You’ve heard his voice on that iconic ’80s classic, “She Blinded Me With Science.” Now, electronic musician, tech trailblazer, and Johns Hopkins professor Thomas Dolby has penned a chronicle of his life, The Speed of Sound. He joined us to talk about how he decided to write the book, the electronic music scene, and what instruments he’s playing now.

When did you know that you wanted to write your memoir?
I was approached a couple of years ago, right about the time I came here, by a publisher, asking if I wanted to do a sort of music-tech business book. It didn’t really appeal to me, but it did prompt me to dig up some old diaries and journals I had, and they were really interesting to read because there was no context to them. And then I thought if I could string the journals together, fill in the gaps, and resist the temptation to editorialize, it would be more interesting than a retrospective. That idea got me an agent and the agent got me a meeting with the publisher, and I had about two meetings with the publisher and handed in the first draft and they said, ‘This is great. In the next draft, can we expect to see a continuous first person, past tense narrative instead of the journal thing?’ Apparently that’s not really en vogue these days. I was thinking it would be kind of fun to read something like Go Ask Alice.

It’s amazing that you had those journals because the level of detail that you have in the book allows the stories to flow seamlessly.
Well, a lot of them I have very clear memories of. But my memory is definitely selective. It’s a good thing that I had [my wife] Kathleen to remind me of what really happened. But it was interesting also because with the first draft, there were half a dozen people that I really wanted to read it and give me feedback, as it’s the first book I’ve written. So I sent it around to a few people thinking I’d get some constructive criticism, and the first thing they wanted to do was fix themselves in the book.

Did you listen?
I did. Chances are none of them are going to write a book like this, so I’m sort of telling their stories as well as mine. You have to be a little bit responsible. But I thought I’d apologize later.

You are very honest in the book, telling the good and the bad. Were there any stories that you balked about including?
Not really. Certainly as far as career stuff, I felt that if it had charm, it would be because you want to slap this guy around and say, ‘Oh, no no, it’s so glaring obvious of what needs to happen here.’ It would be a mistake to go back and whitewash it. On the more personal front, I was a little bit torn because it’s not stuff I’ve talked about in interviews, and it’s not stuff people ask—family life, disappointments, romances, that usually isn’t what people ask me. I was in two minds about whether to put that stuff in and whether it was ok to intrude into the privacy of people close to me. But I decided to do it really because the balance of the whole thing was crucial.

If it was just a business book, then I think people would be saying, as my kids did, ‘Why isn’t this guy a multi-millionaire?’ The answer is that I’ve always just been drawn to artistic possibilities, and as long as I can pay the rent that’s the choice I’ll make, against the better judgment of business people around me. And I just always wanted to keep my humanity through all of it, and it’s very easy when you’re the center of attention to lose that. I needed the book to reflect that that was a struggle.

It seemed like there have been several ethical dilemmas in your life that really determined what path you took, and it seems like that’s one of the things that’s most important to you is maintaining your ethical standards.
When I got stung for whatever reason—like the first time I was really close to getting a record deal and the evening before they canceled for no reason (which was either a U-turn on the part of the record company or that my then–manager had been trying to do something underhanded behind my back)—I was determined that I was going to try and counter that type of behavior with a similar type of behavior myself. I was going to try and be above that. Similar things happened in the tech industry as well, where I felt left down. In most cases it wasn’t deliberately spiteful or destructive, it was more that somebody else thought they were doing their job and I was the scapegoat. My solution to problems has always been creativity. When I was in a fix, I would always just go back to inventing my way out of it, and in a lot of cases, that was the only solution that I had. I’m not very good at politics.

Have you noticed anything specifically going on with you creatively since you moved to Baltimore?
I’ve been pretty busy teaching, so I haven’t been creating a lot of new stuff. I think as I’m teaching film scoring that it’s time I did another film score.

What kind of movie do you think you’d like to score?
Generally speaking the more cinematic a movie is, the more one notices the score. Oscar winning score are often for Dances With Wolves or Out of Africa or Gravity. There’s a lot of Hollywood blockbusters post Gladiator that have all been kind of same in terms of the approach to the score—the thundering drums and the choirs and the random ethnic instruments thrown in along with the giant orchestra.

Like the Verdi Requiem mixed with drumming.
Exactly. So that’s not particular interesting to me. I really enjoy working with so-called real instruments, and I enjoy that a lot more nowadays than twiddling knobs for months on end. I’d be happy to do an indie type movie with real emotions, because the most interesting thing about film scoring is the universality of music. If I find a chord change that affects me in a certain way, then I’ve often wondered, Will the audience perceive it the same way? But amazingly it turns out that it does.

With my music, and the feedback I get from forums and the Internet, people would talk about the same chord change emotionally like I felt when I was composing it. That’s a very gratifying feeling, and if your choice as a film composer is to underline what’s going on onscreen, do you stop short of manipulating the audience and telling them how to feel about something? You work with the director, but you’re also just a name on a crew sheet along with costumes and make up and all that. Collectively, you create an atmosphere.

What has it been like for you to watch the electronic music scene evolve?
It’s amazing to watch. When I started out, electronic instruments were very rarified and hard to get your hands on. They weren’t very reliable, they didn’t stay in tune, and they were all programmed manually, so if you spent hours working on something and then went to get some sleep and somebody came in and dusted and touched the wrong thing it would mess it all up. Or you’d trip on one of the chords and you’d be back to square one. Over time, they became a lot more accessible. You could save your work, and then there were libraries of sounds that you could buy that were programmed by someone else, so you could just focus on playing. So instead of renting studio time, you could just make music in the back of a coffee shop or whatever, and thousands more people had access to it. I was fortunate enough to dive into it and work with it. That’s a situation that I’ve always been very drawn to because I get a thrill out of working in an area that hasn’t been defined yet.

Generally speaking, when something crosses the chasm and goes mainstream, it looses its appeal for me. At each stage in my career, I kind of plunged in when no one had written the rulebook yet. That’s a really exciting place to be for me. If I feel like I’m one of a crowd of people who are jumping on a bandwagon, it’s not very stimulating.

Do you think it’s a good thing that so many more people are involved in it?
I think it’s definitely elevated the field, and even in the pop charts, you’re hearing the trickle down effect of all of that experimentation that’s going on at an underground level. That’s interesting and needed. I don’t go out to clubs much, so I don’t really understand the alternate dance music scene, but it’s very interesting to see the way it’s progressed. In the early 1980s, those of us who were using electronics were really struggling against this perception that it’s not real music, it’s got no feel, it’s got no soul to it.

The fact that, by the end of the ’80s it had gone more mainstream, and there were a lot of cool artists who were starting to use electronics rather than guitars and drums. A great example is Joy Division, who were sort of the prototypical indie guitar band, and suddenly started using synths. That was really a signal to bands of that ilk that it was ok to experiment with that stuff. And once they were doing that, they thought, why were we so snooty about it?

What instruments are you working with now?
I tend to start with the piano. It’s sort of ground zero for me. And I especially like that with a piano you don’t have to plug it in or anything. Any time you plug in a keyboard for the first time, you invariably hit a note, and there’s no sound, and you have to figure out why. I’m actually sometimes tempted to take up another instrument altogether and go and take lessons somewhere and not tell them who I am. Like go in a coffee shop and take one of those tags for French horn lessons.

