Perhaps it is fitting that the “discovery” three years ago that enslaved individuals were held at Johns Hopkins’ Clifton Mansion was made during a graduate seminar at the university named in his honor.

In the summer of 2020, former Maryland state archivist Edward Papenfuse led a class that was looking into how Hopkins had come upon his great wealth in a fast-changing Baltimore in the years before the Civil War.

“In other words,” Papenfuse says, “where did he get his money from in order to leave as much as he did for the purposes outlined in his will? And what was the world like that he operated in?”

As part of the effort, Papenfuse suggested an examination of Hopkins’ sprawling Clifton property, which he had developed into a summer estate, and an investigation into how he put his wealth to work in his personal affairs. Papenfuse does not know if he was the first historian to come across the 1850 census and accompanying “slave schedule,” which listed four enslaved men as the property of the head of the Clifton household—Hopkins, in this case—but he may have been. Under normal circumstances, it would not have been considered especially unusual. Enslaved African Americans were held on estates in surrounding Baltimore County and elsewhere. Except, of course, the esteemed, 147-year-old university and associated hospital and medical school had long held up its benefactor as an abolitionist with no direct connection to slavery.

One of the attendees of the seminar was Allison Seyler, the program manager of Hopkins Respective, a university-wide public history initiative begun in 2013. She had previously worked with Papenfuse while part of the Legacy of Slavery team at the Maryland archives. At Papenfuse’s suggestion, she located a digital copy of the 1850 slave schedule through the genealogical website, FamilySearch. She also found the 1840 slave schedule, which showed one enslaved person—likely owned by Hopkins’ brother—held in his household in Baltimore City. After further research led by Seyler along with Winston Tabb, dean of the university’s libraries and archives, and Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and historian Martha Jones, Hopkins announced the finding in late 2020.

“It was a moment that stopped me in my tracks,” Seyler says of seeing the slave schedules. “The record suggested a narrative that ran counter to the narrative we’d been told [as employees] by the university. I’m also a native Baltimorean, and so I had also heard ‘abolitionist’ associated with Johns Hopkins’ name even before I began working here.”

For Jones, a contributor to the acclaimed 1619 Project who has written extensively about the period, including the award-winning Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, which was set in Baltimore, the finding certainly felt historically significant. But the fact that it went unreported for so long was not surprising.

“It was a moment that stopped me in my tracks,” says Allison Seyler—the program manager of Hopkins Respective, a university-wide public history initiative started in 2013—of seeing the slave schedules.

“It’s important for an institution to understand how it is when you put the telling of the past in the hands of understandably admiring family members, or staff, or people whose job it is to raise money or promote the image of the institution,” Jones says, highlighting a grandniece’s hagiography that became the basis for much of the understanding of Hopkins’ life. “If you leave your history to those sources, it’s nothing exceptional that we wind up with a self-serving version of the man and never bothered to look carefully at the slim but important archival record related to things like, ‘Who is in his household in the decades before the Civil War?’ We just had never done it. The story had served us well.”

Ultimately, the fuller picture of Johns Hopkins that has emerged since the revelation of enslaved people in his household—the interpretation of which has been debated by a handful of local scholars—lays bare the myth that the university’s founding benefactor was an abolitionist.

Along with Hopkins’ announcement of its troubling finding about its namesake benefactor also came complicating information regarding his paternal ancestors. Johns Hopkins’ grandfather, also named Johns Hopkins, held a large number of enslaved people, manumitting some, but hardly all, Jones, Seyler, and their team learned in the run-up to the school’s official statement.

The elder Hopkins, an Anne Arundel tobacco plantation owner, had indeed manumitted nine enslaved adults in 1778, but in the same year, he merely switched the status of 33 enslaved young adults and children to “term slaves,” which meant girls and boys had to serve him until 21 and 25 years old, respectively. When died, he bequeathed 14 enslaved individuals that he still considered his property to his children, including one boy to Johns Hopkins’ father, Samuel.

Samuel Hopkins’ estate did not report enslaved individuals among his property when he died, but Johns Hopkins’ father did enter into an indentured service contract with the mother of two Black boys—Thomas, 7, and Jeremiah, 10—until they reached 21. It’s worth noting that the typical indentured contract of the period—along with an obligation to house, clothe, and provide food—included a promise to teach the bound children to read and write. The surviving indentured contract reveals Hopkins’ father had that stipulation stricken.

Interestingly, Papenfuse is one of several scholars with Hopkins ties who have pushed back against the conclusion from the 1850 census that Hopkins owned slaves. Papenfuse, along with Hopkins senior lecturer Sydney Van Morgan, School of Public Health professor emeritus Stan Becker, and Samuel Hopkins, a descendant and retired attorney, believe that because there is no record of Hopkins buying, selling, or paying taxes on the enslaved men held on his property, they likely “belonged” to someone else—a contractor, maybe. Or Hopkins or someone in his family held them under a temporary arrangement. It is not quite a distinction without a difference, but legally, while the four enslaved men, aged 18-50, were held at Clifton Mansion, the head of the household would be considered their “owner,” as indicated by the census.

Van Morgan, who started a House of Hopkins blog after the university announcement, believes Hopkins’ affiliation with the Quakers of the period, who were largely opposed to slavery, his support for the Union cause, and his bequests—including for a hospital that would serve Black Baltimoreans, if separately—remains evidence of his abolitionist feelings. But Van Morgan, like Papenfuse, readily acknowledges that Hopkins’ main interest was his business interests, which included a large financial stake in the B&O Railroad.

“[Mayor] Swann, who owned slaves, was a good buddy of his,” Van Morgan says. “When the Civil War breaks out, most of the unionists leave the Maryland Club and it becomes very much a Confederate club, and Hopkins did not leave. My instinct was he was playing both sides. He wasn’t going to alienate those prominent businesspeople in the Maryland Club.”

None of this makes Hopkins comparable to say, Joseph Donovan or Austin Woolfolk, owners of the notorious Baltimore slave jail/holding pen. Or the Ridgelys, who held enslaved people on their Towson estate until the Civil War. But to put it simply, in the context of previously known information about Hopkins—his business ties to enslavers, his friendship with Swann, his support of the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party, his involvement in an effort to ship free Black Americans to Africa—his life is now cast in a different light.

“As a historian who studies slavery in Maryland in the 19th century, I would not use the word abolitionist when referring to Johns Hopkins,” Seyler says. “In my studies and going through the historiography, the primary sources, archival records, looking at documents that talk about this period and what folks are doing, I believe that abolitionism requires action. It’s speaking on the abolition circuit; it’s going to church and interacting with the Black community. It’s outright doing things to help folks on the Underground Railroad. It’s financing freedom-seekers. I don’t have historical records, letters, documents, newspaper articles that tell me that Johns Hopkins was taking these abolitionist actions.”

At the same time the revelations were made public, the school announced the launch of a new initiative: Hard Histories at Hopkins, which has since produced an ongoing, meaningful series of webinars, events, classes, and research-based writing. Just last month, Hard Histories hosted its second two-day symposium: “Reckoning with Racism, Forging Just Futures,” which featured a conversation with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Baltimore Museum of Art director Asma Naeem.

Directed by Jones, it’s been the mission of Hard Histories to examine how racism has persisted over a century and a half at Hopkins, as well as a broader exploration of racism related to the university, hospital, and medical school’s environs—Baltimore and Maryland. Hard History talks have included discussions with Hopkins professor, author, and native Baltimorean Lawrence Jackson about Frederick Douglass, a contemporary of Johns Hopkins; Savannah Wood, who is archiving the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper; and scholar Jennie Williams, who has created a database of the coastal slave trade between Baltimore and New Orleans. Hard Histories has also dug into the remarkable life of Kelly Miller, Hopkins’ first Black student and a polymath known as “the Bard of the Potomac” in the early 20th century.

