 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $53,430
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 80%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Journalism, Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, English Language and Literature, Engineering and Education.

McDANIEL COLLEGE
McDaniel College sits in a bucolic setting near Westminster in Carroll County. The private, four-year liberal arts college offers more than 70 undergraduate programs of study and more than 20 graduate programs. McDaniel’s most recent addition to its curriculum is a National Security Fellows Program that provides students with knowledge, skills, and experience in national security as well as the ability to specialize in an area of interest, such as interstate conflict, intrastate political violence, cybersecurity, ethics, and human rights.

Also new this year, McDaniel appointed an inaugural associate provost for equity and belonging who provides vision and leadership to the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and works in collaboration with the provost to co-lead the college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion administrative committee, and guides the Bias Education Response Support Team.

The school also launched a new STEM Center to serve as a physical hub to support students studying the sciences. It hosts workshops and other events while also supplying online and hybrid support.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,757 undergraduates, 1,324 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $46,336
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Kinesiology, Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Political Science, International Studies

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The largest of Maryland’s HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Morgan is a public institution founded in 1867. It is situated in northeast Baltimore. As a Carnegie-classified high research (R2) institution, Morgan provides instruction to a multiethnic, multiracial, multinational student body and offers more than 140 academic programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. As Maryland’s Preeminent Public Urban Research University, Morgan fulfills its mission to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment through intense community level study and pioneering solutions.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,270 undergraduates, 1,364 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $8,008 for in-state and $18,480 for out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 73%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Civil Engineering, Communications Engineering, Business Administration and Management, Social Work, Biology/Biological Sciences, Architecture, Finance, Psychology, Sociology

NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY
A private, Catholic liberal arts university in northern Baltimore, Notre Dame of Maryland University offers programs from undergraduate through PhD, as well as Maryland’s only women’s college. It recently launched the first master’s of art degree in Art Therapy program in the state.
The beautiful, wooded campus is just steps from the bustling downtown Baltimore culture. With values rooted in Catholicism, the school focuses on service to others and social responsibility.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 783
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $39,675
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 88%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Education, Biology, Art Therapy, Pharmacy

TOWSON UNIVERSITY
One of the largest public universities in the state, Towson University offers more than 60 undergraduate majors and continues to draw students from other states, though it remains part of the University System of Maryland.

Its campus continues to expand, with a huge new dining hall, a 23,000-foot recreation and fitness facility with an indoor swimming pool, and its 5,200-seat arena for sporting events and concerts. In 2021, it opened its new Science Complex, the largest academic building on campus at 320,000 square feet.

In September, Towson opened its StarTUp at the Armory, a space for startups and new businesses to engage with the broader community and larger businesses. It serves as a home to Towson’s entrepreneurship programs, as well as student competitions and events.

While Towson remains the largest supplier of medical professionals and educators in the state, the university has also built a strong reputation for its College of Fine Arts and Communication, as well as its Asian Arts & Culture Center, both of which bring students into the wider community and the Baltimore community to Towson for enriching performing arts, music, and visual art programs.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 17,907 undergraduates, 2,949 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 16:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $7,100 in-state, $22,152 out-of-state
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Education, Nursing, Exercise Science, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, Information Technology

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE
University of Maryland, Baltimore is Maryland’s only public health, law, and human services university. Located in downtown Baltimore, it offers 86 degree and certificate programs through its six nationally ranked professional schools—dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work—and an interdisciplinary graduate school.

The school’s 14-acre BioPark is Baltimore’s biggest biotechnology cluster, employing 1,000 people, and remains on the cutting edge of new drugs, treatments, and medical devices.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 7,244
• ANNUAL TUITION: Varies by school
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Medicine, Law, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Social Work

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY
University of Maryland, Baltimore County educates a campus of more than 10,000 students in programs spanning the arts, engineering, information technology, humanities, sciences, preprofessional studies, and social sciences. Located on the edge of Baltimore County, it allows easy access into the city and all the conveniences of suburban life and housing. It also offers plenty of opportunities for study abroad.

In the fall of 2021, UMBC opened the Center for Well-Being, a new two-story complex that houses Retriever Integrated Health, Student Conduct and Community Standards, and i3b’s Gathering Space for Spiritual Well-Being. UMBC’s already significant NASA partnerships have continued to grow. In October, NASA announced a major award of $72 million over three years for the new Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research II center. UMBC is leading the national consortium and will receive over $38 million. The GESTAR II consortium will support over 120 researchers, creating extensive opportunities for breakthroughs in Earth and atmospheric science research, and providing major opportunities for students to conduct research and be mentored by NASA scientists and engineers.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 13,638
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 17:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $12,280 in-state, $28,470 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts

Cited tuition costs exclude room and board and books.

Has the climate crisis impacted your shopping habits recently? Maybe you’ve decided to patronize a secondhand clothing store or refurbish an antique piece of furniture for your home. Those choices matter, and that’s what the new exhibition Naturally Beautiful: Uncovering Nature in the Nineteenth-Century Home, opening March 11 at the Homewood Museum at Johns Hopkins, aims to explore.

The exhibit implores visitors to consider that the prominent Carroll family, who resided for a short period at Homewood, likely faced the same predicament that we do now as shoppers, deciding between conservation or consumerism.

“We’re committed to taking objects that we carefully furnish this house with and looking at them in new and interesting ways,” Homewood assistant curator Michelle Fitzgerald says.

In Naturally Beautiful, the Homewood Museum displays its collection of decorative art and furnishings in distinct rooms or environments throughout the home to show 19th-century homeowners’ relationship to nature, their increasing appreciation for it, and how their choices affected the environment.

“The idea is that the consumer habits of the 19th century truly impacted the environment,” says the museum’s director and curator Julie Rose, “which is something not unfamiliar to us today, and exploring how our predecessors valued mother nature,”

One of Fitzgerald’s favorite pieces on display is a mahogany desk from the 1800s. “It has these beautiful inlays,” she says. “And its primary wood is mahogany, which was hugely popular in colonial America. At this point, while it’s so popular and is considered a luxury item, the Jamaican mahogany trade is almost done because they’ve harvested all of the commercially viable lumber…Today, we still don’t have great commercial mahogany around.”

Visitors can also expect to see Homewood’s popular Blue John urns prominently displayed. Blue John is a semi-precious mineral often featuring eye-catching veins of electric blue and purple. Today, it can only be found in a limited number of mines and caverns in Derbyshire, England. Other featured raw materials among the household items and apparel in the exhibit include silver, coral, and bird feathers.

Naturally Beautiful also explores the growing popularity of picnicking in the 19th century. The curatorial team has created a picnic setting inside Homewood that speaks to the movement of appreciating the environment in a safe, recreational way.

“There were tables, wine, toys for the children, and enslaved people were tasked with setting up this luxurious environment all to admire the beautiful natural setting surrounding Homewood,” Rose says. “This was typical of wealthy Baltimoreans who had summer retreats.”

This exhibition was more than a year in the making, with much research conducted by curatorial assistant and JHU senior Ian Waggoner.

“We spent time interviewing and working with Hopkins’ environmental science and anthropology departments and learning from those professors,” Fitzgerald says. “It’s been a wonderful opportunity to bring in new departments, and hopefully visitors, to the museum.”

Rose and Fitzgerald both hope that, after seeing the exhibit, visitors are more aware of their consumer habits and look at the objects in their home differently.

“This exhibit supports the idea of recognizing that our natural environment provides so much beauty, but it’s at a cost,” Rose says, “and appreciating the beautiful things and materials that go into making things for the home.”

Naturally Beautiful runs at the Homewood Museum from March 11 to June 5.

COMING SOON

Butterfly Tacos y Tortas: Just when we thought we didn’t need any more validation that Charm City has made it onto the national culinary map, Michelin star-rated chef and philanthropist José Andrés has announced that he is bringing a concept the area. A spinoff of the chef’s Washington, D.C. restaurant Oyamel Cocina Mexicana, Butterfly Tacos y Tortas will make its debut on the Johns Hopkins University campus on January 27. Though the weekday lunch spot, located inside Levering Hall off of Bowman Drive, will mainly cater to the campus community, it will also be open to the public. Inspired by Mexico City street culture, the fast-casual menu will highlight options like the “Tacos Hongos” with grilled mushrooms and salsa serrano, as well as the “Torta Pollo Milanese,” layered with crispy breaded chicken, black beans, cilantro, and Oaxaca cheese.

Tony Luke’s: The food court-style Baltimore Marketplace on the first floor of Horseshoe Casino, which is home to the likes of Lenny’s Deli and Piezzetta, is getting some new blood next month. As the communal dining area prepares to undergo a redesign with new furniture and a fresh layout, it will also welcome this lauded Philadelphia sandwich spot. Though the cheesesteaks are the stars of the show, Tony Luke’s—named after owner Tony “Luke” Lucidonio—also emphasizes its roasted pork subs, burgers, and fries. Though the chain has two locations in Ocean City, the Horseshoe spot will mark the first in Baltimore.

Watershed: Come fall, Atlas Restaurant Group is shaking things up and expanding its presence across the harbor to Federal Hill. The group that operates Ouzo Bay, Azumi, and several other spots scattered throughout Harbor East and Fells Point is launching two new concepts inside the newly renovated Cross Street Market later this year. The first will be a stall supplying fresh seafood (everything from Chesapeake Bay rockfish and local oysters to Chilean sea bass and Portuguese octopus) seven days a week. In keeping with the seafood theme, the group is also opening an anchor restaurant, Watershed, which will focus on classic Maryland dishes and steamed crabs. With the opening of the Cross Street Market eatery the neighborhood will also be gaining a rooftop deck complete with flat screens, a centerpiece bar, and recreational games like foosball and corn hole.