What do you think you learned while you were writing this book?
I suppose that memory is quite selective. I think I became more aware of the pattern of the choices I’ve made throughout my life, including the mistakes. If Hollywood licensed this book and made a biopic, they’d have to change quite a lot because it’s not really the typical story. I think they’d want to fix things so I got the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And I sometimes wonder if I’d just tweaked things slightly if that would be the case.

The fact is I’ve never needed to struggle with a choice that I’ve made based on how I’m going to pay the rent, how am I going to pay the mortgage. I’ve always been able to go, ‘Wow, that sounds really cool’ and go for it. And that’s an enviable position for any artist, really. It’s absolutely ideal. There’s no body I’d rather swap places with.

There aren’t many people who can tell you what Juneteenth is or why it’s a significant holiday to celebrate. June 19 is known as the black Independence Day that has been observed in African-American communities since 1886. The day is meant to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the U.S. and celebrate the advancements of the black community since emancipation.

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” read the general orders from the Union Army’s Maj. Gen. Gordon Grange on June 19, 1865. “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”

The celebration’s roots go back to Galveston, Texas, where it was first celebrated on June 19, 1865 after the slaves there found out two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed that they were freed. It has evolved over the years to families and communities honoring the day with parades, local bands, fellowship, and food. The menu usually consists of red-colored items—red velvet cake, red soda, watermelon, and spicy hot links—with classics like fried chicken and black-eyed peas making an appearance. The crimson color is symbol of ingenuity and resilience in bondage.

But we don’t have to be in Texas to celebrate, so here are some events happening in the Baltimore area.

6/15: BFSA Juneteenth Celebration
The Johns Hopkins University Black Faculty and Staff Association (BFSA) is hosting an event that will feature speakers including Councilman Brandon Scott and Rev. Donte Hickman with performances by The Fresh Wind Choir of Southern Baptist Church, Keur Khaleyi African Dance Company, and storyteller Janice the Griot. There will also be activities for the whole family with face painting, magic shows, and games to commemorate the holiday. The Johns Hopkins University, Glass Pavilion, Levering Hall, 3400 N. Charles St.

6/16: Books & Breakfast – A Celebration of Juneteenth
The Oak Hill Center for Culture and Education is teaming up with the Baltimore Black Worker Center to commemorate the holiday by reflecting on the progress of African- American communities since the abolition of slavery. This free event will include breakfast and books, worker rights training, and an interactive timeline on the history of African-American work in the U.S. The Oak Hill Center for Culture and Education, 2239 Kirk Ave., 10 a.m.-12 p.m., Free

6/16: Annual Juneteenth Celebration
The Academy Art Museum in Talbot County is partnering with the Chesapeake Children’s Book Festival this year for their annual Juneteenth celebration. Gather for a day of spoken word, dance performances, face painting, and crafts to celebrate the holiday and the year of Frederick Douglass. Academy of Art Museum, 106 South Street, Easton, 10 a.m.-3 p.m., Free.

6/16-6/17: Juneteenth Reservoir Hill Garden & Home Tour 2018
Celebrate with the Reservoir Hill community in their 24th annual Juneteenth affair. The neighborhood will come alive with music, historic games and storytelling, and carriage rides with the Arrabers. Participants will also be able to tour some of the historic homes and learn about the history of African Americans in the area. Dovecote Café, 2501 Madison Avenue, 12 p.m.–5 p.m., $15

6/19: Juneteenth Celebration at Port Discovery
It’s never too early to teach children about history. Take the family down to Port Discovery to learn about African-American quilting and its importance in passing messages along during slavery. Kids will get the chance to make their own quilts and play games that will help them identify historical black figures. Port Discovery Children’s Museum, 35 Market Place, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., $15.95

6/19: Juneteenth at Ida B’s Table
Food is a big part of celebrating Juneteenth and what better place to dig in than Ida B’s Table? The restaurant is hosting award-winning culinary author Toni Tipton Martin at their Juneteenth celebration. The evening will include song, fellowship, and, of course, a multi-course dinner of traditional Juneteenth dishes from chef Dave Thomas. Attendees will also receive a signed copy of Martins’ cookbook, The Jemima Code. Ida B’s Table, 235 Holliday Street, 7 p.m.-10 p.m., $125

Coming In to Land

By Andrew Motion (HarperCollins)

This collection has a tall order to fill—encompass the 40-year career of a man who served as poet laureate of the United Kingdom for a decade and was knighted for his contributions to the arts. And its mission is made particularly challenging because the poet, Andrew Motion—now a professor at The Johns Hopkins University—has managed to cover much in the way of human experience through his work. There are poems where family and man’s relationship with the natural world are often subjects, set against the backdrop of the English countryside. There are the verses where the experience of war comes into focus, including some inspired by recordings Motion made of British soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. His later poems transport us to places like Australia, Asia, and the United States, expanding his reach but somehow also hitting closer to home. What makes this book extraordinary is that we experience the evolution of a poetic master whose insight only increases with time. We see him experiment with stanza, imagery, voice, and character, and watch his emotional dives grow deeper.

See our full interview with writer and professor Andrew Motion.

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Meantime

By Katharine Noel (Black Cat)

From the start, this novel is surprising and intriguing, delving into the human psyche and demonstrating how the past can follow us through our lives. We are introduced to the main character, Claire, when she’s in middle school, at a point when her life has become really complicated. Claire’s father and his mistress have decided that both their families—yes, spouses included—should live together communally, which has drastic implications. We see its effect when we meet Claire again, decades later. Now, she’s married to a man who has just had someone from the past re-enter his life, and as the couple copes with a tremendous blow to his health, Claire worries that she is seeing echoes of her childhood experiences in their relationship. Noel—a Baltimore resident who teaches at The Johns Hopkins University—has an engrossing, psychological style that is also heartbreakingly human. Claire’s emotions are laid bare before us, which allows us to think of our own shared experiences, and reflect on just how complicated life can be.

Andrew Motion’s lauded career precedes him. From 1999 to 2009, he was poet laureate of the United Kingdom, he won the coveted Ted Hughes Award in 2015, and was knighted for his contributions to poetry. But Motion left his home country two years ago to take a teaching position at The Johns Hopkins University, and now has released a new collection of poems, Coming In To Land, that spans his four-decade career. He joined us to talk about how he’s settling in, how Baltimore has affected his writing, and why salt-sprinkling lorries just appeared in a new poem.

You’ve lived here for two years now. How are you settling in to life in Baltimore?
I came here quite determinedly wanting to use the opportunity to write. It gives me a way to think about things in a more developed way than I did back in England, where I was much busier with other things. And if I were to live in New York, I think I would find it more difficult to get work done because there’s more going on, there are more distractions. So it suits me quite well to live a quieter life. I’m surprised by how pleased I am to be able to walk in a more or less straight line down the pavement. You can’t do that in New York because you’re constantly weaving in and out of other people, and that’s sort of true in London as well. It’s the right time to live more quietly and get more done.