“History is not an artifact,” says Jackson, who is also the founder of the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts, “it’s a process.”

The news from Johns Hopkins, of course, came on the heels of even more profound revelations from other elite universities and their connections to slavery. In December 2021, a year after the 1840 and 1850 records came to light, Jones and the Hard Histories initiative hosted a symposium, “Conversations on Slavery, Racism, and the University.” The virtual event included historians from Hopkins and other schools, including Georgetown, which acknowledged in 2016 that it had benefitted from the sale of 272 enslaved individuals from Jesuit-owned Maryland plantations. Hopkins, like Georgetown, is now one of more than 90 institutions in the U.S., Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England, including Allegany College, Goucher College, Loyola University Maryland, Morgan State, Towson University, and the University of Maryland, that has joined the Universities Studying Slavery consortium based at the University of Virginia.

Christopher Celenza, dean of Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Hopkins, who served at Georgetown as it worked through the acknowledgment of its debt to enslaved individuals, says looking at the past truthfully can bring our own actions in sharper relief.

“It was important to memorialize and apologize for what took place,” he says. “But at Georgetown, much of the effort was also a kind of scrutinizing. What could it be that we’re doing now, that 100 years from now, 200 years from now, might seem misguided or immoral?”

Closer to home, Hard Histories recently hosted a discussion about writing “hard histories” with Harvard professor Andy Jewett, who is at work on a history of Johns Hopkins (both the man and the institution) and historian Ken Lipartito, who is co-authoring a biography of the founder of the McDonogh School. The Owings Mills private school has always known John McDonogh was an enslaver—he owned at least 654 people in his life—and was deeply involved in the slave trade. Yet, the school continued its annual Founder’s Day celebration until just three years ago. Hopkins commissioned Jewett following the 2020 discovery and his book is due in 2026, coinciding with the JHU’s sesquicentennial celebration.

“History is not an artifact,” says Hopkins professor and native Baltimorean Lawrence Jackson, who is also the founder of the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Art, “It’s a process.”

Some of the most compelling student work from Hard Histories involves Hopkins Hospital’s Colored Orphan Asylum and the identity of more than 200 children who lived there. Conceived by Hopkins as a home for 400 “colored” orphaned boys and girls, its mission was changed by trustees after his death. From 1875 to 1914, it cared for only a fraction of that number, and girls-only, providing them with housing, food, medical care, a basic education, and Christian religious instruction. The girls also were trained in domestic service, which would enable them to pursue what Hopkins had described in his will as “respectable employment.” Student researchers, re-combing Johns Hopkins’ archives with new tools, learned that “respectable employment” for the girls—sometimes referred to as orphans, sometimes as inmates—meant working for white families.

That research spurred an end-of-semester lawn installation of the girls’ names in front of the Wyman Park Building, where coincidentally, the Hard Histories lab met, and where the Colored Orphan Asylum once sat.

“Discovering the stories of the girls who had been residents at Orphan Asylum is, arguably, as important as anything we might learn about Hopkins himself, when it comes to thinking about who we are and what our foundation is institutionally,” says Jones, whose most recent book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All, won The Los Angeles Times book prize for history. “As well as what our relationship is, and what our obligation is, to Baltimore and Black Baltimore in particular.”

At the conclusion of this academic year, Jones plans to wrap up the Hard Histories initiative, at which point much of its work will continue under Hopkins Retrospective, with Seyler’s guidance. In fact, similar to Hard Histories, Hopkins Retrospective launched its own initiative, “Reexamining Hopkins History,” which has come with funding for several new positions within the program.

So why does all this matter? Why not put the past behind us, as some say? For Jones, it’s because the past is always present, no more so than in the current moment.

“Look at Florida right now, which is banning books and passing laws that would ban certain subject matters and approaches to teaching,” says Jones, who was a housing rights attorney in New York before changing careers. “We’re in a full pitched battle now.

“Even if you’re not fascinated by the treasure hunt, the discovery, and all the things that just make history fun and interesting and jaw-dropping,” she continues, “I think everyone has to appreciate the power that comes from the storytelling—or people wouldn’t be pushing back so hard and taking the tactics they do. The hardest moments around Hard Histories, for me, have come because everybody believes there are stakes in this.”

*This story has been updated to clarify that the story the university long told about Johns Hopkins’ paternal ancestor manumitting enslaved people relates to his father, not his grandfather.

A pair of students scurry to class. A jogger plods along. The ordinary hubbub of a college campus characterizes the scene outside of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), located in the Steven Muller Building on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus in north Baltimore.

Yet inside the building, none of the activity falls within the realm of the ordinary. There, on the second floor of the nondescript, 1980s-style building, astrophysicists and engineers work to finalize the alignment of mirrors on the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched on December 25, 2021, and now roughly one million miles from Earth, orbiting what astronomers call L2, short for the second Lagrange Point.

L2 is the perfect place for the $10-billion space telescope to orbit. After all, it lies opposite the sun, which means the telescope can maintain the extremely low temperatures it needs to capture images of stars and galaxies light-years away. Lined up precisely with the sun and Earth, L2 also serves as what astronomers call a “gravity pocket,” an area with balanced gravitational pull that keeps the telescope in lockstep with the Earth’s orbit and eliminates the risk that it will, say, float off in deep space.

Yet the location of L2 means scientists can’t visit the telescope if something goes wrong. This differs from another powerful telescope, the famous Hubble Space Telescope, also operated out of STScI, and currently orbiting Earth at an altitude of approximately 340 miles. So far, astronauts have serviced Hubble onboard the spacecraft five times since it launched in 1990. But in deep space—which NASA defines as past the moon’s orbit—the JWST, or Webb, as it’s often called, is off-limits, meaning all maintenance and troubleshooting takes place not aboard the spacecraft but here in Baltimore, on the backside of Hopkins’ campus, along winding, tree-lined San Martin Drive.

There, Mission Operations Manager (MOM) Carl Starr—yes, his last name is Starr—huddles with his team in the Flight Control Room (FCR) of the Mission Operations Center (MOC) of the JWST, the most powerful, expensive space telescope ever built, one that promises to unlock answers to the origins of our universe, such as how galaxies first formed after the Big Bang. Like many federally and internationally funded programs—this one is a product of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA)—working on the JWST means, on top of other cognitively demanding tasks, memorizing a list of acronyms spanning 48 pages.

“Everyone calls me MOM,” says Starr, pictured above, who has worked on JWST since 2004, and whose position as MOM started 30 minutes after launch, when the telescope separated from the shuttle and began its journey to the deep, dark orbit of L2. Starr, who has curly brown-red hair, mutton chops, and a goatee, wears a blue-and-black-checkered blazer with a pin on his lapel representing the telescope’s signature 18 hexagonal mirrors, which look like a honeycomb.

The dad of a 10-year-old, Starr says his daughter finds it funny to hear his team of 600-plus people refer to him as MOM. But some of his responsibilities, it turns out, come across as mom-like. For one, he oversees the team that monitors the health of the JWST—taking its temperature to make sure instruments and systems don’t overheat, sending commands to keep the telescope on task. He also oversees communication among the MOC’s multidisciplinary teams, such as the engineers sitting in an adjoining room with expertise in areas like propulsion and thermal engineering, along with the astrophysicists and physicists working fastidiously around the corner on the telescope’s wavefront sensing technology, which uses algorithms to align the 18 mirrors and maintain optical systems.

Starr’s desk sits in the middle of the back row of the FCR, which is ground control for the telescope. Multiple signs hang on the glass wall and entryway, cautioning anyone who enters that this is a “Controlled Area by Order of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” in which “Unauthorized Persons Who Enter May be Subject to Prosecution Under Title 18 U.S. Code 799.”