CH-CH CHANGES

Bin 604: Foreman Wolf Restaurant Group’s neighborhood wine shop has been adjacent to the Whole Foods in Harbor East ever since it first opened in 2001. So it only makes sense that, when the grocery store makes its move to the ground floor of the Liberty apartment complex around the corner later this year, Bin 604 will be going with it. Slated to open this spring, the shop’s new home will provide an additional 1,500 square feet and a separate classroom for workshops and tasting events. The space will also allow for an even more robust Italian wine selection. “Over the years we have grown our capability not just in wine selection and education, but in selection of spirits and beer,” said co-owner Tony Foreman, in a statement. “We’re incredibly excited to redesign the store, almost two decades later, to maximize our strengths.” As for the spaces Whole Foods and Bin 604 are leaving behind, Harbor East plans to announce replacement tenants soon.

EPICUREAN EVENTS

1/24: Chinese New Year at The Corner Pantry
The team at this Mt. Washington haunt is getting creative for their annual Chinese New Year celebration. Given that 2020 is the Year of the Rat (aka Charm City’s unofficial mascot), chef Neill Howell has prepared a menu featuring local spins on classic Chinese dishes. Among them will be pit beef steamed buns with tiger sauce and scallion salad, crab spring rolls with chili sauce for dipping, and a ginger beer-infused Orange Crush. The a la carte menu will be offered all day on Friday, January 24 in celebration of the holiday.

For the past 11 years, the Newseum—a cultural institution devoted to increasing awareness of the importance of a free and fair press—has stood proudly on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. But after years of financial struggles, the museum will host its final visitors on December 30 before the landmark building changes hands to Johns Hopkins University. If you haven’t yet visited the Newseum or want to take one last trip through its hallowed halls, take along our guide to the top things to do and see before it closes.

TO DO

Photo Finish: Walk out onto the sixth floor’s Greenspun Terrace for an unbeatable view of “America’s main street” and snap pictures of the U.S. Capitol.

Attend an Event: Plan your visit around one of the museum’s “Inside Media” events, including this month’s talks with the authors
of The Only Plane in the Sky: Remembering 9/11 and The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests.

Face Time: Step in front of the cam- era in the NBC News Interactive Newsroom and test your skills as an investigative reporter or anchor.

TO SEE

A Piece of History: Stand in awe of eight 12-foot-high segments of the Berlin Wall, one of the most imposing symbols of oppression in the modern world.

Somber Notes: Take in the two-story glass structure on the third floor that bears the names of more than 2,000 reporters, editors, broadcasters, and photographers who died in the line of duty, including those killed in last year’s Capital Gazette shooting.

Front-Page News: Before entering the Newseum,
see if your hometown newspaper is one of the 80 enlarged and displayed in the Today’s Front Pages gallery outside the museum.

The height of Paul Rabil’s college lacrosse career just happened to coincide with the greatest attendance numbers the NCAA men’s lacrosse tournament has ever seen. In 2007, a record 48,443 fans packed M&T Bank Stadium on Memorial Day to watch Rabil, the brute Johns Hopkins’ All-American midfielder, and the hometown Blue Jays compete for a national title against Duke, the team a year removed from the alleged rape scandal that captured the nation’s attention.

The result, a 12-11 Hopkins win and Rabil’s starring role with one goal and a career-high five assists, catapulted the college junior, a 6-foot-3, 225-pound swim-dodging dynamo into face-of-the-game status. And he parlayed the buzz, and a twenty-something’s early understanding of a thing called social media, into a full-fledged adult lacrosse life. That meant, for the last decade, playing part-time in the sport’s outdoor and indoor pro leagues, promoting himself and his associated brands, crossing the country to teach youth camps and clinics, and suiting up for Team USA.

It was a career, one which landed Rabil the label of “Lacrosse’s Million-Dollar Man,” given his cumulative endorsement deals at age 27, unmatched by anyone else in the growing yet still niche sport. But the glitz and glamour and big contracts of the NBA, MLB, or NFL this was not.

Major League Lacrosse, or MLL—the outdoor pro league that started in 2000 and in which Rabil became a two-time MVP—paid most players less than a typical entry-level job salary, not enough to live on. And, over the last few years, the league gradually received less exposure from major television broadcasters, a trend that didn’t sit well with the media-savvy Rabil, who boasted his own self-made internet footprint.

He’s got a YouTube channel and a podcast (“Suiting Up”) that’s featured guests like lacrosse aficionado Bill Belichick, tennis legend Venus Williams, investor and media executive Gary Vaynerchuk, and even Tony Robbins. Frustrated, Rabil and his older brother, Mike, an entrepreneur who’s started several successful businesses, sought to buy the existing outdoor pro league, but couldn’t reach a deal. (It would have been almost the equivalent of Johnny Unitas buying the NFL as a young man.)

And so here we are, all these years later, right back home where it all began—but with one big twist. This weekend Rabil, now 33, brings to town—and specifically to Johns Hopkins’ historic Homewood Field—his own professional lacrosse league. Yes, he’s the co-founder, along with his brother, of the nascent Premier Lacrosse League, a pioneering first-year outfit unlike anything the sport has seen before. Rabil’s former college teammate, Kyle Harrison, whom we profiled in Baltimore earlier this year, was also a key figure in the formation of the league.

In a dynamic reminiscent of the USFL’s competition with the NFL in the mid-1980s, the Rabils raised capital and wooed players to their league with higher salaries (players are paid a reported average of $28,000), health benefits, and, unconventionally, an equity stake in the league. Investors include people like billionaire Joe Tsai, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba (the Chinese equivalent of Amazon) and a former lacrosse player at Yale.

The games are broadcast across NBC’s family of networks, and the league is breaking team sports ground with its tour-based model, meaning rosters aren’t rooted to a specific city and instead travel like a roadshow (or like the pro tennis and golf tours) and play in places like New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Denver, and Atlanta.

Saturday marks the league’s first stop in Baltimore, and the first pro men’s lacrosse game in the city since the MLL’s Bayhawks moved in 2006 to Washington, D.C. (and eventually to Annapolis). Johns Hopkins will host three men’s games and two pro women’s games this weekend, with the main event coming at 7:30 p.m. Saturday.

Under the lights, Rabil and the Blue Jays-themed Atlas Lacrosse Club (featuring seven Hopkins alums on the roster) will face off against the University of Maryland-heavy (as in 20 Terps on the team) Whipsnakes Lacrosse Club in a rekindling of sorts of college lacrosse’s most epic rivalry, dating to 1895. “Now that we’re out of college,” says former Johns Hopkins and Calvert Hall attackman Ryan Brown, Rabil’s Atlas teammate, “we still hate them, and they still hate us.”

Also notable is the amount of access the league has provided NBC during game broadcasts. Sideline interviews? That’s old hat. How about interviews with players on the field during the game? That new idea, and the execution, has grabbed national attention . . . (Skip ahead to the 35-second mark of this video to hear another Baltimore guy, Gilman alum and NBC analyst Ryan Boyle, ask a live question of a player who just scored a goal.)

This is to say that if you’re not going to make it to Homewood Field to watch in person this weekend, at least tune in on the television or your smartphone, even if you’re somewhere on the beach. If, for nothing else, to see at least one guy live out a dream, on the same field where the seeds were planted for it as a college kid.

“Homewood Field is not only the most historic venue in lacrosse, home to 44 national championships, first-team All-Americans and Hall-of-Famers, but it’s where I learned how to play the game at the highest level,” Rabil says. “My four years at Hopkins will continue to guide me over the next 40 years of my life. And I couldn’t be more excited to rewind this Saturday and play on the ’Wood again.”

If the thought of rum conjures up images of pirates, college parties, and boozy daiquiris, you aren’t alone. But the spirit itself has a much more layered and complex past—one that you can explore at the 23rd Evening of Traditional Beverages put on by the Homewood Museum at Johns Hopkins University.

The annual event, this year held at the campus’ Mudd Hall on May 30 from 6-8 p.m., gives guests a big dose of history with a spoonful of spirits, live music, and local food all to benefit the museum and its future endeavors.

“It’s a fun way to think about history,” says Homewood Museum curator Julie Rose. “We haven’t focused on rum in over 15 years and I know it’s a big part of local lore.”

Indeed, rum was a huge imported product in 18th-century Maryland, mostly being shipped from Barbados into London Town and Gardens in Edgewater. According to historian Kyle Dalton, who will be speaking at next week’s event, the elixir was an apt symbol for cultural mores of the time.

“Maryland was a society of contradictions, as it was very communal but strictly hierarchical,” explains Dalton, coordinator of membership and development for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick. “Rum was a luxury product, so you knew that it was a fairly refined society drinking it. But it was most commonly consumed as a rum punch with colonists drinking directly from the same bowl, so that reflects the communal society.”

Dalton notes that it’s becoming commonplace for museums to try and replicate the past, like with living history exhibits and even the duplication of alcohol products. Colonial Williamsburg has been trying its hand at replicating beer (“the Miller Lite of the 1700s,” he notes) and Mount Vernon is producing a similar whiskey to what George Washington would have imbibed.

“Young audiences really want experiences, rather than something they can take home from the gift shop,” Dalton says. “Liquor is an experience you can share with other people. It’s a small time-travel experience for your tongue.”

That transformative aspect can be seen in modern-day Maryland, thanks to many distilleries using traditional recipes and methods for producing rum. Take St. Mary’s County-based Tobacco Barn Distillery, which makes its rum from 100-percent local ingredients that is then fermented, double-distilled, and sealed in bourbon barrels aboard the U.S.S. Constellation.

“On the ship, you get a little bit of movement that causes swirl and circulation in the barrel, so that imparts a lot more flavor,” says Tobacco Bar co-founder and former Navy admiral Scott Sanders. “If you were in Maryland in the 1700s, this would be the kind of rum you’s drink.”

Besides Tobacco Barn, the rum revival is alive and well in Maryland, thanks to distilleries like Lyon in St. Michael’s, Old Line Spirits in Highlandtown, Blackwater on Kent Island, and Lost Ark in Columbia—all pouring their products at Traditional Beverages.