What are your impressions of Johns Hopkins and the Writing Seminars?
The main thing is that I have very, very, very nice colleagues. I might say that, mightn’t I, but I really mean it. And I’ve worked in quite a lot of universities in my time, and I’ve never been in a department that’s as harmonious as this one. They’re usually a rat’s nest, but this one really isn’t. We all like each other, respect each other, and work well together. My students are very nice and clever and, as a whole, quite committed.

They haven’t read much, and I say this not dismissively of them at all—in fact I say this as sympathetically as I can. Because if they’re interested in reading, then, poor lambs, they ought to have been given the chance. I do feel critical of the system they came through that allowed them to read as little as they have. Which means that I sometimes find it quite difficult to know how to pitch what I’m saying. If it means that I can’t trust that everybody in the room has read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” then that makes life more difficult than I’m used to it being. But what I can assume is if I tell them to go read it, they will, and they will say interesting things about it.

This is the first time you’ve taught poetry in the United States. How does your students’ work here differ from your students’ writing in the U.K.?
Their poems are not unlike the poems I’m used to seeing by my students back in the U.K., with the very interesting difference that American poetry in general is much more involved in identity politics as a sort of default setting than U.K. poetry is. And of course, it’s always interesting who someone thinks they are, but simply stating it isn’t enough. I spend a lot of time trying to get them to create a symbolic or metaphorical alternative, or a narrative at least that is not purely one that goes, “I did, I did, I did.” Because although that can be interesting, that can also be a bit narrow, I think, too finger wagging as well, too expository, not imaginatively seized enough. Not just to allow themselves to see what they are as part of a larger picture, but also to make it more like imaginative literature and less like true confessions.

Why do you think that is?
I think it has a lot to do with the race story here and the lack of harmonious integration between two or three major ethnic blocks. Which makes this a sad story fundamentally—people have to keep saying, “I’m this kind of person, and I matter. Think about my story.” There is a value in announcing yourself in that kind of way. But I’m a very dyed-in-the-wool Keatsian about these kinds of things, and this remark that Keats makes in one of his letters states, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us because it makes us put our minds in our books and walk away.” That’s something I’ve always believed very firmly. Of course, we need to announce our presence, but we need to do it in a way that it doesn’t make the reader feel as if they’re being read a lecture.

Do you have examples of American poets that you feel excel at that type of work?
I think the people who are doing it well find an interesting solution to this. Claudia Rankine, for instance, is an extremely interesting writer. I knew her before I came to the U.S. because she made a big splash [in the U.K.] as well. I’ve been reading her work quite closely and I find it extremely fascinating. Because she takes individual cases and her own individual case and connects it in very complicated ways to other things, and because she’s very good at saying what she means. Her thinking is sensuous, and that’s the kind of poetry that I like best.

How has being in Baltimore affected your work?
Two things happened when I got here. One is that I found myself writing a lot of things about my early days, about childhood and my parents. I’ve just finished writing a long poem about my brother, whom I’ve never written about before. It’s as though a plant of myself has been torn out of the ground and its roots are scrambling around, trying to grab on to something, and what they’re grabbing on to is past stuff.

It’s interesting that it took you coming here to do that.
It is. I’ve written a bit about childhood, but it’s gotten much more intense since I’ve come here. Now it’s about where do I come from? Who am I? And of course, I’m also focused on the here and now. But I think almost in principal I found that it would be presumptuous to think, “Right, I’m a poet and I’m going to write about Baltimore and I’m really going to tell what it’s like.” [Laughs] So I was a bit shy about it. It’s taken me a year or so to write about it in a direct way. I’ve just finished writing something about looking at things in Baltimore, it’s called “Surveillance.” It starts with a helicopter hovering over, looking at us. I thought how strange it must look to them, the light connecting the parts of the city. So it begins and ends with the helicopter and dots around places in the city.

How do you see your work evolving while you are here?
I expect I will write more about Baltimore in a recognizable way, but I don’t expect that I will make a fetish of it. Partly because I still feel that there would be some presumption in that, but also because I’ve never really wanted to write poems that were so precisely anchored in one place that they couldn’t be moved to another. I’m sure my next book of short poems will be full of references to Baltimore and Maryland. This morning, I wrote a poem thinking about the salt-sprinkling lorries. It’s set here, but what interested me is thinking about where the salt comes from, and it actually comes from under the Great Lakes. Four hundred million years ago, North America was about where Uganda is now, so the salt under the Great Lakes was laid down where Africa now is. And the idea of that salt being sprinkled on the streets of Baltimore, that’s an interesting thought. I feel a bit uncanny here. I feel very committed to the city and very committed to my teaching. There are people here with whom I’ve become very good friends and I feel loyal and invested. But I also feel a bit spectral. It’s not my place, it’s not my country, and there are millions of things I don’t understand. Like every writer, but perhaps like every transplanted writer, I feel at a sharp angle to everything.

This is such an interesting time in our country’s history for you to be here.
I thought Brexit was bad enough. Brexit is very bad, I think Brexit is actually worse because it’s forever and passionately keen to remain. I think it says something very vile about the majority of people in Britain, or in England, that they want to turn their back on the rest of Europe in this way. And as for the presidential election here, I think both it and Brexit are motivated by fear of the “other” and poor education. To think things are acceptable that have apparently been made acceptable by the election of Trump is only possible with people whose education has not been sufficiently developed. They are victims in that way.

The good news about Baltimore and its problems is that it knows it has got them. A lot of the difficult and/or repellant stuff in the U.K. it was in denial about it. Here, the city does know that there’s a problem, and only when you admit it can you then start to do something about it. And the good news about Trump is that in the worst case, provided that the world is still turning, he’s only president for eight years. American politics seems to vary precisely between one opposite to another opposite, so we might elect someone really cool next time.

Why did you decide to come out with this collection now?
To put it bluntly, I thought I’d ideally come to America and get a good publisher, and what should come first is a collection of poems. And that’s what happened, so I’m very pleased about it. I’m hoping what my British publisher publishes will be available in the U.S. as well. I’ve just given them a short something.

Sounds like you’ve been fairly prolific.
In England I used to get up and fight for time to write, which was hard to do because I’d committed myself to many different things. And when I was laureate there, especially, that seemed to me like the job—to do lots of talking and reading. And if it was the one morning a week when I got to write poems and didn’t work, I knew it would be a long time before I had another morning. Now, I have five mornings a week when I’m just writing, and if I have a bad day, it doesn’t matter because there’s tomorrow. That’s not only good for me in a practical way, but I think that’s allowed me to relax a bit and take some risks. And if my experiment doesn’t work, then what the hell, there’s always tomorrow. I’m very pleased about that, and I have written more than I expected.

This is the first year of my life when I can afford just to write poems. So God bless America.