Roughly the size of a school classroom, the FCR consists of nine desks on which stands a sea of gleaming monitors. The desks face the back of the room, oriented intentionally in the direction of two large, hanging screens that display the telescope’s movement and location. Two digital clocks flank the screens, one displaying Eastern Standard Time (EST) and the other Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), based on the Earth’s rotation.

Beyond the glowing, digitalized control room is something unlike anything else in the room: a view not into a pixelated screen but into nature. Made possible by a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, the view shows a panoply of tall oak, maple, and birch trees, swaying gently in the wind outside, a stream meandering through the middle.

The panorama of Earth comes in handy, at times, to a team with their eyes on the far-off universe. Starr included it intentionally when he worked with an engineer and architect to design the room. “Nature soothes and calms,” he says. At times, the high stakes work environment calls for it.

“My position as MOM is like the conductor of the orchestra,” says Starr. “I keep things moving, and then, when things don’t go as expected, I become more like a general on a battlefield.”

 

“MY POSITION AS MOM IS LIKE THE CONDUCTOR OF THE ORCHESTRA.”

 

With three decades of work in operations engineering, on top of military experience—Starr served in Operation Desert Shield in Iraq—he can remain calm, and keep others calm, under pressure. “When an anomaly happens, I call a triage meeting, I hear from all the leads and subject-matter experts, and I help get a new plan together,” he says. “But sometimes that $10-billion price tag falls right on our shoulders.”

Starr can tell by body language when his team is tense or frustrated.

“Sometimes people freeze, and I take off my headset and then walk up to talk to them personally and say, in a calm voice, ‘This is what just happened. It’s really critical that in the next three minutes we do X, Y, and Z,’” he says. “And then it’s ‘Copy that, Wilco,’ and we go on about our business.”

Kayla Yates sits on the front row of the FCR, next to Irma Aracely Quispe-Neira. Yates serves as the command controller, while Aracely Quispe-Neira works as the operations controller. Together, they monitor the telemetry, or the automatic measurements and data sent from the telescope via a radio signal to Earth.

Just a few years out of an undergraduate program in astronautical engineering, Yates is one of the youngest members of the team at 26, and the only one, on most days, sending direct commands to the telescope. Written in a standard computer programming language and tailored to the needs of the spacecraft, the commands tell the telescope to do things like turn off a certain system so it can cool down, maneuver to a new position, or perform whatever task the engineering, wavefront-sensing, and instrument teams deem necessary.

The command requests first go to Starr, who works with Yates and Aracely Quispe-Neira, 39, to schedule the procedure in a timely manner, among other priorities. Yates then types in the commands with her long, glossy, taupe-painted fingernails, checking the script multiple times—and having Aracely Quispe-Neira double-check it—before hitting send.

When asked how it feels to be one of only a handful of scientists communicating with the telescope, Yates is surprisingly blasé. “I think it’s the routine of it all,” says the engineer, who communicates with the telescope every day, with a shrug. “It’s the repetition of mostly looking at numbers.”

Yates almost went to art school and stands out, in combat boots and a boho-style dress, from her conservatively clad colleagues (with the exception of Starr, perhaps, and his unconventional facial hair). But she decided, at the last minute, to pursue her passion for math and science by attending Capitol Technology University in Laurel to study astronautical engineering and computer science. “It’s a very niche program,” Yates says. “It’s similar to an aerospace degree, except mine was totally focused on flight outside of an atmosphere.”

Like everyone who works at the MOC, Yates underwent extensive training for her current role, training that Starr says involved late-night studying and exams and equates to “going to school all over again.” But if anything, Yates feels overprepared. “In so many ways, the flight is going almost flawlessly, compared with what we practiced and prepared for in training on the simulator,” she says.

Right now, the preparation appears to have paid off, given that the telescope is sailing through the “commissioning phase,” a term used to describe the six months after launch, during which the various teams make sure that all systems and components work according to plan. With the telescope’s tennis-court-sized sun shield deployed and keeping it cool, plus the 18 mirrors unfolded, and, as of press time, aligned, the JWST is nearly ready to start capturing images and conducting the research that NASA and its partners created the observatory to do.

 

“WEBB WILL PROBABLY ALTER HOW WE CONCEIVE OF OUR PLACE ON EARTH . . .”

 

So far, images taken and transmitted back to Earth have exceeded even the team’s wildest imaginations. “Look at this,” Starr says, with a sparkle in his eyes as he pulls one up on his smartphone. There, on the small screen, brilliant bursts of light populate nearly every inch, like an explosion of stars and galaxies. “They will only get clearer,” he says, “and are going to blow us away.”

Like the stunning images taken over the past few decades by the Hubble Telescope, the JWST will capture and share with the public exquisite looks at stars, planets, and galaxies never seen before. But while the Hubble detects light primarily within the visible and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum, the JWST will detect light largely ininfrared—and see objects 10 to 100 times fainter than Hubble, according to NASA. This, combined with Webb’s much larger mirror and state-of-the-art detectors, will enable the JWST to peer “back in time” to see the universe billions of years in the past—and hopefully solve the mystery of how the first galaxies formed.

Webb’s resolution, NASA says, will enable it to capture intricate details of, for example, an object the size of a regulation soccer ball 340 miles away, or the size of a penny about 24 miles away. That level of detail, at such a distance, is unprecedented. It will “enable the telescope, and scientists worldwide, to use infrared to truly unveil the universe,” says Quyen Hart, a senior education and outreach scientist at STScI.

“Hubble enabled us to discover planets outside of our solar system in the 1990s, so now our questions are: What, exactly, do we know about these planets? Are they hot? Do they have atmospheres? Are they like Earth?” she continues. “Webb will open the door to these answers and others—and probably alter how we conceive of our place on Earth and in the universe.”

NASA and its partners plan to release the first images this July, with events and celebrations happening worldwide at informal learning institutions like science centers, libraries, museums, and planetariums. A map of more than 600 events in Baltimore and across the United States is available online, along with updates on the precise release date of the actual photos, once NASA turns them over to the public.

Space enthusiasts can also visit NASA’s Universe of Learning for activities and resources to dive into the science of Webb, other observatories, and outer space in general. And they can follow NASA’s hashtags on social media for all things JWST—#UnfoldTheUniverse and #NASAWebb.

Or they can walk the path that coils along San Martin Drive on Hopkins’ campus, and when they pass the Steven Muller Building, with the “Go, Webb, Go!” banner fluttering outside, salute the team of scientists hard at work uncovering the mysteries of the cosmos.

In January, as COVID-19 began its spread around the globe, a team of Johns Hopkins University engineers began tracking data from around the world to document the novel coronavirus. Their online dashboard now gets upwards of 4.5 billion hits a day from public health authorities, researchers, and the general public. In early May, we spoke with project lead Lauren Gardner, an infectious disease specialist and co-director of the school’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering, about the dashboard’s viral moment.

What was a normal day like for you before the coronavirus outbreak?
A lot more relaxed. My group does infectious disease modeling, specifically looking at the risk of spread on national or global scales. We look at how many different factors—people, their environment, land use, population density, urbanization, climate mobility—play a role to understand which are most significant, then we build out prediction models. Back in January, we were looking specifically at measles. I’ve historically done a lot of work around Zika and dengue fever.

Given your expertise, did the arrival of this pandemic come as a surprise?
Back in January, I definitely didn’t think this was going to become the worst pandemic in a century, but in general, I am keenly aware of the heightened risk of new novel viruses getting introduced into the human population. The severity of this one, the extent to which it has integrated into every part of the world, and the complete economic collapse around it, is more extreme than I, and I think most people, were originally thinking. Even in January, we were expecting to see it all over the world—we were modeling importation and exportation risk at a global scale back then. But there was still just so much uncertainty surrounding how infectious it really was.