“Rum not only interests me from a historical perspective, but we wanted to highlight the resurgence of distilleries in Maryland,” Rose says. “People have a real interest in seeing where their food comes from in terms of protecting our planet. There was the microbrewery phenomenon that has had such a big impact on the industry and people are interested in distilleries for that same reason.”

The rain-or-shine event will also feature locally sourced bites from Woodberry Kitchen and live calypso music from percussionists Christina Manceor and Matthew Stiens.

“Right now, campus is in a transition period after graduation, so it’s a great time to celebrate,” Rose says. “This is a good excuse to put on your floral shirt, relax a bit, and learn about some history of the drink.”

On a cold evening in February, Johns Hopkins University sophomore Jesse Wu pulled out his wok, heated up a dutch oven, and prepped a three-course meal for some of his friends. The menu featured chicken wings sous vide in Shaoxing wine with hoisin vinegar sauce, mapo tofu with szechuan peppercorns and doubanjiang bean paste, and a traditional red bean soup with tapioca pearls and orange zest.

“It’s basically your classic Chinese banquet dessert,” Wu explains. “Even after a full meal, you always have to save space for that red bean soup.”

The impressive menu is one that could easily be found at any upscale Chinese restaurant in the area, but, in Wu’s case, the kitchen and dining room were all set up in his cozy Hopkins dorm.

Symbolizing “something precious” in Chinese culture, Wu’s restaurant concept Jade is a way for the biomedical engineering student to share his heritage with his peers, while also expanding his studies.

“I’m very interested in, not just clinical, but also social and cultural medicine,” says Wu, who wants to go on to medical school and eventually pursue a career as a physician-chef. “I think that food plays a really important role in all three. I’d really like to incorporate what I know about food and my experiences working in restaurants to make systemic change.”

The son of an engineer and a food scientist, Wu says that STEM has always been in his blood. But it wasn’t until he got to college and began writing for the Johns Hopkins News-Letter that he started to learn more about the local food scene and flex his cooking skills.

“Since I’m the youngest in my family, I was always barred from the kitchen,” he says of his upbringing in Massachusetts. “My parents were always like, ‘Don’t let Jesse get cut or get burned. We have to protect our youngest and make sure he does well in school’—only for me to later go off to school and get burned and cut in the kitchen.”

The greatest burn came just one week after Wu’s inaugural Jade pop-up in his dorm. Just as he was about to announce the next night of service to his friends on social media, Wu got a call from the residential director of his building, who informed him that Hopkins was shutting the operation down.

Although Wu is ServSafe certified and was only permitting invited guests into his dorm, the university has a strict anti-dorm business policy. It also has a non-compete agreement with its food management company, which prohibits outside organizations from serving food on campus. (Wu later penned an opinion piece for the News-Letter about the university’s role in fostering young entrepreneurship.)

In a true reflection of his enterprising spirit, Wu didn’t let the obstacle stop him from continuing Jade: “You can’t ever let anything like that get you down,” he says. “No matter how overwhelming or looming the institution imposing it upon you may seem.”

Instead, he chose to turn to the community around him to figure out how to keep the restaurant going. Through the university’s TCO Labs incubator, he connected with fellow student Pava LaPere—who has founded three different startups in her undergraduate career. After hearing about Jade, LaPere let Wu use her apartment building as the venue for the second pop-up in April.

He also connected with local chef mentors like Rey Eugenio of the Masarap pop-up and Steve Chu of Ekiben. These experiences in the local food scene have prepared Wu for his biggest gig yet—a stint in the rotating pop-up stall at R. House May 28-June 2. The menu will highlight riffs on Jade’s signature dishes, which include crispy scallion pancakes, popcorn chicken and tapioca longjin milk tea, and a vegan version of the mapo tofu.

“I came to Hopkins because of the biomedical engineering program, but I stayed because of Baltimore,” Wu says. “The food community is so cooperative. People who work in food service know how hard it is, and they’re so willing to help if you have a good mindset. It’s really fantastic to see all of that love and support be channeled toward one kid with a pipe dream.”

Moving forward, Wu is excited to see how Jade will evolve throughout his undergraduate career and beyond.

“I want to see it grow,” he says. “That’s what immigrant food has to do. We have to be flexible so that we can share it with as many people as we can, and in as many spaces as possible.”

Johns Hopkins football coach Jim Margraff, the program’s all-time winningest coach and the recently named NCAA Division III Coach of the Year, died Wednesday at his home in Timonium. He was 58, and less than a month removed from leading the Blue Jays to their first-ever D-III national semifinal game and a program-best 12-2 record.

School officials did not release a cause of death, but said it came suddenly.

Margraff had just completed his 29th season coaching at his alma mater, where he played quarterback and graduated in 1982 as the program’s career leader in passing yards and touchdowns. After a few assistant coaching stops, he took over as head coach at Johns Hopkins in the summer of 1990.

“Jim Margraff was a thoughtful, humble, passionate, and exceptionally talented leader and our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends at this difficult time,” Johns Hopkins athletic director Alanna W. Shanahan said in a statement. “He left an indelible impact on all he touched and he made us all better. We will forever be thankful for the unparalleled experiences he provided for so many over the course of his highly successful career.”

Margraff completed the 2018 season with a career record of 221-89-3, as the Blue Jays ended the year with a 28-20 loss to 13-time national champion Mount Union. At Hopkins, Margraff won a Centennial Conference-record 14 league championships and advanced to the playoffs 10 times. His 221 wins are also the most by any college football coach in Maryland state history. He was inducted to the Johns Hopkins Athletic Hall of Fame in 1997.

In 2015, we profiled the Blue Jays football team, which ran through the regular season undefeated and was in search of a deep playoff run.

Friends, fellow coaches, and admirers shared their public condolences upon release of the sad news on Wednesday, including the Ravens and coach John Harbaugh, who praised Margraff as a “highly respected member of the Baltimore community and an icon at Johns Hopkins.”

A memorial service will be held on Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus, with more details to be announced by the school.

Additionally, Margraff is a finalist for the American Football Coaches Association National Coach of the Year award, which will be announced Tuesday.

Margraff was originally from the north shore of Long Island, where he was a standout high school quarterback and baseball player before heading south to Baltimore. He broke many of his passing records at Johns Hopkins while throwing to Bill Stromberg, now the president and CEO of T. Rowe Price.

Margraff is survived by his wife, Alice, and children Megan, James, and Will. Alice Margraff is a 1989 Johns Hopkins graduate, and Megan Margraff graduated from Johns Hopkins in 2017.

For 31 years, Orla Wilson had been treating her Type 1 diabetes with a combination of prescribed pumps and devices, but all that changed when her then-8-year-old daughter, Polly, was diagnosed with the disease. Wanting to make Polly’s daily routine more predictable and less time consuming, Wilson, a senior lecturer of materials science and engineering at Johns Hopkins University, joined a rising subculture of patients who have hacked their own insulin pumps and created an artificial pancreas system using open-source coding.

The simulated pancreas system was founded in 2015 when diabetes activists Dana Lewis and Scott Leibrand created a closed-loop system that connects updates from a patients’ continuous glucose monitor to their wearable insulin pump. Instead of having to manually adjust insulin levels, the OpenAPS system transmits blood sugar readings to the insulin pump, which then automatically adjusts the patients’ intake to maintain a healthy rate.

The systems must be self-made and are not regulated or approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Lewis and Leibrand shared their open-source code online and launched the #OpenAPS movement to help people like Wilson, who became the 121st person to complete her own system in October 2016. As of July, more than 725 people, including Polly, are reportedly using the hybrid strategy.

Since adopting the homemade system, Wilson says she worries less about “going low” on glucose while she’s teaching or about Polly sleeping through her blood-sugar alarms. She has shared her experience with various diabetes Facebook groups and the Johns Hopkins chapter of the College Diabetes Network, and even hosted a webinar with local nonprofit Diabetes Destiny.

During her senior design course, she points to her system as an example of the importance of innovation and lifelong learning. “It’s like saying ‘screw you’ to diabetes,” she says. “I have a better understanding and control over it now than ever before, and the fact that it’s something I chose to do and build for my health is empowering.”

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he does not believe qualified high school students should be barred from entrance to college because of financial issues, announcing Sunday that he was giving a record $1.8 billion donation to Johns Hopkins University, ensuring that admissions to his alma mater would forever be need-blind.

“I was lucky,” Bloomberg wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “My father was a bookkeeper who never made more than $6,000 a year. But I was able to afford Johns Hopkins University through a National Defense student loan, and by holding down a job on campus. My Hopkins diploma opened up doors that otherwise would have been closed, and allowed me to live the American dream.”

Beginning in the fall of 2019, Johns Hopkins will become a loan-free institution, President Ronald Daniels said. The school, founded in 1876 with a $7 million endowment from its namesake Baltimore philanthropist, plans to replace all undergraduate student loans with scholarships and reduce overall family contributions to financial aid. In addition, Hopkins will offer immediate loan relief to currently enrolled undergraduate students receiving a federal need-based loan.

In a letter to the university’s alumni, Daniels said the school’s goal is to “attract and support” a student body by 2023 in which at least 20 percent of its students are eligible for federal Pell grants.

Hopkins tied at No. 10 in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of national universities. Its annual tuition, fees, and room and board will total nearly $70,000 in 2019.

“America is at its best when we reward people based on the quality of their work, not the size of their pocketbook,” Bloomberg said. “Denying students entry to a college based on their ability to pay undermines equal opportunity. It perpetuates intergenerational poverty. And it strikes at the heart of the American dream: the idea that every person, from every community, has the chance to rise based on merit.”