The Baltimore Love Project

Rafael Alvarez, with photographs by Sean Scheidt (self-published)

It’s likely you’ve encountered at least one, with its painted black fingers gesturing to you, spreading a message everyone understands. Since 2008, murals depicting hands that spell “LOVE” have sprung up on 20 walls around Baltimore, thanks to the creativity of mural artist Michael Owen and the strategic negotiating of his partner in the project, Scott Burkholder. This book chronicles their journey in finding walls to paint and obtaining approval from property owners. But it also takes the reader beyond descriptions of the murals’ locations and explores what their effect has been—from altering lives to physically changing the surrounding communities, and even affecting Burkholder and Owen’s relationship. Alvarez’s poignant, intimate prose also highlights the history of murals in Baltimore, including the 1970s-era Beautiful Walls project and the more recent Open Walls. And Scheidt’s stunning photographs strike the right tone, showcasing people and neighborhoods authentically. This piece of Baltimore spreads the love, just as Owen and Burkholder intended.

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Adnan’s Story

Rabia Chaudry (St. Martin’s Press)

This confusing, enveloping, and at times infuriating murder case had listeners of the podcast Serial wondering for weeks, “Who killed Hae Min Lee?” And even almost two years after the start of Serial, we still don’t know, as the man convicted of the crime—Lee’s ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed—was granted a new trial on June 30. This book takes us beyond Serial to examine what this case has done to Syed’s life and the lives of those close to him who maintain his innocence. (If you felt Serial left Lee out of the narrative, this isn’t the place to find her story.) Family friend Chaudry—who has her own podcast devoted to investigating what she believes are wrongful convictions—takes us through the events leading up to the disappearance on Jan. 13, 1999, presenting the evidence of the case, how Serial got involved, and the Syed family’s mission to overturn the verdict. Chaudry’s words make room for passages penned by Syed, and together they draw back the curtain on what life is like for Muslim residents of Northwest Baltimore and what it is like to be part of a high-profile murder case. It’s a riveting read that will draw you deep into its depths.

See our full interview with writer Rabia Chaudry.

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John Barth: A Body of Words

Edited by Gabrielle Dean and Charles B. Harris (Dalkey Archive Press)

It’s no secret that John Barth is a giant of the literary world. One of the best writers “we’ve ever had,” according to The New York Times Book Review, he’s a two-time finalist and 1973 winner of The National Book Award, and author of the brilliantly experimental The Sot-Weed Factor and Chimera. We get to claim Barth as one of our own, as he is a Cambridge resident (and native) and was a professor in The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until his retirement in 1995. And as this anthology of essays describes, behind the guise of literary genius was a kind, thoughtful, inspiring professor who encouraged students to call him “Jack” and looked after them “beyond anything expected of him,” writes former student John Balaban. That anecdote illustrates what this collection of essays (including one by our own John Lewis, Baltimore editor at large) does best—it takes us from the publishing house to the classroom, illuminating a treasured literary mind and showing his grace and brilliance in intimate detail.

You came to Hopkins in 2009 and now your contract has been extended through 2024. That’s a long time!
The board invited me to extend my term at Johns Hopkins, and I jumped at the opportunity. My wife and I love Hopkins and Baltimore, and couldn’t be happier knowing that we will be able to spend the next eight years being part of this amazing place, including, of course, strengthening Johns Hopkins’ relationship with Baltimore.

How do you approach your role as president of such an influential institution?
People have charitably referred to Hopkins as the 800-pound gorilla in Baltimore. Just by virtue of our size, the number of employees, the number of our campuses, we’re a very important entity within Baltimore. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, the fate of the university is inextricably linked to the fate of Baltimore. For me, that’s been one of the really exciting parts of my job—just seeing the extent to which we’re able to bring the intellectual, moral, and political imagination of Johns Hopkins to bear on a number of important and interesting issues that effect the community at large. I don’t see it as a role that is beset by deep contradictions. I’ve found that there are a number of areas in which we can do well for the city and well for Hopkins simultaneously. And in fact, as we strengthen the city, we’re simultaneously strengthening Hopkins.

What would you say are your guiding principles when determining responsibility to the city?
It’s a sense that there’s a moral responsibility but also a sense that in discharging that responsibility, we have significant capabilities that we can share. A lot of the issues Baltimore grapples with— concentrated poverty, problems with access to good health care, challenges in the performances of our K-12 system, lack of green space—are issues that I think universities are uniquely poised to be able to contribute to. And then I think, it’s also having a sense of the importance of humility and modesty in how you go about bringing these strengths to the broader community, recognizing that a lot of the people who you’re hoping to be able to help have very clear views about what they need, the kinds of supports that are desirable, and the kinds of interventions that are less so.

Hopkins is such a sprawling organization—encompassing medical schools, Peabody, and the arts and sciences—there must be disciplines that you are much more familiar with than others.
My background is as a legal academic, so the one school that I know the best—I led a law school for more than a decade—we don’t have at Johns Hopkins. So, I’m in the interesting position of leading a university that actually lacks a school dedicated to my discipline. By definition that makes me a generalist, and actually that’s a great part of my job, being able to be a bit of an intellectual dilettante.

Hopkins received a $350-million gift from the school’s most famous alum, Michael Bloomberg. What has resulted from that gift?
Mike’s gift was to create 50 $5 million endowed chairs that we call the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Program. What’s distinctive about it is that each of the professors appointed into one of these positions has his or her appointment in two or more schools of the university. The idea for it came from a simple but challenging reality for us at Hopkins, which is, we’re not a university on one contiguous campus, we’re spread across multiple campuses in Baltimore, in Washington, in Montgomery County, and then have campuses outside the United States, as well. Given that we’re geographically distributed, how could we encourage interdisciplinary collaboration? The idea was, if we can’t have geographic proximity, then we would use faculty to constitute human bridges and link different disciplines of the university together. So that program has now resulted in almost 30 appointments. It has just been so energizing to be able to engage in what has been, for the last three years, this international Star Search, where the university’s faculty has had the ability with these chairs to look out across the nation and beyond and ask the question: Who is the very best person who could tackle this issue or link these disciplines? And then recruit them to Hopkins.

Like who?
Kathy Edin is a scholar who is appointed to the Department of Sociology in the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences and also to the Bloomberg School of Public Health. We recruited her from Harvard. She recently wrote a book, $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, which has received significant attention. Her interest is in urban poverty and the role that government can play in supporting the development of cities, in particular by looking at the least advantaged members of the community. She is playing a role in developing our 21st Century Cities Initiative. That has led to important collaborations with a program that collects data that has been supported by Bloomberg philanthropies that, in turn, has developed ties to city leadership in Baltimore and other cities.

We’ve got Kathleen Sutcliffe who was appointed to Carey Business School and to the School of Medicine. She’s someone who has an interest in the business of health care and comes from the University of Michigan’s business school. Her principle interest is in the way in which hospitals and other health care organizations organize their activities and ensure that they’re responsive to the interests of the patients. She has been a very important catalyst for work that straddles a number of different disciplines in the university but also, again, has very direct bearing on policymaking and hospital administration here at Hopkins.