How did you make the shift to following COVID?
We had a lab meeting back in January with a couple of my PhD students and we were talking about this new coronavirus in China, just discussing what was going on and the implications. The students were already tracking it closely because they’re both Chinese and have family there. I thought it could be a great opportunity to build out a dataset for an emerging infectious disease in real time for the research community. Of course, we didn’t know where it was going to go. We built the dashboard just to visualize the data. It was a big surprise how popular it became for the general public. It makes sense now. My PhD student, Ensheng Dong, was really the pioneer. He built the original dashboard from scratch. We literally made the whole thing in a few hours one evening. But the data collection feeding into it is an incredibly complex process that has massively evolved over the last few months.

How quickly did it begin to consume your work?
The first week we put it up. It was growing quickly in popularity. By the end of February, it was already getting a billion hits a day. It was huge, and already starting to quickly get unsustainable in terms of managing it. We had to grow the team and start automating things. Part of it too was the scale of the outbreak. In terms of magnitude and also spatial scale, it just grew so fast through January. It was pretty obvious very fast that we were getting in deep.

How timely and accurate is the dashboard?
We update every hour. It just depends on how frequently our sources update, and because we’re reporting from all over the world, we’re getting updates at different times. One of the biggest challenges has been that sources are changing all the time. Over the last few months, counties, states, and even countries have come up with their own reporting systems, dashboards, and websites dedicated to COVID. None of these existed in January and February when we first started tracking this. Reporting rules are also changing. Some places include probable cases, some include probable deaths, some don’t. That’s really complicated to keep up with, and it’s a reason why there are discrepancies. Everyone in the world is still trying to learn how to deal with this, and their data collection and processes are continually evolving. Even in the U.S., there are inconsistencies all over the place.

What’s your day to day like now?
Since January, it’s been 110 percent. None of us have taken a day off. We work pretty much all the time because the dashboard is running all the time. We have people on 24-hour rotations for issues around servers and scripts and data crashes and all that, and we have group meetings every morning to talk about any ongoing issues, because we’re still literally building out the infrastructure every day. On the side, I’m doing a lot more modeling and analysis now, too, using the data we’ve collected through the dashboard. We’re creating weekly risk assessment forecasts for what’s going on in the U.S. We’re looking at how the cases and death rates are growing in every U.S. county. We’re looking at how social distancing is affecting the outbreaks growth rates. We’re looking at building local and global models for climate seasonality, and how that’s affecting COVID around the world.

Are there any key takeaways?
We’re learning a lot. The most critical thing right now is that we’re obviously seeing the loosening of regulations around social distancing and stay-at-home orders, and I would say it’s definitely not time for that yet. There’s strong evidence that social distancing is driving down the growth rate of the outbreaks, and if we start moving around again, we should expect to see those increase.

Are there any local trends you’re paying attention to?
A lot of our county-level modeling looks at the contributing risk factors, and a lot of that has to do with certain socioeconomic demographic characteristics, so I definitely have concerns about Baltimore. I do expect it to get worse here. Maryland is one of the higher risk states that we’re concerned about.

What’s next for the dashboard?
We’ll keep it running and continue to build on it and keep it as sustainable as possible. We’ll continue to create new models to try to learn more about COVID, and then ideally we’ll be able to transfer that knowledge to other infectious diseases. I think the dashboard has filled a knowledge gap and set a great example in terms of having a public facing tool to watch these things unfold in real time. I think it could be a good resource for annual influenza. And I hope it encourages more vaccinations among populations because maybe they’ll understand more about the risks.

You joined the Hopkins team in early 2019. What it’s like being a part of that community in this moment?
This tool is so trusted because it’s coming out of Hopkins. I think it’s really cool that we’re doing it out of the [Whiting] School of Engineering. It’s important for people to recognize that engineers can contribute to society in lots of different ways, including public health.

As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and the death toll in Maryland climbed again Monday, Gov. Larry Hogan and former Baltimore City health commissioner Leana Wen discussed the potential reopening of the economy, which President Donald Trump has been pushing for, on CNN.

Despite concerns from White House public health experts and governors and elected officials from around the country, President Trump continued to press for the removal of work and business restrictions on Twitter and during his daily briefing yesterday.

“I have been having discussions with my team and top experts,” Trump said, reading from a prepared statement before an ultimately contentious late afternoon event with members of the media. “We’re very close to completing a plan to open the country . . . We will soon finalize new and very important guidelines to give governors the information they need to start safely opening their states. My administration’s plans and corresponding guidelines will give people the confidence they need to begin returning to normal life.”

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. surpassed 600,000 by Tuesday, including more than 25,000 deaths, the highest total of any country to date.

Earlier Monday, however, Gov. Hogan noted on CNN with Anderson Cooper that the decision to restrict commercial activity in Maryland, as well as more than 40 other states, was made by governors—not the president or federal government.

“[We’ve been] talking with our scientists and our doctors, some really smart folks, including Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who is the former FDA commissioner, [Dr.] Tom Inglesby from Johns Hopkins, along with some of our business leaders about how we would go about this in a safe way,” Hogan said. “I think it is something the governors are taking a lead on and will continue to do so.”

When Cooper replied that Trump was now making the case that the decision to reopen the economy was his—and not the governors’—Hogan pushed back against the president’s claim. “It’s not my understanding of the Constitution,” Hogan said.

In terms of the federal stimulus package, Hogan also noted none of the funding was directed to state governments to help alleviate local economic losses and growing budget deficits due to the collapse of state revenues.

“States are really in a position to be able to help get our economies back on line, and we’ve also suffered major revenue losses that we need to provide the basic services to all the people in our states,” Hogan said. “We made the tough decisions to shut things down and to put in place these tough social distancing practices, which are having an impact on the economy and we need that help from the federal government so we can help get the economy back on track when it is safe to do so.”

Hogan, who is chairman of the National Governors Association, told Vice President Mike Pence in a conference call Monday that governors across the country need $500 billion to save their budgets.

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases topped 9,400 in the state by Tuesday. More than 300 deaths have also been reported in Maryland to date, with the African-American community disproportionately impacted. The latest modeling from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts that Maryland’s daily number of cases and deaths will peak this week, level off, and then steadily decline into the first weeks of May.

Dr. Leana Wen, the former Baltimore City health commissioner and current visiting professor of public health at George Washington University, cautioned in a separate CNN interview that while the country may seeing a peak, in terms of daily cases and deaths from COVID-19, the outbreak of the virus is far from contained.

“The peak doesn’t mean that deaths have stopped,” Wen told CNN’s John King. “Actually, the peak that we may be hitting may be one in which there are thousands of ongoing deaths [in the country]. And, now there is also all this talk of opening our economy and removing restrictions.”

She added that the U.S. still needs a national coordinated effort to secure personal protection equipment for healthcare workers, ramp up testing, and build public health infrastructure before it’s safe to fully reopen the economy.

“But it seems we are doing this backwards because we shouldn’t be talking about a timeline as much as we should be talking about metrics and capabilities, including the number of tests that can be made widely available [and] the public health infrastructure needed to able to identity individuals who test positive and trace their contacts,” she said. “And the health care infrastructure overall to be able to treat people and not be rationing resources all the time. We are nowhere near having these capabilities in place.”

She also later took to Twitter to condemn the president’s defensiveness and continued attacks on the media Monday:

Sweetheart candies and heart-shaped cards aren’t the only hearts we’re concerned about this Valentine’s season. Across the nation, February is officially American Heart Month. In honor of an entire month of hearts, we decided to learn more about healthy cardiovascular practices from Johns Hopkins cardiologist Dr. Matthews Chacko.

What is one surprising fact about heart health our readers should know?
Heart disease affects all of humanity. There is not one gender, race, or ethnic group that is really spared from heart disease. What’s being recognized is that coronary artery disease is being seen in younger individuals.