Bloomberg, 76, is a graduate of the Class of 1964 and a former chair of the Hopkins board of trustees. With his latest gift, Bloomberg’s overall contributions to Hopkins now surpass $3.35 billion. It is believed to be the largest philanthropic investment ever made to an institution of higher learning in the U.S.

At more than three-dozen elite U.S. colleges, more students come from families in the top one percent of the income scale than the the bottom 60 percent, even though many lower and middle-income students have the academic credentials for admittance, according to a 2017 analysis by The New York Times.

With more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loans in the country, college loans surpass total motor vehicle loans, making it the second-largest consumer debt segment in the country after mortgages, according to the Federal Reserve’s most recent annual report.

In addition to Bloomberg’s announcement, Hopkins said it plans to address the issue of college “under-matching,” in which top high school students from middle and lower-income families are not matched with selective college options with new outreach and recruitment programs. Bloomberg Philanthropies will also address the issue through two programs aimed at helping high-achieving, lower-income students gain access top universities.

Previously, Bloomberg donated $1.5 billion to university’s school of public health, which bears his name. He has hinted at a possible presidential run for president in 2020, switching his party registration from Republican to Democrat earlier this year.

According to the Forbes’ real-time billionaire rankings, Bloomberg is the 14th-richest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at $46.3 billion. After being laid off from an investment-banking job at Salomon Brothers in 1981, he founded the global business information and media company Bloomberg L.P., which generates an annual $9 billion in sales.

Five years ago, on an otherwise normal Friday morning in Chelyabinsk, Russia, a six-story meteor—seemingly out of nowhere—burst across the clear blue sky as commuters were making their way to work. This surreal fireball—hurtling toward the Earth at 42,000 miles per hour and burning brighter than the sun—was caught on at least a dozen dashboard cameras before it exploded 19 miles above the city. (Nearly every car in Russia is outfitted with a dashboard camera, with footage typically used to settle traffic disputes.)

The blast from the largest asteroid to pierce the Earth’s atmosphere since the 1908 Tungaska event, which flattened some 800 square miles of Siberian forest, damaged 7,200 buildings in six cities, shattering windows and injuring more than 1,600 people.

Suffice to say, the episode was an effective reminder that about two-dozen meteors pop through the Earth’s atmosphere every year, including on average at least one the size of an automobile. It also proved a wake-up call for Congress, which began holding hearings about the threat to U.S. public safety. After all, the next 7,000-ton, flaming rock could just as likely land on I-95 as a Siberian forest.

NASA eventually announced the creation of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The big question they needed to figure out, of course, was how exactly do you divert a rogue asteroid from an orbital collision with Earth? How do you design, model, and fly something into a speeding space rock and then measure the change in its trajectory?

The answer came to Andy Cheng, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Howard County, in his basement during his morning calisthenics routine. Cheng realized the simplest approach was to crash a spacecraft into the smaller of a twin pair of asteroids—whose orbits are linked—and then measure the change in the orbit of the smaller asteroid against its larger twin. Up until that point, leading planetary defense scientists, including those at the European Space Agency, assumed they needed to build two spacecrafts—a prohibitive cost—one to smash into the asteroid and a second to document the change in its orbit. Measuring the changes in the asteroid’s rotation and spin against its twin, however, scientists could manage from their telescopes.

“It was a light bulb moment,” Cheng says with a laugh. “I was at home, stretching, in my normal routine before work, and I thought, ‘I know how to do it.’”

The chief scientist of the Space Department at the Applied Physics Laboratory, Cheng jokes he should be retired by now. He well remembers the year he moved to Baltimore (he currently lives in Potomac) to take a job at JHU’s Applied Physics Lab because it’s the same year the Orioles last won a World Series—1983. Instead, the 66-year-old grandfather is the co-lead investigator on the first-ever mission, nicknamed DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), to demonstrate an asteroid deflection in real time, in real space, for planetary defense purposes.

“I’m just having too much fun to quit.”

Given the way the threat of asteroids has permeated pop culture, namely end-of-the-world movies such as Deep Impact and Armageddon, it’s easy to forget that the study of asteroids is really new science. We put a man on the moon a decade before the first scientists theorized a giant asteroid had caused the mysterious extinction of the dinosaurs (not to mention three-quarters of all living species) 66 million years ago. That asteroid, with a diameter half the length of Manhattan, dented the Yucatan Peninsula with such force that it’s estimated 330-foot waves crested the shores of what are now Texas and Florida. More significantly, it ignited such an explosion on impact that the ensuing billow of dust, sulfur, and carbon dioxide blocked out the sun’s rays for years, driving down global temperatures and setting off a chain reaction of ecosystem catastrophes.

Closer to home, it wasn’t until 1983 that scientists discovered the first hint of the 53-mile impact crater buried beneath the Chesapeake Bay—left by the crash of an asteroid more than a mile in diameter.

“You know the saying: ‘The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program,’” says NASA’s Tom Statler, quoting science fiction author Larry Niven and only half-kidding. “Only in hindsight does it seem obvious that all these [previously believed volcanic] craters were the result of asteroids crashing into planets.” All told, Statler adds, about 100 tons of extraterrestrial matter falls onto the Earth every day, mostly in the form of harmless dust, but also the occasional small meteorite.

For the record, the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk is considered “small” by NASA’s near-Earth asteroid tracking standards. As was the fiery 26-pound rock that smashed through the trunk of 18-year-old Michelle Knapp’s Chevrolet Malibu while it was parked in her family’s Peekskill, New York, driveway in 1992, and the 8.5-pound space rock that crashed through an Alabama farmhouse in 1954, injuring Ann Hodges while she was napping on her sofa. Remarkably, there are no known human casualties from asteroids in recorded history, although a dog in a village outside Cairo, Egypt, was reportedly killed by a falling fragment in 1911. (Intercepting these small meteorites isn’t on the table at NASA or the Applied Physics Lab. Planetary defense scientists have their hands full tracking the thousands of near-Earth asteroids five times the size of the most recent Russian asteroid or larger.)

Roughly 95 percent, or about 15,000, of the large near-Earth asteroids have been located, says Statler, who serves as the NASA program scientist overseeing the DART mission. But until Cheng’s breakthrough idea, redirection was considered extremely difficult and borderline unverifiable.

“I wish I had thought of it,” Statler says.

As the timeline stands, the APL-built DART spacecraft will launch in June 2021 and impact Didymoon—the smaller twin to the asteroid Didymos (Greek for twin)—6.8 million miles from Earth on Oct. 7, 2022.

“Each asteroid has been to different places. Each has its own history.”

This summer, the White House released the administration’s 2019 budget request of $150 million for planetary defense, including $90 million for the DART mission. The White House also outlined goals to address the small but “high-consequence” threat posed by near-Earth objects, further developing technologies for deflecting or disrupting potential collisions (including a nuclear missile in the worst case scenario).

Meanwhile, notes Nancy Chabot, an APL project scientist, amateur astronomers will be able to track the DART project’s effect on the orbits of the Didymos asteroids when they are close to Earth. “We welcome anyone with a telescope to help,” she says of what will be the years-long observations of the twin rocks.

Most asteroids that stray near Earth—the Didymos pair, the Chelyabinsk rock, or others—are fragments of larger asteroids, numbering in the millions, from an enormous asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Some are rich in precious metals—asteroid mining is predicted as a thing of the future. Some asteroids are actually blown out comets with all the ice gone and just the rocky minerals left behind. Some have eccentric orbits. “Each asteroid has been to different places,” says Columbia resident Andy Rivkin, co-lead investigator with Cheng on the DART mission. “Each one has its own history.”

Rivkin adds that in recent years it has been theorized that most of the water on Earth may have come from asteroids and not comets.

The DART mission is not the only current high-profile project out of the Hopkins lab, which employs more than 6,000 people on its sprawling 20-building, 453-acre campus. The APL designed, built, and operates the recently launched $1.5 billion Parker Solar Probe, which will fly seven times closer to the sun than any previous mission. That spacecraft will explore, among other sun properties, the powerful solar winds that affect Earth, occasionally derailing satellites and GPS systems.

Other recent missions based at the Laurel facility include MESSENGER, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. And yes, Pluto is still a planet, although it is now considered a dwarf planet, of which there are many in our solar system. “The question everyone asks at a cocktail party when they find out you’re a planetary astronomer,” says Rivkin.

Meanwhile, APL planetary geophysicist Olivier Barnouin, who worked on the MESSENGER and New Horizons projects, helped write the proposal for another ongoing high-profile project overseen by NASA’s Goddard Flight Center in Greenbelt. The OSIRIS-REx project is the first U.S. mission designed to bring back an asteroid sample, from a primitive asteroid named Bennu, which scientists hope will reveal new information about the formation of the solar system.

“[With the OSIRIS-REx project], we are talking about being able to answer what are religious-type questions in the scientific community,” says Barnouin. “One hypothesis people go for is that in reality we are all aliens—that almost everything that is needed for life on Earth came from outer space.”

An asteroid estimated to be 4.5 billion years old with a diameter of the Empire State Building, Bennu, named after a mythological Egyptian bird, takes a close orbit to the Earth every six years. It is also noteworthy because it’s one of the large near-Earth asteroids with the best odds of impacting Earth, albeit sometime late next century. Granted, it’s a slim shot—an estimated 1 in 2,700 chance—but that’s still twice the probability of the average little leaguer making it to the big leagues. It’s also better odds than getting struck by lightning, which kills a couple dozen people in the U.S. each year.

Space, which is sometimes depicted as a great void and at other times as an asteroid and comet superhighway, is actually neither.

It’s both.

“Space is big,” says Rivkin. “But if you wait around long enough, something will come by.”

Last summer, six Johns Hopkins University archaeology students were conducting preservation work around the perimeter of the university’s Homewood Museum when they unearthed an early 19th-century bottle of champagne.

A previous trenching project conducted in the 1980s, when Homewood was being restored into a museum, uncovered similar artifacts including wire cork cradles and bottlenecks dating back to the early 1800s—when Maryland’s historic Carroll family inhabited the estate.