You just mentioned two women and Hopkins Hospital, which just hired its first female president earlier this year. I suppose the question is why did it take so long and what does it mean now that she’s there?
Redonda Miller’s appointment as head of the Johns Hopkins Hospital was obviously a very important statement. She’s an extraordinarily talented physician and administrator and, in a lot of ways, was a very obvious choice to succeed Ron Peterson. But I think you’re right. This is a time when we’re seeing a lot of opportunities for the recruitment of new leadership and we are working hard at being very mindful of the need to think about opening avenues for underrepresented minorities and for women in positions where they previously haven’t had an opportunity to lead. And that’s something that we’re also working hard at in our standard faculty recruitment across the university, to think about how we build broad, diverse pools so that we’re reflecting the richness and the complexity of the society of which we’re a part.

The Supreme Court just upheld that institutes of higher education can use race as a determining factor in admissions. Does that change anything for Hopkins?
We were supportive of the University of Texas in the litigation and thought it was important that the Supreme Court’s prior reasoning, which saw a role for race in admissions decisions, be preserved. At Hopkins, we have experienced a truly spectacular increase in the quality of our student body over the last several years. This is measured by SAT scores, by class standing, by GPA averages, in the numbers of applications, acceptance rate, yield rate, and by attracting more students who are leaders in their schools and communities. This has also coincided with a significant increase in the percentage of underrepresented minorities in the first year class. What this affirms for me is the idea that you can have a very diverse study body while, at the same time, one need not compromise on its excellence.

You’re from Canada originally, right?
Yeah. [I’ve been in the United States] for 11 years. Just this past year, I became an American citizen. I had a green card for several years and ultimately decided that given my commitment to Hopkins and to Baltimore, I really wanted to be able to vote in national, state, and municipal elections. That, combined with the fact that I want to have the ability to get a security clearance so that I can be properly involved in the management of the Applied Physics Lab [in Laurel], which I’ve been sequestered from for the last several years because of my inability without American citizenship to get a clearance.

Wait! Let me get this straight. So there was stuff that they were working on at the Applied Physics Lab that they couldn’t tell you about because you weren’t an American?
You got it. In fact, when I came to Hopkins, the trustees had to basically do a reorganization of the Applied Physics Lab, which had previously reported into the president of the university. Instead of reporting into me, it had to report into the chair of the board of trustees who was an American citizen and was capable of getting a security clearance. So I’m on the path to become involved for the first time in this billion-dollar-plus research organization, which, for the last seven years, has been out of my line of sight.

Wow I guess they take it seriously there. That’s good to know.
There was a sense early on that maybe there’d be some way to get a clearance through some reciprocal recognition arrangement with Canada and the United States but, alas, that just had to wait until I could get American citizenship.

Now though, they can show you the really cool stuff.
They have indicated there will be a number of things that I will be interested to learn of that are happening at the lab that are deeply connected to Johns Hopkins but which I have not been exposed to.

Wow. Very euphemistically stated. I’m even more intrigued now. If they tell you where the aliens are, I want to know.
[Laughs]

Laura Pogliano lost her son, Zac, twice. She’ll tell you this freely, looking you straight in the eye with tears rolling down her cheeks, defying you to look away. She’ll tell you both losses were traumatic, but they were different. She’ll describe how one unfurled over the course of six and a half years as her once vibrant son slipped into the ever tightening noose of schizophrenia, while the other happened suddenly, in January 2015, as he lay sleeping in his Towson apartment.

Ask her what happened in between and she’ll tell you about the year he called 911 at least 25 times because of his delusions—which included being shot in the head and choking on spiders—and how, at one point, he became so paranoid he slept with kitchen knives under his pillow to prevent an attack. She’ll inform you that she went broke—“gladly,” she’ll say—paying her son’s medical expenses, and she’ll relate how long it took to find good care for him, including a story about a clinic in Idaho that bullied him and called him lazy. She will fume at the scorn heaped upon her from others, including a therapist who blamed her son’s illness on bad parenting and a supervisor at work who dismissed her ordeal by saying, “Golden boy gone bad. Same old story. Get over it.”

But she also will praise the many devoted health care professionals who eventually formed the core of her son’s treatment team, and she will tell you about the compassionate way in which a Baltimore County police officer talked her son out of a delusion. She’ll tell you that, coincidentally, it was that same officer who responded to her call asking if someone could enter her son’s apartment and check on him because she hadn’t been able to reach him for a few days. She’ll note that her son was found dead in his bed, with his arms folded across his chest, the way he always slept. She’ll say that his cause of death is listed as cardiomegaly—or an enlarged heart—but that she knows it’s more complicated than that. Whether directly or indirectly, schizophrenia killed her son. And then—and this is the most important part—she’ll tell you how devoted she is to making sure it never happens to anyone else ever again.

Zaccaria “Zac” Pogliano was born Aug. 1, 1991—“a healthy, fat baby,” says Laura, as she sits at the dining room table in her Loch Raven Village townhouse, spring sunlight pouring in through the windows. Her sister, Angie, who moved from the Poglianos’ native Chicago last year to help in the wake of Zac’s death, bustles around the kitchen preparing a lunch of toasted salami and cheese hoagies, chips, and pasta salad. Both women agree that Zac was an exceptionally sensitive child with a strong moral compass, but was otherwise typical.

“There’s so much judgment around it that you don’t see in other illnesses.”

“One thing [doctors do] is try to go back and say, ‘Was there anything wrong? Was there something we should have seen?’” explains Laura. “He was fine. He was healthy. He ate and slept. He didn’t have any irregularities. He had no childhood illnesses. There was really nothing to say.”

While there might not be anything to say about Zac’s early health, there’s plenty to say about Zac himself, whom Laura describes as having a “peace, love, hippie flare.”

“He was a little social-justice type person, and he was that way after he got sick, too, even when he was paranoid or psychotic,” she says. “He’d say, ‘I’m the last peaceful man on Earth.’ He would cry for the rape victims of the world.”

She remembers that when Zac’s fourth grade teacher made racially insensitive remarks in class, Zac responded by refusing to do homework for the woman.

“I had to go to the school and say, ‘You have to apologize to him. He’s on a one-man boycott of you, and I can’t get it to end because you don’t deserve homework as far as he’s concerned!’”

This is the Zac that his family—which includes an older half-sister, Leah—wishes more people knew—the one who played baseball, drums, and piano, who had friends and a girlfriend, and who would volunteer to partner with social outcasts on school projects. But the truth is, as his illness worsened, all of that fell away, leaving Zac with what Laura calls “a medical life.”

Says Laura: “Honestly, when I cry about my child now, it’s not because he passed away, because all of us are going to pass away. It’s because of all the things he suffered while he was here: friendlessness, hopelessness, his sense of being abandoned. . . . All that stuff comes with long-term illness.”

The first hint that anything was amiss came in the summer of 2008. Zac had just finished up his junior year at Calvert Hall College High School when, in the course of a few weeks, he totaled the car, quit the baseball team, dumped all his friends, and began suspecting people—including Laura—of dishonesty.

Though Laura knew something was off, she initially attributed his behavior to typical teenage angst. “I started thinking, here comes the bad year,” she says with a rueful laugh. But by the end of the summer, Zac’s behavior had only become stranger. He had frequent temper tantrums followed by periods of intense moroseness. As his birthday approached, he told his mother, “I don’t even know why I’m having a birthday. There’s no point in birthdays. There’s no point in getting older or living your life.”