Who is at a higher risk of heart disease?
Those at risk for heart disease or coronary artery disease tend to [be] people who are older individuals, those that smoke, those that have diabetes or high cholesterol, and those that have a strong family history of heart disease. Somebody might say “my dad had a heart attack when he was 40,” and that is something to be very worried about. But I would say that of the risk factors that are out there, perhaps the most important risk factors are smoking and diabetes.

We know exercise is great for multiple reasons. Are there certain exercises that help cardiovascular health most?
Believe it or not, just regular walking is better than doing nothing at all. But things that make you sweat—the aerobic physical activity—would be more important than strength training. Keeping active with 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise weekly is the guideline.

Do you have any top tips for keeping heart-healthy?
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide—more than cancer, more than infectious diseases. In general, it starts when we are children. It just continues to press without any symptoms or manifestations until you get older, and so identifying risk factors [early] is important in terms of preventing a downstream event such as a heart attack. The things one can do to prevent heart disease are common sense. I tell folks not to smoke or to stay away from secondhand smoke. To eat well—and that involves avoiding unhealthy fats like saturated fats and trans fats.

Then, if you have diabetes, controlling that to an optimal level. The last thing is simply knowing your numbers. There are a lot of people out there who walk around with high blood pressure and don’t know it, or high cholesterol and never get their cholesterol checked. Those are people at risk for heart disease, and these are treatable, so get to know your numbers.

WHAT YOU NEED:

IDENTIFY RISKS: Work with your doctor to regularly check your blood pressure, cholesterol, and discuss any family history that could link to higher risks.

TAKE PRECAUTIONS: Eat a healthy diet, practice aerobic exercises weekly, and avoid smoking.

MAINTAIN YOUR LEVELS: Those with diabetes should ensure they keep up with maintaining healthy levels of sugar and insulin.

Before and After Loss: A Neurologist’s Perspective on Loss, Grief and Our Brain

Lisa M. Shulman, MD (Johns Hopkins University Press)

In this poetic, insightful, and heartbreaking memoir, neurologist Lisa M. Shulman chronicles the diagnosis and eventual succumbing to cancer of her late husband, William “Bill” Weiner, former chair of neurology at the University of Maryland. His journal entries, her recorded dreams, and photos of meals they shared add a personal touch to the book that illustrates their love for one another, while quotes from philosophers, poets, and psychotherapists offer wisdom on death and grieving. Combined with scientific studies on traumatic brain injury and holistic approaches to healing, Shulman has created a unique book that touches on all aspects of grieving—the psychological, physiological, and those places where neurology and psychiatry overlap. It’s an invaluable aid to counselors and doctors, as well as anyone moving through grief toward wholeness.

The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City

Antero Pietila (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers)

No citizen left a more profound impact on Baltimore than entrepreneur, abolitionist, and philanthropist Johns Hopkins, who, after his death, endowed to the city the great university and hospital system that bears his name. At the same time, because he thoroughly destroyed his private papers, no comprehensive biography exists of Hopkins—but this is a good place to start. Pietila, a Baltimore Sun reporter for 35 years, delves into not just Hopkins’ formative years but the formative years of the city itself, which he helped shape through his business and real estate ventures. If readers are looking for a work that dives deep into recent controversies around its syphilis or lead paint studies, for example, that’s not this book. If readers want to learn more about Baltimore’s history, particularly that of the east side, they won’t be disappointed.

See our full interview with writer Antero Pietila.

Longtime Baltimore Sun journalist Antero Pietila—who has also covered politics from South Africa to the Soviet Union—focuses his latest book around the central figure of Johns Hopkins. In The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City, Pietila examines the life and legacy of the titular developer, as well as digs deep on the impact his institutions have had on the racial patchwork of Baltimore City.

We talked with Pietila about what inspired the book, writing the first real biography of Johns Hopkins, and whether his institutions are doing enough for modern-day Baltimore.

This begins as a prequel to your last work, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City. Then it becomes a companion.
We are at a very peculiar intersection of history in Baltimore. The names William Donald Schaefer and James Rouse mean less and less. Fewer people remember these individuals who had made a profound impact. These books are sort of designed as introductory assignments for those new to Baltimore. Like David Simon’s The Wire.

No credible biography of Hopkins exists, correct?
He destroyed his papers. Nobody knows why. He was very private in his personal matters and at the same time, had powerful friends, including Arunah Abell, the founder of The Sun. Yes, there were stories about Johns Hopkins in the paper, but nothing personally revealing.

Hopkins grew up on an Anne Arundel plantation and died in 1873. How did he view African-Americans?
He was a Union party member and believed in Lincoln and Reconstruction. But he did not believe in equality by today’s standards. The hospital had a humanitarian mission [to serve black patients], but at the same time, he never expected the University to have black students.

Hopkins was the one of the wealthiest people in the U.S. when he died, and the largest individual B&O Railroad shareholder. How did he make his money?
He started as a dry goods merchant, catering to the needs of Conestoga wagons traveling to the Shenandoah Valley and west to Ohio. He sold whiskey, “Hopkins’ Best,” and was involved in banking, shipping. There wasn’t an enterprise he wasn’t involved in.

During your research, did Hopkins remind you of anyone today?
I never thought of a comparison to someone. But thinking of it now, he was the principal investor in the B&O Railroad, which represented the Silicon Valley of its time.

Hopkins had no children and never married. When did he get interested in philanthropy?
Most likely through George Peabody, who was a close friend. He was also in contact with Enoch Pratt. The turning point seems to be after a brush with death at 37 when he contacted cholera.

What set the course for excellence at the university, medical school, and hospital that bear his name?
The university was modeled after the elite German institutions, and started with very few undergraduate students. It was primarily a graduate university and research institution. Similarly, the hospital was unique in that it began as research hospital.

The “ghosts” of Johns Hopkins refers not so much to various controversies around the University or medical school, for example, the syphilis and lead paint studies, but city’s development, in particular, around the hospital.
Not in My Neighborhood documented the ethnic rotations in West Baltimore, but nobody had outlined what happened in East Baltimore where there had been a strong Czech and Bohemian presence. In Old Town, the ethnic rotations included Germans, Irish, and then German Jews and Russian Jews. I don’t avoid the controversies.

You emigrated from Finland and started as a Sun reporter in 1969. What was your impression of the city?
I thought it was interesting, an ancient-looking city with its rowhouses and an atmosphere that was different than the parts of modern Europe, which I had visited. The extent of the segregation surprised me. I came to Baltimore one year after the riot. Not only was the mood of the city terrible, there were a helluva lot of questions about its future. The situation is tricky today.

And currently?
The mood is again not very good with the level of violent crime, but there are cranes and buildings going up everywhere by the waterfront. It makes you wonder if we are in the middle of a housing bubble.

But you see Hopkins Hospital as a bridge, potentially, spurring redevelopment on the east side from the harbor all the way to its campus.
The Hopkins campus never really brought to fruition the kind of renewal that we were told it would. But I see a lot of promise, particularly in the Broadway corridor. I think there is some kind of possibility for renewal that might connect to Preston Street and Greenmount Avenue. Hopkins has long had a strange, or perhaps stained, is a better word, relationship with the city. Given that this world-class university and medical school and hospital brand that sits in the midst of city with tremendous challenges. It is strange, and strained as well.

There is always the question is Hopkins doing enough for Baltimore? Today, there is the question whether it should have its own police force to set up a perimeter around its campuses. Something like 40 percent of the real estate buildings in the city don’t pay taxes because they belong to nonprofits and are exempt. Eventually that is going to become an issue as well, I imagine.

Ross Jones spent decades at Johns Hopkins University without ever learning the story of the university’s first president’s extraordinary daughter Elisabeth Gilman. A rebel in her time, Gilman traveled the country and the world advocating for those whose voices were not as easily heard as her own. She fed and entertained U.S. servicemen in World War I France, provided relief for miners and their families throughout Appalachia, called for an anti-lynching law in Maryland, and ran for several offices as a member of the Socialist Party, among other things.