“What we were able to do is compare what was found in 2017 to what was found in 1980s,” says Homewood’s director and curator Dr. Julie Rose. “And there was a significant amount of material that spoke to sparkling wine consumption, commerce, and service at that time.”

Suffice it to say, the Homewood team had plenty of inspiration for the theme of this year’s Evening of Traditional Beverages—an annual summer event that explores the history behind classic spirits and cocktails.

In previous years, the outdoor program has taught attendees about everything from ciders and shrub cocktails to bourbon and rye. This time around, Homewood’s 22nd annual event on Wednesday, June 13 at 6 p.m. will celebrate all things bubbly with a sampling of five sparkling wines and light bites by Woodberry Kitchen.

“It’s this opportunity for people interested in history and Maryland’s culture to be thinking about it in a different context,” Rose says. “Drinking champagne at home or at a restaurant is great, but to consume sparkling wines in this setting of the historic house really elevates the experience in terms of how we are still so tied to our past.”

Aside from the archaeological findings, Rose mentions that a survey of the wine cellar in the Homewood Museum revealed that the Carroll family had an extensive collection of French Champagne.

“It was very fashionable and relatively new for Americans at the time,” Rose says. “Both Charles Carroll of Carrollton and his son, Charles Carroll of Homewood, had their formal education in France. So they were fluent in French and had an affinity for French culture. It makes a lot of sense that Champagne would be on their dining room table.”

Some of the cellar findings will be on display for attendees at the event, which will feature remarks by Al Spoler of WYPR’s “Cellar Notes” and sparkling beverages including Dibon NV Brut Reserve Cava, Bisol Jeio Prosecco, Roederer American sparkling wine, and the Albariño Pét-Nat from our own Old Westminster Winery (OWW).

“This particular albariño really captures the essence of what we’re out to do,” says OWW co-owner Drew Baker. “We grow the grape in our home vineyard, and it offers so much interest. Unlike a cabernet or sauvignon blanc that is made with grapes grown throughout the world, it isn’t ubiquitous. Albariño is a little more niche.”

Baker describes the pét-nat as one of the most ancient styles of sparkling wine. The process, which pre-dates champagne production by several hundred years, involves bottle-conditioning the wine so that it is naturally carbonated without adding any sugar or yeast. The historical element, says Baker, couples well with the academic nature of the event.

“It’s kind of like what’s old is new again,” he says. “When consumers discover this style and understand how it’s made, they quickly fall in love with it. People want to go back to their roots.”

The annual event, located on the lush lawn outside of Homewood Museum, always adds a bit of education to after-work libation.

“We like to think of the event as sort of the unofficial kick-off to summer,” Rose says. “There’s been a clear interest to look at alcoholic beverages and all the history and culture that goes along with them.”

Those gathered at the Royal Farms Arena on May 24 to celebrate the Johns Hopkins University Class of 2018 will likely hear a few familiar names among the graduates, but one may stick out from the rest.

George Lucas, film innovator and the mind behind the iconic Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, has been chosen to receive one of the six honorary degrees from Johns Hopkins University to be conferred this year.

“I am passionate about creating educational opportunities that enable our young people to learn and grow,” says Lucas. “I am extraordinarily impressed with Johns Hopkins and its academic mission—one that fosters an environment of creativity, imagination and innovation.”

Lucas, who also holds an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, will attend the commencement ceremony along with his wife, Mellody Hobson, who is also being awarded an honorary degree. Hobson is president of Ariel Investments, one of the country’s largest African-American-owned investment firms, and was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2015.

JHU senior Claudia Perez, who has been a member of The Johns Hopkins Science-Fiction and Fantasy Association (HopSFA) since her freshman year, is excited to graduate alongside one of the heroes of the sci-fi community.

“I’m a pretty big Star Wars fan,” says Perez. “I’ve seen all the movies multiple times and have played many hours of the various video games, not to mention owning many of the Lego sets. One summer a group of HopSFA members, myself included, got together each week and watched 1-6 before the seventh movie came out.”

For the past three years, Perez has worked to organize many HopSFA events as a member of the group’s board, including an annual convention called JohnCon, in addition to her studies in molecular and cellular biology. She and other HopSFA members found out about Lucas’ honorary degree via JHU Hub and have been talking about it since.

“I think it’s really cool and would love to see more people with similar interests to myself get acknowledged for their accomplishments,” Perez says.

Since selling Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company in 2012, Lucas has dedicated his time to the George Lucas Educational Foundation, which he founded in 1991. The foundation promotes “innovative, replicable, and evidence-based programs and practices that prepare students to thrive in school.” The filmmaker’s latest project, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art broke ground last month in Los Angeles and is expected to open in 2022.

Lucas and Hobson will be honored alongside locals David H. Bernstein, Douglas Miles and Solomon H. Snyder, as well as commencement speaker Bryan A. Stevenson.

“I am truly honored to be among such esteemed and distinguished recipients,” Hobson says. “I am inspired by Johns Hopkins’ founding principle—that by pursuing big ideas and sharing what we learn, we make the world a better place.”

Ayurveda Beginner’s Guide

Susan Weis-Bohlen (Althea Press)

This debut book from Susan Weis-Bohlen—former owner of Breathe Books in Hampden and now an Ayurvedic practitioner and meditation instructor—serves as a primer on Ayurveda, an ancient, holistic system of medicine, as well as an abbreviated cookbook to complement the lifestyle. She lays down a strong foundation before delving into the more creative and playful aspects of daily rituals—crafting meals, yoga sequences, breathing exercises—based on your dosha (don’t worry, you’ll have a firm handle on what a dosha is—and what your dosha is—after reading this). Though Ayurveda is 5,000 years old, Weis-Bohlen also addresses modern health and dietary concerns, like environmental toxins. Through the lens of this ancient science, she covers everything from the importance of scraping your tongue in the morning to the importance of Ayurvedic-style sex. The warmth and serenity of Weis-Bohlen comes through on the pages. At times, reading it feels like a meditation in and of itself, especially if paired with a hot cup of spiced milk.

Chance Particulars

Sara Mansfield Taber (Johns Hopkins University Press)

Sara Mansfield Taber’s latest is part workbook and part how-to, and though it bills itself as an instructional guide that’s suited primarily for writers and artists, anyone wanting to more deeply understand his or her world will find its ideas useful. In fact, the book’s subtitle is fairly inclusive: A Writer’s Field Notebook for Travelers, Bloggers, Essayists, Memoirists, Novelists, Journalists, Adventurers, Naturalists, Sketchers, and Other Note-Takers and Recorders of Life. The phrase “chance particulars” is borrowed from Thomas Mallon, who says that writers should include any peculiar observations in their work. Taber, who has taught writing at Johns Hopkins University and the Bethesda Writer’s Center, builds on that idea and breaks down the methods for doing so, like talking with people, keeping records of such seemingly mundane things as gas prices and grocery lists, and using descriptions that evoke all five senses. She writes about the practicality (and joy) of keeping a commonplace book wherein you jot down any musings, snippets, or other useful information you come across. As the saying goes: God is in the details.

Like Riding a Bike

After a tumultuous first year that included temporary suspension of service, Baltimore Bikeshare is expanding. According to an announcement in its most recent membership newsletter, Bikeshare will add nine locations around the city, bringing the total number of stations to 50. The new locations include two in South Baltimore, two in East Baltimore, and four in Mt. Vernon/Station North. Installation of the new locations, which will also include a new downtown station at the Charles Center metro stop, will begin December 15.

The locations are:

• Charles Center
• Chase Street and St. Paul Street
• 1200 Maryland Avenue
• North Avenue and Maryland Avenue
• St. Paul Street and Madison Street
• Light Street and Ostend Street
• Charles Street and Fort Avenue
• Betty Hyatt Community Park (near Broadway and East Baltimore Street)
• Perkins Homes (1400 Gough Street)  

Maryland Goes Anti Antibiotic 

Maryland farmers raising animals for consumption will have to abide by stricter criteria when administering antibiotics to a member of their flock or herd thanks to a newly enacted state law. Passed by the state legislature earlier this year, the so-called Keep Antibiotics Effective Act, prohibits dosing healthy cattle, hogs, and poultry with broad-spectrum antibiotics in order to promote growth, a common industry practice that scientists warn has contributed to the rise antibiotic resistance. Now, in order to administer an antibiotic to an animal, farmers will need the express approval of a licensed veterinarian. Furthermore, the law outright bans agricultural use of some medically precious antibiotics. In enacting the law, Maryland becomes only the second state (after California) to place limits on antibiotic usage in livestock. 

However, prominent public health officials charge that the law does not go far enough. Firstly, the law does not apply to farming operations classified as small, which, in this case, means farms selling fewer than 200 cattle or pigs, or 60,000 birds per year. Secondly, in a recent oped in The Washington Post, Ellen Silbergeld, a food systems expert at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, notes that while the bill requires veterinarian approval it does not require that veterinarian to confirm the presence “of disease in the herd or flock before animals can be treated with antibiotics.” Given these parameters, she says it would be easy for a cooperative veterinarian to write an unneeded prescription based on risk factors—or the threat of disease—rather than the actual presence of disease. 

“Given the crowded conditions characteristic of factory farms, it would not be difficult for a veterinarian to conclude that every animal stands a reasonable risk of contracting a disease,” she writers. “This situation is analogous to how a pediatrician might conclude that every child who attends day care should take antibiotics on a daily basis throughout childhood simply because they have an increased risk of contracting strep throat.”

First Day Hikes

For those looking to start 2018 off on the right foot (so to speak), the Maryland Department of Natural Resources has posted a list of New Year’s Day hikes at 32 state parks. Hike times, distances, and difficulty levels vary (but most are easy to moderate). Local options include ambles through the historic Jerusalem Mill Village section of Gunpowder Falls State Park, a 2-mile jaunt around North Point State Park, and easy excursions into both the Avalon and McKeldin areas of Patapsco Valley State Park. More information can be found on the DNR’s website.   