In August, Laura took Zac to see the first of many psychiatrists, who provided the first of many misdiagnoses and prescribed the first of many largely unhelpful drugs. Ultimately, in 2011, doctors settled on a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which the National Institute of Mental Health characterizes as “a chronic, severe, and disabling mental disorder characterized by deficits in thought processes, perceptions, and emotional responsiveness.” But to get to that point required many dead-end trips through a mental health system Laura calls “disconnected, jarring, and hostile.”

“Over and over I would say, ‘Oh my gosh, how could my son navigate this himself?’” she says.

And yet, that is, in many ways, what the law asks patients to do. In Maryland, starting at age 16, individuals have the right to make their own decisions regarding psychiatric care, a sizable obstacle in providing treatment to the mentally ill, who often don’t realize they are sick. Furthermore, even if they were to seek treatment, figuring out where to get care—or how to pay for it—would remain challenging.

Since the passage in 1963 of the Community Mental Health Act, the federal government has phased out its once pervasive system of state-run mental hospitals in favor of private or community-based facilities. The act—a response to the widespread abuse of patients in government facilities—was well intentioned, but Laura believes it went too far. “Instead of fixing the system, we dismantled it,” she says. Now, options for those without private insurance and/or immense wealth are limited. This is one reason it is estimated that up to a third of the homeless population suffers from some form of mental illness, and that a Justice Department report from 2006 found that “more than half of all prison and jail inmates had a mental health problem.”

Indeed, even Laura, a fully competent adult who has worked as a training consultant for organizations including the U.S. Navy and The Johns Hopkins University, found herself overwhelmed. So relentless was the stress of her son’s illness that she developed a panic disorder, severe depression, and a nervous tick.

“When I cry about my child now . . . it’s because of all the things he suffered while he was here.”

“She went through this with him,” says Krista Baker, the program supervisor for outpatient schizophrenia services at Johns Hopkins Bayview, where Zac received treatment during the last two-and-a-half years of his life. “When I first met her, she was struggling with her own reaction to what was happening, and she sort of developed this head-twitch-nod thing. So we had this series of meetings about it. I was like, ‘You have to get better because you have to be able to provide the support to him.’”

Heeding Baker’s advice, Laura sought therapy for herself and began taking antidepressants, a regimen she continues today.

“I got better,” she says. “In a handful of weeks I was back at work. That’s not the same as being diagnosed with a chronic, progressive debilitating brain disease like schizophrenia.

“I mean, he was never really well,” she continues with a sigh. “He got sick and then he got sicker. Each time it takes more and more medicine to restore competency. Each time they lose a little bit more. They don’t come all the way back, especially when you’re floridly psychotic, like he was. He had periods of recovery . . . but with the stress of daily living, he would have another episode.”

According to Baker, Zac’s chances of improvement were inhibited by his intermittent use of illegal drugs and resistance to some treatment options.

“The next step was clozapine,” says Baker, referencing the antipsychotic often used to treat schizophrenia. Zac had been prescribed the medication before, but hadn’t liked it. As a result, says Baker, “he adamantly refused to ever let us initiate it.”

With no more medications to try, Zac was discharged from his 13th and final hospitalization in mid-September 2014. In November, Laura acquiesced to his constant demands and paid for him to move into his own apartment nearby, hiring a house helper and house cleaner to perform chores and monitor his behavior.

“I just decided . . . for however long he has, I’m going to set him up and let him be the cool guy, let him have a normal 23-year-old’s life,” she says.

His death from heart failure came as a shock, of course, especially since, to monitor how his medications were affecting his overall health, Hopkins regularly administered electrocardiograms, none of which detected any irregularities. And yet, there was a part of Laura that had been bracing for his death for more than six years.

“When [the police officer] first told me he was passed I said, ‘Well, that’s just about enough of that then,’” recalls Laura, tears welling in her eyes.

“I mean that kid had such a tough time. That was plenty. Enough is enough. He really, really suffered, and he was looking at 40 more years of it.”

What’s striking about the Poglianos’ story is how common it is. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, more than 16 million people in the U.S. have a serious mental illness. Factor in other mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder, and the number further balloons. Schizophrenia alone affects about 3.2 million people. That’s more than are afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) combined.

But for all their ubiquity, severe mental illnesses remain mysterious. For instance, there is no diagnostic test for schizophrenia. And beyond identifying some contributing factors—genetics, brain structure and chemistry, prenatal and/or birth-related difficulties, extreme stressors/trauma—medical experts don’t understand why one person develops schizophrenia and another doesn’t. It is also difficult to know how treatment will affect patients. Psychiatric drugs can cause severe side effects, and as a result, medication is administered with a “go low and go slow approach that is trial and error,” says Baker. While prudent, this also means that some patients can take years to stabilize.

Says Laura, “Every time I meet a person [with mental illness] who’s doing well, there’s a million factors—and luck—that made it happen: time, money, quality care, wraparound services, a supportive family who doesn’t give up. Most families don’t have all that. They might have one piece or two pieces [but] they don’t have all five or six things going for them.”

Even before Zac’s death, Laura began soliciting donations online and distributing them to fellow caregivers who were struggling to pay bills. Now, she has formalized that practice as the nonprofit Parents for Care, which she runs with Angie. In addition to handing out donations, the organization advocates for mental health law reform, runs a monthly support group, and partners with the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center to get medical information and resources to caregivers. Eventually, Laura and Angie say they’d like to build affordable custodial care homes for the mentally ill in Baltimore and beyond.

If the plans seem ambitious, that’s because they are. Laura has no patience for anything less.

“I really believe that the way we treat mentally ill people in this country is the human rights crisis of our times,” she says. “There’s so much judgment around it . . . that you don’t see in other illnesses. . . . [People with mental illness] are somebody’s boyfriend, somebody’s husband, somebody’s wife, mother, grandma—all unlucky enough to get sick.

“I’m never going to stop talking about it,” she declares. “It’s too important.”

The Mechanical Horse
Margaret Guroff (University of Texas Press)

In 1819, a man named James Stewart displayed a device he’d built at a Baltimore concert hall. It had two wheels, and a handlebar-like contraption, and was called a draisine—a precursor to the bicycle. From these humble beginnings, Guroff writes, the bicycle grew to become a worldwide phenomenon, bringing change to many facets of our history—­women’s liberation, exercise, and warfare among them. Guroff, who was once Baltimore’s managing editor and now teaches writing at The Johns Hopkins University, has penned a fascinating account of how such a seemingly simple invention could have such a global impact.

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Thirst
Benjamin Warner (Bloomsbury USA)

If you’ve ever caught yourself pondering a post-apocalyptic “what would happen if” scenario, you’ll feel at home in this novel. Warner, a Towson University creative writing professor, brings us into a world where water has disappeared mysteriously, and survival forces his characters in what appears to be suburban Maryland to behave in ways they wouldn’t have dreamed. They resort to violence and threats while combating dehydration, which Warner relays in terrifying detail. Thirst is transportative and enveloping, so much so that you’ll feel relieved when you can shut the book and reach for a glass of water.