Though her story was mostly lost to time, Jones has revived this 20th-century heroine in his new book, Elisabeth Gilman: Crusader for Justice. Ahead of his book talk and signing at Evergreen Museum & Library November 1, we spoke with Jones about gathering the details of Gilman’s past and what she might think about the state of the present.

How did you first come across Elisabeth Gilman’s story?
I was doing research, and this is probably 10 years ago, in the Eisenhower Library in the archives. I noticed a her name in a file and, to tell you the truth, I did not know she existed. I didn’t know that Daniel Coit Gilman had a daughter—he actually had two. It turns out that she had donated to the Hopkins Library in the 1940s all of her letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and pictures. She even did an informal memoir that was in there, and I spent about an hour or so just sort of leafing through things. I quickly came to the conclusion that this was really fascinating and it might be worth a story. So then I went back on a number of occasions just in the early days and went through the whole file and was able to read everything.

Tell me a bit about the research process. After that first file, where do you go from there?
I concentrated on her letters first. There were many of them and she, fortunately for me, wrote in a nice hand. Most of the letters were written from during World War I and to her sister. She had gone over as a volunteer with the YMCA, which ran a canteen in Paris for soldiers coming off the front for rest and recreation. And she was in a hotel that was taken over by the military, 450 residents whenever the soldiers were there, and she would provide food and entertainment, and she wasn’t alone. There were several women who did that. She was there for about two years and she wrote letters to her sister two or three times a week. And so you got this picture of what life was like in Paris during the war, what she was up to, entertaining the troops, and some of the things that were happening to her. Her enthusiasm for her job was very, very touching.

That habit of letter writing has really gone by the wayside. It’s a shame people won’t have those kids of materials for research in the future.
It’s really a lost art in many ways, and I don’t know what we’re going to do now that we just have everything online, you know. There’s no original materials anymore. One of the things that really fascinated me was Elisabeth, in the winter of 1917, had to buy an overcoat, and she wanted to tell her sister. She wrote to her sister about it and she cut a little swatch of the material, a kind of blue and black wool, and pinned it to the letter. Well, it’s still there. That really amazed me, over 100 years old now and still has its colors.

Gilman was quite the radical in her time. Can you talk a little about how she came to be that way?
I would characterize her as being the centerpiece for social reform and social justice in Baltimore for the first half of the 20th century. She was into so many things. She started out as a social worker. In 1916 she went up to Boston and heard a professor from Wellesley who was an Episcopalian, like Elisabeth was, and also was a socialist and it a Elisabeth’s introduction to socialism. She came back to Baltimore and, lo and behold, almost as soon as she got home, she had an invitation to go to an international socialist rally. It was a weeklong rally held in, of all places, Sherwood Forest. It’s hard for me to believe that anything like that would be held there!

Anyhow, she met a radical Episcopal priest named Mercer Green Johnston. He had just been dismissed from his church in Newark, New Jersey, because he was too radical. They were birds of a feather and a kind of reinforced each other’s idealism and interest in socialism. And then the war came along. Johnston signed up to go drive an ambulance in France, his wife went over as a volunteer for what was called the National Surgical Bandage, Committee, and they asked Elisabeth to go with them.

She came back in 1919 and then she really got revved up doing all kinds of activities. She was the secretary of the West Virginia Miners Relief Association, she went to Washington, D.C., to testify at a meeting of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, she held a meeting at her home in 1931 a where the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union was founded. She was nominated for governor in 1930 by the Socialist Party and lost by huge, huge margin. But she used the platform to talk about her liberal views, and her message was that the Socialist Party wants to make the world a better place for everyone to live. She said that over and over again. She ran twice for the United States Senate. She ran for mayor of Baltimore, even sheriff. So she really was a pistol. When she wasn’t running, she was doing things like badgering Congress for relief funds for workers during the depression and she was always speaking out against racial discrimination.

The word socialism can sort of scare people off sometimes. Can you tell me a little bit more about sort of what the concept meant to her?
Well, the concept meant to her that the government would own major industries. Many of the things that she was pushing for prior to FDR’s election were actually put in place by his administration. I think she was a kind of a quiet socialist in the sense that she wasn’t super radical. She just saw and felt that the working people of the country, men and women and their children, weren’t getting a fair shake. She pushed for cheaper trolley fairs in Baltimore. She wanted to lower gas rates, electric rates, and water charges. She was fighting against a big business that she felt was taking advantage of working class people.

Where do you think Elisabeth would fit into today’s world?
She would be having a ball today. Everything going right now is just the opposite from what she believed in, what she fought for for all those years. I think she might be a little sad to come back and see some of the things that are happening today. Voices like hers need to be heard, and I think they are being heard more and more. She might be a little disappointed that racial relations are not as positive as she might’ve hoped. For her to have fought it for that then and to realize that that the racial discrimination, the issues with the police and African-American men, and other things that are going on today I think would have disappointed her very greatly.

How do you hope people remember her?
I would always hope that people would read the book, and then maybe if anyone should ask them today who Elisabeth Gilman was, they would tell you what a champion she was for liberal causes and how dedicated she was to the advancement of social justice and the well-being and working people in her day.

When Alice McDermott suggests meeting for lunch at the Irish Inn at
Glen Echo, it seems like an obvious choice. Critics often tag her as an
Irish-American, or Irish-Catholic, writer, and the proposed setting
conjures images of Guinness on tap, shamrock decorations, fish and
chips, and a steady stream of stock phrases like “luck of the Irish” and
“Irish eyes are smiling.” But it turns out that the Inn, like McDermott
and her work, defies stereotyping. Its humble exterior—painted yellow
with a dark-shingled roof—is unremarkable. Inside, it exudes carefully
cultivated taste, with white linen covering the tables and framed oil
paintings lining the walls. It is, indeed, a leprechaun-free zone. The
menu lists black-tiger-prawn spring roll and smoked-salmon carpaccio
alongside more traditional fare such as shepherd’s pie.

McDermott,
who lives in nearby Bethesda, appears to be a regular, greeting the
hostess and server with a familiarity that trumps formality. After
glancing at the menu, she orders a beet salad and iced tea. A
youthful-looking 60 years old, she smiles easily, often, and for good
reason—she has, for decades, been acclaimed as a top-tier literary
talent.

McDermott’s latest novel, Someone, was recently
nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. (The
winner will be announced March 13.) She’s already won a National Book
Award for 1998’s Charming Billy and earned three Pulitzer Prize
nominations. McDermott’s crisp, purposeful prose has been praised by
many publications, including The New York Times, which lauded her for “writing with wisdom and grace and refusing to sentimentalize her characters.”

Peers
like Anne Tyler feel similarly. “I am a huge admirer of Alice
McDermott’s work,” says Tyler, who cites Someone as a particular
favorite. “It was beautifully written and very touching, with its
unpredictable landings on different, random times in one woman’s
life.”

McDermott appreciates the acclaim but doesn’t make too
much of it, likely the result of a middle-class upbringing and its
accompanying don’t-get-too-big-for-your-britches ethos. She often seems
more interested in talking about the successes of others, notably her
students.

What’s less known about McDermott is that she’s forged a
stellar reputation as an educator. She has, since 1996, taught in the
Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University, where she conducts
graduate and undergraduate fiction workshops. “It’s energizing,” she
says. “I enjoy looking at that first draft and thinking, ‘What have we
got here? What’s on the page that we can make use of?’ I occasionally
feel like I’m more invested in the stories than they are, but it’s
always fun because they’re so talented.”

One of those talented
students, 2003 grad Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a fellow nominee for
the National Book Critics Circle Award this year. She came to the U.S.
from Nigeria at the age of 19, determined to become a serious writer. In
2008, she won a MacArthur “genius” grant. Another former student,
Matthew Thomas, graduated from Hopkins and took a job teaching English
at a Jesuit high school in New York. For 10 years, he didn’t publish
anything, but worked steadily on his first book, which he recently sold
to Simon & Schuster for $1 million.