Park Places

Earlier this month, it was announced that Baltimore City’s parks received $7.6 million from the state for fiscal year 2018. The funds, which come from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, are earmarked for 10 projects around the city’s green spaces. The largest chunk of funding ($2.4 million) is allocated for the renovation/rebuilding of the Cahill Fitness and Wellness Center in Leakin Park. Other line items include $500,000 for a new artificial turf multipurpose playing field, scoreboard, lighting, fencing, and ADA-compliant pathways in Clifton Park; $300,000 for upgraded lighting, an expanded community garden, and renovated park entrances and pathways in Patterson Park; and $300,000 for improved trailhead access to the Jones Falls Trail in Druid Hill Park. The city also received $1.5 million for general activities such as “continued maintenance, planning, volunteer support, and operations.” Details on the various projects can be found in the city’s grant application, which is available as a PDF here.     

Hopkins Cuts Coal

The Johns Hopkins University is joining the global movement to cut financial ties with fossil fuel companies. On Friday, December 8, the university’s board of trustees voted to withdraw its investment holdings in companies that produce coal for electric power as a major part of their business. The new policy also prohibits future purchases of shares in companies that earn more than 35 percent of their revenue from electricity-generating coal. Studies have shown that burning coal for electricity produces more greenhouse gas emissions per unit than any other fossil fuel. In embracing the new edict, Hopkins joins a growing list of academic institutions, state and local governments, faith-based organizations, nonprofits, and businesses that are jettisoning investments with fossil-fuel-burning energy giants. The University of Maryland announced a similar pledge last year, but its directive went even further, eliminating investment in any coal, oil, and natural gas companies.  

Turtles Rescued 

In our continuing sea turtle coverage, the National Aquarium took in a group of 30 sea turtles in November after the aquatic reptiles fell victim to cold water temperatures off the coast of Cape Cod. The turtles arrived suffering from a range of ailments, including pneumonia and blood chemical imbalances, which can arise when the water temperatures drop rapidly and the turtles become “cold stunned.” Cold stunned season typically last from December through April, but a chilly New England fall caused an early onset. The group of turtles is largest ever taken in by the aquarium, which is a member of the Greater Atlantic Region Stranding Network, a network of zoos, aquariums, and conservation groups along that East Coast that respond to animals in peril. Aquarium employees had fun with their newest charges, naming each turtle after a breakfast food. Resultant names include Waffles, Bacon, Flapjack, and Benedict.      

Award-winning writer and Johns Hopkins University professor Alice McDermott’s most celebrated works have been set in the world of Irish Catholics in 20th-century New York. The same is true for her latest novel, The Ninth Hour, in which she explores how one event—a man’s suicide—reverberates through the lives of those around him. We got the change to talk to McDermott about her latest work, real-life inspiration, and how true friends keep you honest.

It feels like we’re going into welcome familiar territory with the subject matter of The Ninth Hour. You’ve found so much fruit in Irish Catholic America. What is it about that framework that has allowed you to get so much creatively from it?
I never feel like the driving for these novels is the milieu itself. I sort of find myself ending up there. I’m not a sociologist or a social historian that’s particularly interested in those matters. For me, I start out trying to understand something about our common experience and then because as a storyteller you need the details, I am drawn back to territory that I know, but always in such a different pursuit that it never strikes me that I’ve returned to a place I’ve been before. I always feel like this is all brand new to me. Eight books into this job, I’m aware of my readers kind of rolling his or her eyes and saying, “Ohhh, we’re back here again?” [Laughs] 

But as my own first reader, I always feel that it’s such new territory because with each book you’re telling a different story, dealing with different ideas, trying to get at very different things. For me, it’s a pursuit of what’s this life of all of ours about not just Irish Americans in the New York area in the early 20th century. What’s experience like? How do we make sense of any of this? There’s a great line, I think I read it ages and ages ago, in Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, and he talks about how we live between two darknesses—the time before we’re born and the time after we’re gone and the only light is whatever time we have here. I go to ficition for anybody who can help me to understand that period of light that we all get, no matter or how brief or long. It’s all we’ve got and there’s a lot to figure out about that.

Why do you think you end up back in Irish Catholic America?
Well, number one it’s material I’m familiar with, being Irish American myself, having grown up second generation. I grew up in Long Island at a time when all of my peers were second or third generation. Almost every grandparent I ever encountered growing up had some sort of accent—Russian, Polish, Italian, Irish. The language of that milieu I already have in my head, I already have the vocabulary, and also writing about characters who have Catholicism as a faith tradition, that also gives them vocabulary, they have ways of talking about things that they might not have the where-with-all to talk about otherwise. A lot of those things are the things I’m interested in—mortality and hope and selflessness, sacrifice, especially in this book.

In this book, you delve into vivid characters who happen to be nuns. Were you waiting for the opportunity to dive into their world with this book?
No, I think I was avoiding it at all costs. (laughs) Oddly enough, the genesis of this book was that I was thinking a lot about the idea of substitutes in the Civil War. I had a conversation with a friend who’d had a substitute in his distant family, someone who went to war so that one of his great-great uncles didn’t have to go. And that conversation stirred my interest, and I started reading historical accounts and trying to figure out how much did it cost, what was it all about? And when you’re a fiction writer, not a historian, as soon as you get something that interests you, you do a little bit of research, but you’re not looking for the historical record. It brings up this whole idea of whose life is more valuable, who puts themselves on the line for somebody else and is going to live? How long do you stay grateful to the person who stepped in? 

Once you start thinking about that, you’re thinking about who died so that we all might live. That was really what started the thoughts, and that led to the metaphors of selflessness and who gives up their lives so other lives can be saved, and that led me to nuns, and I thought, Oh my god, here they are. And then, of course, you start reading, trying to make something of what life was like in Brooklyn for these nuns and these poor families, but, again, two, three generations on, how do we look back at those lives, do we forget them, do we dismiss them? The more you read about what nuns have done in this country, the more you realize that the good things they’ve done have been nearly erased and replaced with the crazy, screaming witch or clown in a crazy habit.

Were you drawing on anyone you’d known in particular when you were coming up with the characters?
I was very aware of not modeling them in any way. I went through 12 years of Catholic school, had a lot of nuns in grammar school, a fair number in high school, but I didn’t want to use any of my own experience as models because I really wanted these to be a fresh look and to make sure that each one of them was not in any way diminished by cliché, that they were fully human, flawed, striving, thoughtful. And the thing that I loved was the more that I read, I found that there were so many orders of nuns in the New York area at this time, thousands and thousands of nuns in Brooklyn alone. It was almost like found poetry looking at the names of all the orders. It revealed so much about how they thought of themselves. The order that I created for the novel is an amalgam of a number of orders, like nuns who called themselves Little Nursing Sisters, the Little Sisters of the Sick and Poor. 

When you think about women who had such little power at that time, especially in the Catholic Church, claiming this kind of humility, oh we’re just little. But on the other hand, what their ambition is is that they’re going to go up and stand up against suffering, this tremendous egotistical ambition. All of it’s embodied in what they call themselves. That’s what fascinated me, and that’s what reconciled myself that I was writing about an order of nuns. And how much they did underground, it’s not subtle there are lots of themes about being underground in this novel, but it’s sort of the machinery of getting things done, taking care of what needs to be taken care of literally under the radar of the hierarchy of the church. It continues to happen. The role of women in the church, and especially religious orders, is still much the same.

In terms of your writing process, how long does it take you to finish a book like this?
It depends. I established a very bad habit early in my career and I keep falling into it and that is that I always have two things going simultaneously, two novels. And that kind of slows you down, but then it always seems to happen that one pulls ahead. For most of last year, I just knew that I had to stick with this novel, to put my head down and sink deeply into it to understand it. Except for a version of the first chapter that was published as a short story in The New Yorker, my poor, long-suffering editor hadn’t seen a word of it until I sent the completed novel to him in late December 2016. I was sort of emerging into the sunlight when I finished it, kind of blinking and saying, what do you think of this?

Have you had the same editor for a while?
Yes, from the very beginning. It’s very rare in publishing, but I was all of 26 or 27 and I only had written 100 pages of my first novel when my editor Jonathan Galassi, who was at that time probably all of 30 or 31, purchased it incomplete. We’ve just been working together ever since. I feel very fortunate. He’s a great editor because he just lets me go off and lock the door, go underground and write what I feel compelled to write. He’s very supportive. 

How do you balance your work with teaching?
I tend to teach one course a semester, so I’m at Johns Hopkins University generally one day a week. It’s not onerous because I still have four weekdays and weekends for my own work, and I find it energizing. I’ve always been a little bit afraid of going too deeply underground to write fiction and to forget the real world and real readers and writers. It’s the same as when my kids were small and I’d have to stop writing to go get in the car pool line. Sometimes I would say, “Well, Tolstoy never had to do this,” but on the other hand, it keeps you real, from getting too full of yourself and your own ideas. And teaching is the same way. I love hearing what my students are reading and thinking about and I love reading their work. And there’s also a reminder that it doesn’t matter what stage you’re at in this career, you’re always dealing with the same things—how to get those sentences right, how to be honest, what’s the best way to tell the story. Every story that you start, you’re a novice all over again, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done before. 

Do you find that you are drawn to students who have similar interests to you, or who are writing things that are completely different?
For me, it’s what’s on the page, and if it’s wonderful and engaging, then I’m excited about it and if it’s not yet, I think it’s an awful lot of fun to sit with a writer and say, where is it? It’s in there somewhere, how do we find it? I have never taught one of my own books, I would never be able to do that. So in some ways, even if you’re the writer at the head of the table, I think you have to approach teaching. I think it was John Barth who said, “We’re not teachers, we’re coaches.” Here’s a young writer with talent, what can I do to help this writer realize fully the talent that he or she has. I forget about myself. I’ve never been inclined to say, Oh, I wrote a scene like that once, maybe you should go read that. I’m just more like, we’re down in the ditches with these sentences, ok, how come this scene is not completely realized? Let’s figure out how we can fix that. That’s the fun part. The nice part is not thinking about yourself. 