Crabtown, USA
Rafael Alvarez (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing)

It’s obvious from the start of Crabtown, USA that Alvarez lost his heart to Baltimore years ago—in fact, the title of his first chapter is “My Beloved,” and he’s not talking about a woman. Encased in these 441 pages is a love letter to his home city, though it’s far from a typical one. Alvarez—who has authored several books about his native neighborhood of Highlandtown, and made a national name for himself as a writer for The Wire—doesn’t just wax nostalgic in these essays about Charm City’s majesty, but finds poetry in her flaws and shortcomings. He writes about street drunks and the outcome of Bethlehem Steel’s departure with the same pen that he uses to offer odes to Joseph Conrad and Edgar Allan Poe. He transforms the seemingly ordinary into historical relics to be relished—the Baltimore hon, narrow alleys, even the humble deviled egg. And throughout, he sprinkles his experiences with characters who embody the true spirit of the city, from former rewrite colleagues at The Sun to a woman who played piano at neighborhood watering holes for most of her 86 years. Alvarez’s enthusiasm is contagious, and by the end, you’ll want to walk the harbor, or stroll the streets of Fells, just to soak up the essence of Charm City.

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Wild Women of Maryland
Lauren R. Silberman (The History Press)

One was known as the “limping lady,” a spy who stole secrets, despite having lost her lower left leg. Another led the movement for civil rights in Cambridge, enduring arrests and rioting in her quest for equality. And still another was among the first women to visit Antarctica, where she lived for a year in the 1940s during a research expedition. These are some of Silberman’s wild women of Maryland, dames who bucked the status quo to live lives of adventure, danger, and trailblazing. You’ve heard of some—Harriet Tubman, for instance, or Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor—but Silberman also shares stories of women who are missing from the often-male-dominated history books. These are women tried as witches during the 17th century, for example, as well as suffragettes and World War II-era female aviators. (Divine even makes an appearance.) Silberman, an author who is also deputy director for Historic London Town and Gardens in Edgewater, showcases their stories in well-researched detail. During Women’s History Month, this book is a good reminder for all of us, regardless of gender, that anything is possible when you stand out from the pack and live life on your own terms.

See our interview with writer Lauren B. Silberman.

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Knocking the Hustle
Lester K. Spence (Punctum Books)

You don’t have to look far in hip hop culture to find references to the “hustle”—the constant grind that is necessary to find success on the street, and in the music industry. But in Spence’s eyes, that mentality demonstrates an unfortunate turn in pop culture and politics. Instead of highlighting power and control, it shows “black men who are forced to work incessantly with no way out,” he writes. In his well-researched and enlightening book, Spence, an associate professor of political science and Africana studies at The Johns Hopkins University, argues that’s a consequence of a shift toward the neoliberal, which favors free-market capitalism. He says the move away from the structure and protection of unions and other workers rights groups, for example, is responsible for vast wage inequality, and has contributed to widening gaps in education and opportunities for blacks. Spence turns his microscope on Baltimore, as well as other urban areas, and his thought-provoking opinion is a welcome change in a debate where the arguments are tried and true.

Kenneth Sembach was just a fifth-grader in suburban Chicago when a book report set the course of his life. He was perusing his school’s library, looking for a worthy title, when the bell rang. “I was out of time,” he recalls now, nearly 40 years later, a faint Midwestern lilt still detectable in his measured, thoughtful speech. “I picked up a book on the shelf—I had to have something—and it was a small field guide to the stars. . . . So I would go outside at night and see if I could find these things. This sparked my imagination, and I’ve been in love with it ever since.”

The “it,” of course, is astronomy. Or maybe the universe. Or maybe scientific discovery. Or maybe all three. In any case, Sembach is still staring up at the sky in wonder, asking questions—only now he’s in a position to answer them.

Sembach is the new director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)—a facility located on the Homewood campus of The Johns Hopkins University and operated by a consortium of astronomical research universities for NASA. In a beige office building off San Martin Drive, he now leads some of the world’s best minds—a Nobel Prize winner among them—in some of mankind’s most ambitious scientific endeavors.

The most famous of these undertakings is the Hubble Space Telescope for which STScI runs science operations. The data that Hubble has sent back and STScI scientists have analyzed has transfixed astronomers and the public at large, most dramatically via exquisite images of swirling nebulae, billowing dust clouds, and kaleidoscopic galaxies.

In October 2018, Hubble will get a companion in the skies—the James Webb Space Telescope, affectionately known as “the Webb.” Though as monumental a project as Hubble—which has, among other things, helped astronomers determine the current rate at which the universe is expanding—the Webb will differ in several key ways.

Unlike Hubble, which circles the Earth in a low orbit, Webb will be propelled a million miles into space and parked. Operating just a few degrees above absolute zero, it will be able to look back through time to detect the dying embers of some of the first stars and galaxies that formed not long after the Big Bang.

That is, if all goes according to plan. Because of its distance from the Earth, the observatory will not be serviceable like Hubble is—“so,” acknowledges Sembach, “it has got to work.”

The reason for the distance is because the Webb, unlike Hubble, is primarily an infrared observatory, meaning its instruments will distinguish wavelengths of light that are beyond the visible spectrum (aka ROYGBIV), but that can suggest temperature. If it were in orbit around the Earth, the heat from the planet and the sun would interfere with its readings. And we want those readings crystal clear. They will help answer some of mankind’s most enduring questions.

“At some point, we’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we did that.’”

On a dreary November day, just a little over two weeks into his tenure as STScI’s fifth director, Sembach sits perched on the edge of a couch in his unnervingly neat third-floor office. (“That’s ’cause I’ve just moved in. Give it time, give it time,” he cracks.) He has just come from giving a pep talk to some of STScI’s approximately 650 employees. With the telescope still in pieces around the country and staffers buried in minutiae prepping for its assembly and launch, he says he reminded them to take the long view.

“You come and you work on it every day, and sometimes it just doesn’t sink in,” he says, “but you step back and you say, ‘Wow, that was something really great that we did.’”

To illustrate the difference Webb’s infrared view of the cosmos will make, he pulls up side-by-side images taken by Hubble of towers of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula known as the “Pillars of Creation.”

One of the images, taken using visible light, is ethereally beautiful, like a detail from a ’70s rock concert with a kick-ass laser light show and smoke machines on full blast. But the other, taken using infrared light (Hubble has limited infrared capabilities), is so sharply, densely brilliant with stars that it resembles a close-up of a diamond-encrusted dress.

“If you want to look into clouds of gas and see stars forming . . . the infrared light’s longer wavelength just kind of goes right in—or in this case comes right out—so you can see
objects that are enshrouded in dust,” Sembach explains.

But it’s not just about clearer images. It’s about what those images can tell us—and it’s a long list.

“We can answer questions like when did the first stars and galaxies form. . . . Those first stars that formed black holes and were the nuclei for galaxies, what did they look like? When did those stars and black holes start shaping the medium around them? How did those galaxies evolve over 13 billion years to the kinds of galaxies we see today? How do stars form? We still don’t really know how stars form. That’s kind of amazing,” Sembach says.

Then there is the wish-list question.

“Obviously, whether we know it or not, we’re on this quest to find out whether there are other planets like the Earth out there,” he says. “We have a chance now, probably not with Webb, but you never know. We’ve done things with Hubble we would have never thought of.”