Listening to McDermott
talk about them, it’s apparent she isn’t bragging or basking in some
reflected glow. She certainly isn’t competitive, and their awards and
advances, though nice, don’t really impress her. On a deeper level, she
understands the enormity of how far they’ve come and the sheer
improbability of their journey.

She relates to that.

McDermott
grew up in Elmont, a Long Island suburb, where she went to Catholic
school and read constantly. She had two older brothers. Her mother did
secretarial work and kept house; her father was a sales rep for Con
Edison. He worked a desk job his entire life, valued the health care and
pension it gave him, and expected his children to have similar
aspirations. As a result, McDermott’s notion of going to college as an
English major and becoming a writer was greeted with eye-rolling doubt.

“It
wasn’t just that I thought it was an impossibility,” she recalls. “I
was told it was an impossibility. My parents said it was silly, or, even
worse, dangerous.”

But after realizing how serious their daughter
was, her folks softened a bit, figuring she could teach or become a
secretary in a publishing house. “But you’ll have to get your shorthand
and typing skills up,” they advised her.

McDermott graduated with
an English degree from the State University of New York at Oswego, where
an instructor once took her aside to say, “I have bad news for you.
You’re a writer, and you’ll never shake it.”

After a short stint
working as (no kidding) a secretary at a publishing house, she went back
to school and got her master’s in writing at the University of New
Hampshire in 1978. That same year, she sold her first short story to Ms.
magazine, an event that proved to be a professional and personal
turning point.

McDermott was out celebrating the story’s
publication with friends in New York when she met her future husband at
the Mad Hatter, a singles bar on the Upper East Side. David Armstrong
had just moved to the city from Ohio to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience at
Cornell University. When asked if they started out as friends, McDermott
interjects, “This was the Seventies. You didn’t write letters.”

So it was immediate, love at first sight? “Oh, yeah,” says McDermott, with a nod and laugh that drives home the point.

Two years later—after publishing more stories in Mademoiselle, Redbook, and Seventeen—McDermott sold her first novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter,
to Houghton Mifflin for $12,500. The modest advance “felt like a
million dollars,” she says, but even more significantly, it fed her
belief that “this crazy idea I had of being a writer could become a
reality that was recognizable to the rest of the world.”

Still, her parents cautioned—her chosen line of work didn’t come with benefits.

McDermott
and Armstrong married in 1979, and his career researching Alzheimer’s
disease has pretty much determined where the family—they have three
children, two boys and a girl—has lived. It’s taken them to San Diego,
Pittsburgh, and, ultimately, the D.C. suburbs, after Armstrong landed at
the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

While living in
Pittsburgh in 1996, McDermott was approached by John Irwin— who chaired
the Writing Seminars at that time—about coming to Hopkins for a writing
residency. By that time, she’d written three books, been a finalist for
the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, and done some college
teaching. “I heard her read at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference [in
Tennessee] and knew she’d be a perfect fit,” recalls Irwin. “Her writing
was humane and deeply felt. She was a consummate stylist.”

McDermott
accepted the invitation, “because it was Hopkins,” she says. “It was
the house that Barth built,” referring to longtime faculty member, John
Barth, who built up the program and retired before she arrived.

She
commuted from Pittsburgh for a year and enjoyed working with
serious-minded colleagues like Stephen Dixon, who says that McDermott
was, indeed, a perfect fit. “She created a fair, relaxed, and warm
atmosphere in the classroom,” says Dixon. “In addition to that, she was
incisive and very smart.”

After the residency was over,
McDermott was invited to stay. Around the same time, her husband got the
NIH job, they made the move to Bethesda, and she became a regular
presence at the university, though her exposure to Baltimore was limited
to reading Anne Tyler books, which, she notes, made her “very receptive
to the city.” She was named the Richard A. Macksey Professor for
Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, which is an endowed chair, in
1999, the year after winning the National Book Award.

Since then,
she has been Hopkins’ marquee writer, following predecessors such as
Barth, Robert Stone, and Mark Strand. “As a highly visible writer, she
attracts students to the fiction department,” says Irwin. “And she’s
very hands-on once they get here, a truly great teacher.”

“She was
very human, kind, and honest,” says former student Adichie. “She had a
quiet class and grace and wore her immense talent very lightly. She was
also very sharp as a reader—she got things and saw things. I paid
attention to the comments she wrote on my stories.” (McDermott, for her
part, takes no credit for Adichie’s success, saying she was “almost
fully formed when she came to us.”)

Matthew Thomas was similarly
impressed. “Alice taught us that every story should be not just one
story, but two stories, or more than two if possible,” he recalls.
“There should always be a parallel story, she urged. With that in mind, I
will say that there is the story Alice’s work tells, and then there is
the parallel story of the remarkable person Alice is in the world.

“She
is one of those transformative teachers one is lucky to meet even once
in a lifetime, a great writer, an American treasure, a gift to readers
everywhere. Nearly above all else, what I remember about Alice is her
wonderful laugh, which suggested that everything was right in the world,
or could be with a little mutual effort.”

McDermott has long
maintained that writing fiction helps her make sense of the world, so
it’s remarkable that making sense of others’ fiction holds such appeal
for her. “It’s just a matter of getting down and dirty in their prose
with them,” she explains. “We’re all there trying to make the story,
novel, or chapter as good as it can be. It’s a constant struggle to get
it down, get it clear, and understand that your intentions are the same,
whether you’re an undergraduate writing a short story or a writer with
seven published novels. The continually reassuring thing is that we’re
all novices when we start a new work.”

That point gives her pause. She takes a sip of tea and adds: “There’s so much you don’t know until you start writing.”

---

Read author Matthew Thomas’s tribute to Alice McDermott. >>

It has been a 60-year battle. On January 29, 1951, doctors at The Johns Hopkins Hospital took a biopsy from Henrietta Lacks—wife of a Bethlehem Steel worker—who had an aggressive form of cervical cancer. 

Though she passed away eight months later, the tissue that was used without her consent went on to establish the cell line HeLa—the first immortal human cells ever grown in a culture, which have been invaluable to medical researchers ever since.

However, the Lacks family has never been consulted when researchers use this genomic data—something heavily profiled in Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—until now. In August, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) made a privacy agreement with the Lacks family. “In 20 years at NIH, I can’t think of a specific experience more charged with scientific and ethical challenges than this one,” says NIH director Dr. Francis S. Collins. “It is truly fitting that her story is catalyzing changes in policy.”

Though the cells have been used in countless studies through the years, her family became concerned this past spring when German researchers completed the first whole genome sequence of her cell line and posted it to an open-access database.

“We were left in the dark,” says Owings Mills resident Jeri Lacks Whye, Lacks’s granddaughter, pictured, with her brother David. “For the past 60 years, we were pulled into science without consent and weren’t given a voice until now.”

The new agreement requires NIH-funded researchers to use a “controlled-access” database of the HeLa cell genome, governed by a panel that contains two of her grandchildren, both still living in Baltimore. “We are happy to be in the conversation now,” Lacks Whye says. “This is important in the legacy of Henrietta Lacks as a person.”

Clutching her iPad to her chest, Irena Stein stands in the midst of the spacious, gleaming, sunlight-filled room that, in less than a month, will morph into a natural-foods cafe in The Johns Hopkins University’s remodeled Mudd Hall, her third on the Homewood campus. She lay awake for hours the night before mulling the final candidates for the new spot’s name—”My head is still spinning,” she says, drawing circles in the air with her right index finger—and now, 12 hours later, she runs the possibilities by her Dutch-born logo/website/signage designer Maarten Ottens—Amiel, Deseo, Acanto, and Baio. Finally, in keeping with the A-team motif of her two existing restaurants—Azafrán and Alkimia—they agree on Acanto (Spanish for the acanthus plant family).