Who do you read, and what have you liked reading recently?
Fortunately, I’ve been teaching long enough that it seems like once a week I get galleys from former students who are publishing. It’s wonderful, but it’s the obligatory reading. When I don’t have a pile of obligatory reading, I’m the most scattered reader. I pick up things that strike my fancy or that someone sent me, so I’m all over the place. I do read a lot of poetry because it reminds me of how wonderful and thrilling language can be in a not time consuming way. W.H. Auden’s series of poems on the divine hours was very much with me as I was composing The Ninth Hour. I’ve been re-reading a lot of Elizabeth Bishop just for fun, and I just finished Margot Lindsay’s novel Mercury, which was an interesting novel about a marriage and a horse. I just read a very, very short novel called Sisters by Lily Tuck, which I just found hypnotic. Claire Messud’s novel The Burning Girl, I just read in the last month. It also has wonderful, strong female characters and she’s just a wonderful writer. There’s always something that you just can’t wait to get to.

How do you gauge the opinions of your audience, and is that something that’s important to you?
I was a reader long before I was a writer, and I’m always sure that I’m a reader—there are plenty of days when I’m not sure that I’m a writer. I always feel that you have this dual personality, even as you’re composing, you’re still the first reader of your own work. But you have to get out and talk to other readers and realize where literature stands in the real world. And where it stands is not in a really important place. There are lots of people who are busy with things we really need, and literature is there and for some of us it feels like life’s blood and it feels essential, but I think it’s always a good idea for a writer to understand that there are plenty of people who don’t feel it’s essential. You want to be in some way including them, with the hope that if they do pick up this book, they might be surprised. I think it keeps you honest. 

I have a group of old, dear friends, none of whom were even English majors who read all kinds of different things, books I would never read, and I think of them as my touchstone. As the Irish say, don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t be writing just for other writers, don’t be writing to show off how much research you’ve done, or how clever you are. You should have an agreement with all readers that I’m not going to waste your time, I’m really going to get at something that we all want to think about or are puzzled by and I want to bring everybody with me. 

Baltimoreans appreciate our beloved hometown for its great neighborhoods, eccentricity, and “Smaltimore” feel, but political disarray, inequality, and violence have also long-plagued the city.

Matthew Crenson, professor emeritus of political science at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Neighborhood Politics and the co-author of Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. In his new book, Baltimore: A Political History, he tackles the tangled history of the city’s political and cultural disjointedness, examining the role of race and politics from the 18th-century through to our present circumstances  

Why this book and why now?
Like many Baltimoreans, I was curious about the city’s many curiosities. And it has been a long time since anyone told the city’s story. The second edition of urban geographer Sherry Olson’s book, Baltimore: The Building of an American City, appeared 20 years ago, and it concentrates on the physical development of Baltimore, not its political history.  

One vital research source also became more accessible when the Baltimore City Archives relocated and reorganized in 2010. The Archives are essential for understanding the city’s political past, but only a few authors have relied on these records.   

Of course, I could not have foreseen the death of Freddie Gray or the turmoil that would follow it [when I started working on the book]. Retracing the path by which we got here now seems even more vital than when I began. 

You make the case that Annapolis, the state capital, long held political sway over Baltimore. Do you think that’s still the case?
Because Baltimore was a late-blooming city, there was already an entrenched political establishment in Annapolis at the time of the town’s birth. It cast its shadow over Baltimore from the time it received its town charter in 1729. Even after it became a supposedly self-governing municipality in 1797, the city’s powers were limited by the state. The city, for example, could levy property taxes, but for decades after it became a city, the state legislature decided what the tax rate would be. 

Baltimore can fix its own property tax rate today, but the city’s police department is still technically a state agency, as it has been since just before the Civil War. The Governor’s cancellation of the Red Line reminded Baltimoreans of just how much control the state has over the city’s public transportation system. Then there’s the Maryland Stadium Authority. In 1997, Baltimore’s mayor conceded partial control of the city’s school system to the state in return for increased state funding. Governor Larry Hogan closed the city’s detention center (probably a good decision), but without consulting any city officials in advance. Baltimoreans are reminded of their exposure to state government every time the General Assembly convenes. 

Baltimore was home to the largest number of free African-Americans in the South in the decades before the Civil War—some 92 percent of black Baltimoreans were free at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. But you conclude white Baltimoreans were always afraid to address the issue of race head on. What drove you to that conclusion? Do you believe that’s still true?
As early as 1817, when prominent Baltimoreans became advocates of the American Colonization Society, the city’s leading whites have repeatedly practiced evasion or equivocation when confronted with issues of race or slavery. The Colonization Society proposed sending African Americans to Liberia. On the one hand, they argued that exporting free black people to Africa would help to preserve slavery in this country, because the presence of free black people made slaves restless.  On the other, they claimed that slave owners would be more likely to manumit their slaves if they could send them to Africa, instead of having to live with them after they were free.  Baltimoreans, in other words, managed to come down on both sides of the slavery question. Colonization would preserve slavery while eroding slavery. 

A long series of similar dodges led me to conclude that the city’s white leadership was leery about confronting the issue of race head-on,  perhaps because Baltimore is a border city where whites are unlikely to be united on issues of race. And then, soon after World War II, many whites abandoned the city for the suburbs. The exodus accelerated after the 1968 riots. Much of Baltimore’s former white population can now avoid the race issue—and practice segregation—without thinking or feeling like racists. 

Can you tell us when the division between Baltimore City and Baltimore County was created and why?
This is complicated. 

The separation was a two-step process—maybe three. In 1850, the General Assembly passed legislation that would enable the residents of Baltimore County to vote on whether to separate from Baltimore City. (The legislators held that this would be advantageous to Baltimore County.) The voters were also to elect a commission whose members would decide where to put “public buildings”—a courthouse, a jail, and a poorhouse—facilities which the County had previously shared with the City. The voters decided to disengage County from City. The Commission was elected, but couldn’t agree on where to put the public buildings. The commission divided down the middle on whether to leave the City.

In the meantime, the voters of the state approved the calling of a constitutional convention. When the convention completed its work in 1851, it placed Baltimore City and Baltimore County in separate judicial districts, requiring them to have separate courts and jails. In 1852, the General Assembly repealed its act of 1850 calling for the election of a commission, thereby depriving the commission of its authority to make decisions for the County.

If we can go back, say, before William Donald Schaefer, what important character, politician or leader should Baltimoreans know about—but probably don’t?
Mayor James H. Preston [in office from 1911-1919] was a creature of the Democratic political machine. But he had vision. He proposed a gradualist alternative to annexation. It would have created four “boroughs” outside Baltimore City, one in each quarter of the compass. The boroughs would be governed by their own councils and could purchase services from the City. As they bought in to more city services, they would eventually become parts of the City, which would achieve annexation, but without suddenly imposing high city taxes on former suburbanites. Unfortunately, politicians from Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties prevented Preston’s plan from becoming law. If they had agreed to it, we might have a viable metropolitan area government today—like Miami-Dade and Indianapolis.

Who is your favorite historical Baltimore political figure? And why?
This is hard. There’s John Pendleton Kennedy—novelist, politician, and designer of an iron bridge over the Jones Falls that would stand up to floods. Then there’s Samuel Smith—businessman, politician, and military tactician who anticipated every move that the British would make in their 1814 assault on Baltimore. And of course, there’s Frederick Douglass, who learned to read in Baltimore, and became the country’s premier writer and orator in the struggle against slavery. 

But I have a special admiration for Samuel Purviance, a forgotten Baltimore revolutionary. He chaired the city’s Committee of Observation during the Revolutionary War. It functioned as the town’s government, struggling to maintain public order in the face of the city’s anti-British hotheads, one of whom was Samuel’s brother, Robert. He also had to contend with a revolutionary government in Annapolis that was far from revolutionary. As late as January, 1776, the provincial convention declared its “affection for, and loyalty to the house of Hanover” [the British dynasty the produced six monarchs, including George III] and its conviction that to be British subjects “is to be the freest members of any civil society in the known world.” Purviance endured censure by the Annapolis authorities for trying to take the royal governor into custody. (The royal governor had been providing intelligence to the British military about prospects for invading the Chesapeake.) Purviance’s business interests collapsed in the recession that followed the Revolution. He tried to retrieve his fortunes in the West, but was captured by Indians while traveling by boat on the Ohio River, and was never heard from again.  

What is a total solar eclipse?
Every year, there are a minimum of four eclipses: two solar and two lunar. However, the eclipse on August 21 is especially unique; there hasn’t been one like it since 1918. During this eclipse, the sun will be covered—totally or partially—for approximately three hours, with the longest period of complete coverage lasting just under three minutes. At this time, the only visible portion of the sun will be its hazy atmosphere known as the corona.

Why is this such a big deal?
Scientists have been studying data and patterns from the eclipses for the past 60 years to learn more about the sun. The Applied Physics Lab (APL) at Johns Hopkins University will send the Parker Solar Probe to the sun’s corona in 2018 in hopes of answering questions that have plagued scientists for decades. “It’s the first time in 99 years that we’ve had a total solar eclipse that’s gone right from one coast all the way across the U.S. to the other coast,” said Dr. Nicola Fox, project scientist at APL. “The corona is about two million degrees, but the surface is only 10,000 degrees, that doesn’t make sense. From a logical standpoint, the further away from the surface, it should get cooler, not hotter.” Events like the total solar eclipse bring scientists one step closer to answering these questions. 

Will we be able to see it in Baltimore?
Each state along the 70-mile wide path of the eclipse—Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and The Carolinas—will witness a total solar eclipse, in which the moon will completely cover the sun, while the rest of the country will see varying views of partial eclipses. “In Baltimore, it will be a partial eclipse for about two hours,” said street astronomer Herman Heyn. “One hour as the moon approaches the sun, and another hour as it leaves the sun.” According to an interactive map created by NASA, a partial eclipse will begin in Baltimore at approximately 1:18 p.m., with maximum visibility occurring at 2:42 p.m., and ending at 4:01 p.m. “You’ll see something, it won’t be 100-percent totality, but it will darken up a bit, and part of the sun will disappear,” Fox said. “It’s really dependent on the cloud coverage. As long as you’re somewhere pretty open, with a good view of the sun, you should be fine.”

Can I take pictures of it?
Heyn explained that a total solar eclipse is actually safe for unprotected viewing, but looking directly at a partial eclipse is harmful for the eyes. There are creative alternatives to view the eclipse that will occur over Baltimore. Purchasing “eclipse glasses” is one way to protect your eyes from the suns harmful rays. These glasses are specially designed to look directly at the sun. “You don’t want to use regular dark sunglasses,” Heyn cautioned. “Those don’t block enough of the infrared light that would burn your eyes.” Creating a pinhole camera is another safe way to experience the eclipse, using materials already available around the house. “Take a piece of cardboard, about a foot square, and poke a hole in it with a straight pin,” Heyn explained. “Take another piece about half that size and place it under the first. That will give you a small image of the eclipsed sun.” There will also be workshops at Cylburn Arboretum the day of the eclipse to create pinhole cameras for ages seven and up. Taking pictures of the eclipse should be done cautiously, due to the extreme heat—two million degrees Fahrenheit—emitted from the sun’s corona. A typical photo lens will burn up without a heavy-duty filter.

What does this mean for the future of astronomy?
The total solar eclipse later this month will be another piece of data that the APL and NASA can use toward their mission. “It’s kind of cool because we’ve discovered so much about the sun’s corona itself during eclipses,” she said. “The huge temperature difference was found during an eclipse and what the corona’s structure looks like was found during an eclipse. Without the solar probe, we’ll never fully understand what we are really seeing.”

Nature News

Have you ever seen the alarming photos of what a supermarket produce section would look like without bees? If not, here you go:

So we all get that bees are critical agents in the food chain, right? Well then, one local beekeeper has some bad news for us.

Bill Castro, who runs Bee Friendly Apiary out of his home in Southwest Baltimore, says more than 56 percent of managed honeybee colonies in Maryland were lost in 2016. This follows a three-year average loss of 54 percent.

“This means that beekeepers in Maryland spend over $1.13 million every year to replace approximately 7,600 lost registered honeybee colonies,” writes Castro in an email. “If managed honey bee losses are this high, how do we think that wild native bee populations are fairing?”

The statistic Castro cites comes from Bee Informed Partnership, a collaborative effort among academic institutions, agriculturalists, scientists, and apiary owners to better understand honey bee declines in the United States. The troubling figure reinforces worries about worldwide losses from so-called Colony Collapse Disorder—an inexplicable dying off of hives—that researchers theorize is caused by pesticide use, parasites, and loss of habitat. However, recent stories indicate that the problem may not be as dire as previously thought.

In any case, local bee populations seem to be among those still suffering.

One step the average citizen can take to help the bees is to stagger garden plantings, so at least some flora is always blooming throughout the season. Bees begin foraging in early spring and continue until late fall. However, many garden plants and agriculture crops bloom only in the spring or fall, leaving the bees with little to sustain them the rest of the year.

Your local garden center can probably help you pick plants preferred by pollinator, which include bees, butterflies, birds, bats, and several other insects. Or, if you want to be super eco-friendly, Herring Run Nursery in Baltimore City can provide expertise in creating a pollinator garden using only plant species native to Maryland.

BGE took a small but symbolically significant step toward pollinator preservation in mid-November when it announced a partnership with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to return approximately 200 acres of utility-managed land in state parks to natural meadow habitat.

“This partnership benefits the state, our customers and, most importantly, the pollinators that are vital for a healthy environment,” said Derrick Dickens, vice president of Technical Services for BGE. “Changing the way we manage these electric rights of way will encourage the return of pollinators and native ecosystems, while still ensuring that power lines are safely maintained.”

Sustainability Shorts

After discontinuing its composting drop-off program for several months while it overhauled its system, Real Food Farm is once again accepting food scraps at its Clifton Park location. The farm’s new system—developed in tandem with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Urban Farm Plans—follows a co-op model that asks participants to take a one-hour training course before joining and then volunteer one hour per month to maintain membership. Once joined, members can drop off kitchen scraps any time and take home finished compost to fertilize their own gardens. If residents would like to participate but don’t have time to volunteer, Real Food Farm also accepts compost via Compost Cab, a collection service that operates in the Baltimore and D.C. metro areas.

Somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of all food in the U.S. goes to waste, ending up in landfills where it decomposes and emits methane, a greenhouse gas several times more potent than carbon dioxide. Composting is one way to divert unused food from landfill. Gleaning—the process of collecting excess food in order to feed food-insecure populations—is another. There are several local organizations that facilitate gleaning, including Gather Baltimore, Hungry Harvest, and the Mid-Atlantic Gleaning Network.

Visiting Laureate

On Wednesday, the famed poet, environmentalist, and farmer Wendell Berry spoke at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about finding hope and sanctuary in a simple life lived in harmony with the natural world.

“I can’t give anybody hope,” said Berry, who spoke as part of a celebration marking the 20th anniversary of the school’s Center for a Livable Future. “Hope has to come up out of you … To find something worth hoping for is a very good place to start. There are things worth hoping for, there are good people, this is still a very beautiful world.”

A recap of the talk, which was led by journalist Eric Schlosser, can be found here.

All work and no play can make being an adult kind of dull, and that’s the idea behind escape rooms, the latest rage for grownup fun. The team-building activity is bigger than trust falls and icebreakers; instead, you get locked into a room with friends, family, co-workers, or complete strangers and work together to escape in an allotted amount of time.

Open since February in the heart of Mt. Vernon, Escape 45 is Baltimore City’s first escape room, the brainchild of Johns Hopkins University graduate Ashraf Afzal and University of Maryland, College Park, students Dylan Kapoor and Asad and Fahed Masood, who are also brothers. Here’s how it works: In one of three rooms—the Lighthouse, the Jewel Heist, or Sully’s Haunted Cabin—groups of two to eight participants must find clues, solve puzzles, and crack riddles to break free in 45 minutes or less.

But why would anyone volunteer to be locked in a room with someone, let alone their family or co-workers? “It’s a new activity and different way of interacting with each other,” Afzal says. Posits Asad, “What else do adults get to do, besides go out to restaurants and bars?” “And of course there’s the adrenaline rush when you actually get out,” adds Fahed, with a smile.

For these reasons, Escape 45 has grown quickly in popularity over the last nine months, garnering as many as 40 groups a day, including big corporations like Under Armour and M&T Bank. And it’s not alone: Since its launch, several other escape rooms have opened nearby, from Power Plant and Federal Hill to Towson and Timonium. The region’s first opened in Catonsville last fall.

Though the rooms range in difficulty, Escape 45’s founders agree that the key to escape is communication. “I’ve seen people who look like geniuses who can’t get out and it all boils down to one thing—how effectively they communicate,” says Asad. “It’s that whole ‘teamwork makes the dream work’ kind of thing.”

In the end, if a group runs out of time, Escape 45 enters the room and shows them what was missed. “They have all sorts of reactions,” says Afzal. “Some are happy, angry, shocked.” But if they succeed, there is a prize on the other side. “Pride,” quips Fahed. Adds Asad: “And we have a Hall of Fame on Facebook.”

These days, it’s no longer necessary to go to an art museum for art or a library for literature. Using two feet and four wheels, local movers and shakers are now shedding these stationary structures to bring paintings, books, and DIY workshops to a neighborhood near you.

Open Works Mobile
The new Station North maker-space has launched a mobile extension of its Greenmount Avenue brick-and-mortar, geared toward offering workshops and events for city students in grades K-12. The van will feature classes and curricula centered around its DIY equipment, including a portable 3-D printer, laser cutters, and a large whiteboard on its exterior.

JHU Art Cart
In 2014, a group of Johns Hopkins employees and students transformed a janitor’s cart into a ray of sunshine for patients and their families. Now an arts-and-crafts station, the volunteer-led cart brings art projects to hospital rooms and waiting areas, toting materials to make paper flowers, origami, and more.

SOGH Art Truck
After his grandmother’s death, Shawn Theron was inspired to make the most of his life, which eventually meant creating art. His colorful, whimsical paintings landed in an exhibit at AVAM and even the pages of our very own Baltimore Bride. Now, via his art truck, they can be found and purchased on Sundays during the farmers’ market under 83.

BMA Outpost
With its high ceilings and marble columns, The Baltimore Museum of Art is the grand dame of Charm City culture, but it turned hip in 2014 with the launch of its mobile museum. Setting up shop at locations like Lexington Market and Healthcare for the Homeless, it encourages passersby to participate in art making, storytelling, and, ultimately, community building.

Taharka Change-Maker Mobile
Out of its bright pink truck, Taharka Brothers’ small-batch ice cream shop is hawking more than just delicious flavors like honey graham and key lime pie. In the back, a small retail space features an ever changing selection of books, showcasing everything from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther comic book to D. Watkins’ acclaimed memoir The Cook Up.

Bookish
This nomadic bookstore features a beautifully curated collection of artist-made, independently published, and small press books. Among the green and white delivery van’s minimalist, hipster-chic interior, you’ll find local poetry, photo albums, adult coloring books, and alternative zines. It also doubles as a mixed-used space for workshops and events related to all things print.