Hopkins gave Stein the official go-ahead for the project only days earlier, and with just three weeks until its late-August launch, she frets about financing the venture and hiring suitable new employees. “The staff is what worries me the most,” she confides, “but we’ll figure it out.”

That Zen-like sensibility—she’s a practicing, not proselytizing, Buddhist—typifies Stein, 60, whose background in social work, cultural anthropology, and jewelry design defines her responsible and artistic approach to food selection, preparation, and presentation.

Fifteen minutes and a brisk walk away, she makes a pit stop at Alkimia (from the Arabic “al-kimiya,” for “alchemy”), her takeaway cafe in Gilman Hall, alternating between English and French as she confers with its Paris-raised manager, and then heads back to her office at her signature cafe Azafrán (Spanish for “saffron”), located in the Steven Muller Building—home of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the center of the Hubble Telescope’s science operations—on the far fringes of the JHU campus. There, she deftly bounces between English, Spanish, and French while speaking with various members of her Benetton Nation-like staff.

That same cultural internationalism extends to Azafrán itself. Open weekdays and serving fruit salads, yogurt with honey, granola, and breads with homemade jams in the morning—not forgetting its all-day espresso bar—Azafrán devotes its principal energies to lunch, offering a standing menu of creative hot and cold sandwiches, soups, salads, and desserts, plus weekly specials that often reflect national or regional cuisines.

Working one week in advance, Stein personally devises these constantly changing specials—a kale/sausage/roasted potato flatbread entree and a chilled Thai-spiced watermelon with crab soup, to cite two examples—and sources a lot of her foods locally. She shops at farmers’ markets, Asian markets, and Restaurant Depot, augmented by deliveries and pick ups from Maryland purveyors such as Springfield Farm (meats), One Straw Farm (vegetables), Charlottetown Farm (goat cheese), and Black Rock Orchard (fruits). Environmentally conscious, the restaurant adheres to a mostly zero-waste recycling policy.

“For me, to feed people all-natural, homemade food is incredible,” Stein notes. “There is nothing industrial about what we do. If I’m not going to eat it, then I’m not going to have anybody else eat it.

(While Stein’s three cafes largely cater to Hopkins students and staff, they are open to the public as well.)

Fit, vivacious, and invariably dressed in elegantly casual attire, Stein launched Azafrán (what she calls her “improbable cafe”) in 2004 while running a catering business out of her Guilford home and working as a substitute pastry chef for restaurateur/food writer John Shields at The Baltimore Museum of Art-based Gertrude’s.

Back then, AURA—the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which operates STScI/Hubble—approached Shields about taking over its Muller Building cafeteria. Overwhelmed by a confluence of projects, Shields declined, recommending Stein instead.

“I had known Irena for some time and loved the food that she prepared for caterings and private parties,” Shields explains. “She is one of the best chefs in the Baltimore region—in fact, one of the best I know.”

Stein inherited a dining area that “looked like a boarding school,” she recalls, “with the colors of a McDonald’s and plastic flowers” on the tables, plus a grease-caked kitchen. With AURA and Hopkins footing the bill, she oversaw the space’s complete overhaul, constructing an open kitchen and a comforting setting.

The first six months were shaky, with many diners objecting to Stein’s higher prices and smaller portions. Open your sandwiches, Stein urged her customers, and examine the high-quality contents. Equally vexing: an entrenched super-size mentality. When lunch-goers told her that they weren’t full after a meal, she replied, “Yes, but the idea is that you go back to your office and you’re productive” instead of sluggish and bloated.

In effect, she was teaching her clientele a new way to think about food, about eating—a more European sensibility. This included eliminating massive doses of salt, sugar, and fats. “Slowly, people adapted to our ‘weird,’ multicultural menu,” she says, “until there was a complete level of comfort.”

These days, Azafrán feeds up to 250 people daily: approximately 70 percent researchers, administrators, post-doc and grad students from STScI and the nearby Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy and the Carnegie Institution for Science; 20 percent from the rest of the campus; and 10 percent from surrounding neighborhoods.

Among them, JHU/STScI astrophysicist Adam Riess, a 2011 Nobel Prize laureate in physics, who lunches at Azafrán daily: “I love how they throw hints of various cultures into whatever they do. I just had a special that was a large bruschetta topped with greens, prosciutto, and grilled peach drizzled with a balsamic glaze.”

Another regular, Antonella Nota—associate director for the European Space Agency (ESA) at STScI and a Hubble project scientist at ESA—appreciates the cafe’s “new and original recipes, drawn accurately from the international scene; the fresh and healthy ingredients; and Irena’s artist’s eye in the food presentation.”

Stein comes by her food philosophy naturally, not via a formal culinary education. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, she and three brothers were raised in a nurturing household that respected food, prepared at home daily and eaten together.

“My mom did everything from scratch, all natural, so we grew up cooking,” Stein explains. “It was an upbringing with a tremendous food experience; even though we lived in so many places, even though we traveled so much, we didn’t have any packaged food.”

Her Polish father left his homeland, presciently anticipating World War II, and eventually settled in Venezuela in 1936. He then worked as a film distributor for Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures, taking his Venezuelan wife and their kids to Paris when Irena was six, back to Caracas when she was 10, and then to Brussels when she was 15.

In Brussels, Stein earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from the Institut Supérieur de Formation Sociale in 1976, focusing on community and cultural development, and served for several years afterward as a cultural coordinator working with the city’s impoverished adolescents.

Back in Caracas, she developed cultural programs for both the Venezuelan youth department and the National Library. Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, she earned a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from Stanford University in 1982, after which she segued into contemporary jewelry design, creating limited-edition necklaces, brooches, and earrings that she exhibited at juried shows and sold in museum stores in the U.S. and Venezuela, all while living in San Francisco and, not incidentally, raising a daughter, Sofia. (Stein’s 1982 marriage ended in divorce.)

With the majority of her sales and shows based on the East Coast, Stein relocated to Baltimore in 1998 for its proximity to major cities and its affordability. But when a national guilt complex regarding buying luxury goods set in after 9/11, she was forced to call a career-path audible: “I needed to reinvent myself right away.”

Urged by friends to open a restaurant, she began instead by catering events for the local arts community, particularly galleries, working out of her home “in a 1950s kitchen that was falling apart” and the kitchens of two neighbors. Then came the stint with Shields at Gertrude’s and, subsequently, Azafrán.

Since then, Stein has maintained her catering business (using Azafrán’s kitchen), designing menus and brainstorming concepts for an array of arts, community, institutional, and private clients, including Riess, who chose Stein to handle the dinner bash thrown by his MIT fraternity honoring his Nobel laureateship.

In 2010, Hopkins contracted Stein to open Alkimia in Gilman Hall, serving salads, sandwiches, and desserts—ferried from Azafrán—to students, professors, and administrators. (Stein married Mark Demshak, an architect, in the airy, glittering atrium adjacent to Alkimia in 2012.)

Now comes the daunting prospect of preparing Acanto, which will offer a completely different menu from Azafrán and Alkimia. And barring any unforeseen setbacks, Stein will launch her first non-Hopkins-based restaurant next year in North Baltimore, serving what she terms “South American street food”: arepas, empanadas, tamales, and seviche. “I want to leave my Venezuelan imprint on Baltimore,” she says. She already has chosen a name, which, not surprisingly, begins with ‘A’: Alma (Spanish for “soul”).

You can bet that she will infuse the new place with her improbable governing food philosophy. “I want people to have the same pleasure and delight and deliciousness and loveliness as I do in my house,” Stein says. “We serve brilliant people. When they come here for that pleasure, we give it to them. The return is enormous feedback. They’re happy to come. They know what they’re putting in their stomach is very nice.”