There is one more major difference between Hubble and the Webb, and that is that STScI can claim the Webb in a way it never could with Hubble. Of course, STScI has been and will continue to be deeply involved with Hubble, but mission control for that observatory is 30 miles down 295 in Greenbelt. But for Webb, both the flight and scientific operations will happen at STScI. In fact, the command center at STScI is under construction right now. “Once it’s up in the sky,” Sembach acknowledges, “it is, for lack of a better term, ours.” Which means that, to a very large extent, it’s also his.

If you have to rest the weight of an $8.7 billion space-exploration project on one person’s shoulders, Sembach seems a good choice. After receiving an undergraduate degree in physics (with honors, naturally) from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he earned a three-year fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following that, he stayed on at MIT for a year and a half before coming to Hopkins to work on a project involving ultraviolet light. He joined STScI in 2001 as an instrument scientist for Hubble and, as he says, “moved up the food chain here.”

“Once it’s up in the sky, it is, for lack of a better term, ours,” says Sembach.

He notes that this assignment, which is as much about team-building and leadership as it is about scientific know-how, has arrived at a good time in his career.

“When I was a kid, astronomy was a very personal thing,” he says. “It was mine. It was something for me. And it was that way even well through school and the early part of my career. [There were] things I really wanted to do, things I really identified with that I really wanted to know. And now it has become a broader perspective. A lot of times, it’s the people I work with, the people I meet, the people I can help motivate, that’s what gets me up in the morning.”

But there are other things in life besides work, even for Sembach, who rarely takes vacations and says he is “on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” When asked to name his hobbies, he cites gardening, woodworking, and running, but you get the impression he could survive without them if he had to. Only one thing seems to truly rival his passion for work.

“I spend a lot of time talking to Marguerite,” he says, referring to his wife, Marguerite Hoyt, a writer, historian, and former women’s studies professor at Goucher College. “One of my favorite things to do is just sit at the coffee shop and talk with her. We talk about everything, what she’s doing, what I’m doing—science, history, politics.”

The couple met during their first day of freshman orientation at the University of Chicago, and their union, by both accounts, is rare in its compatibility and devotion.

“We’re very close. We are absolutely a real team,” says Hoyt. “It’s as simple as, when he gets home every night, we cook dinner together. He does all the chopping, and I do all the cooking. My mother has said, ‘You guys are like a ballet in the kitchen. You work together so well.’ And we do. It’s almost like we can read each other’s minds sometimes.”

And though Hoyt admits her husband’s job can be an occasional inconvenience, she has long since accepted its central place in their life.

“A long time ago, just before we were getting married, I was complaining about him being an astronomer and being out of town all the time and working all the time,” she recalls. “And another astronomer’s wife, who is a friend of mine, she looked at me and she said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. You knew exactly what his job was going to be when you got together with him. So you can’t complain about this.’ And I thought, ‘She’s absolutely right. I cannot complain about this because I knew this is what his life would be and what he wanted so badly.’ You kind of have to make peace with that.”

A few years ago, Hoyt quit her job at Goucher and now devotes herself to creative writing projects and keeping the home fires burning at their house in Ellicott City. She says she doesn’t regret leaving academia and takes pride in her “tiny contribution” to her husband’s noble mission.

And it is noble—though Sembach is too Midwesternly modest to use the word himself. But it is obvious he thinks of the Webb as the next great leap for mankind.

“James Webb is the largest science project this country is doing,” he says. “It’s going to be amazing, it’s going to be absolutely amazing. At some point, we’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we did that.’”

This is certainly not the big money world of college football. The 834 fans at Homewood Field who watched Johns Hopkins’ 52-20 rout of Western New England on Saturday afternoon in the first round of the NCAA Division-III playoffs attest to that.

So does the two hours and 34 minutes of real time it took for the nation’s sixth-ranked Division-III team to handle business against a top-20 opponent. There were no television timeouts or pre-packaged, in-game entertainment, unless you count what happened on the field. By the end of the first quarter, the Blue Jays led by two touchdowns and were on their way to a 38-0 halftime lead.

This is the best local football team you’ve never seen.

Jim Margraff, who decades ago played quarterback for Hopkins, lives in Timonium and is in his 26th season as head coach. The undefeated Blue Jays are in the second round of the 32-team tournament for the third time in four years. They host Wesley College (10-1) at noon this Saturday, November 28. A win would mark their 12th this fall, a program record, and match its deepest playoff run ever.

“We’re excited about it,” Margraff said Saturday. “When the year is over, you look back and reflect and maybe count things up, but right now we’re going to enjoy this one tonight and get ready for next week.”

So, how does this happen? Five-foot-six, 175-pound senior running back Brandon Cherry, who went to Boys’ Latin and has more than 2,500 collegiate rushing yards to his name, points to the program’s recruiting approach. Division-III football teams cannot offer athletic scholarships or likely NFL careers and generally lack the resources to recruit nationally, but a glance at the Blue Jays reflects the opposite: 88 players from 23 states, and only four from Maryland. Not even Mount Union (Ohio) and Wisconsin-Whitewater, winners of the last 10 D-III national championships, can boast such geographic diversity. Should Johns Hopkins win Saturday, a potential game against Mount Union awaits in the quarterfinals.

“You look at other teams and you don’t see the type of talent the coaches are able to recruit,” Cherry said. “It’s kind of crazy. With the SAT and GPA requirements here, it’s hard to find people who match that and are good players at the same time.”

It’s taken ingenuity fit for Johns Hopkins’ smart-school reputation. The football budget doesn’t allow unlimited trips to hotbeds like Florida, Texas, California, or even Ohio, so the Blue Jay coaches use opportunities while working summer camps at Ivy League schools to identify recruits. Overlooked by Harvard, Princeton or Yale, but have a great academic profile? They say you’re two inches or 25 pounds too small? Hopkins may be the right fit.

Don’t make that argument to Western New England coach Keith Emery, the former Hopkins defensive coordinator, who faced his old boss on Saturday. He said the Jays’ offensive line—averaging 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds—was so big that some of his defensive players said they couldn’t even see Johns Hopkins junior quarterback Jonathan Germano working read-option sets, which allow for a run or pass play.

“They’re impressive to look at. We had some All-Americans when I was coaching here too, but now they seem to be across the board,” said Emery, on the Blue Jays staff from 1998-2004. “They’re doing the things we taught years ago, they’re just doing it really well with guys from all over the country. That’s the biggest difference. We had guys from Pennsylvania and New Jersey and a smattering from here and there. This team comes from everywhere. They are getting kids from the best high school programs in the country.”

Take junior wide receiver Bradley Munday. He played for a Chagrin Falls, OH, high school program that reached the state playoffs all four seasons he was there. Margraff said he’s a Division-I talent, but was overlooked because he’s 5-foot-8. Johns Hopkins plays in the Centennial Conference and Munday last week was voted its offensive player of the year. On Saturday, he made a beautiful one-handed catch on a trick pass by running back Stuart Walters. Margraff patrolled the sideline in khakis and a Columbia blue pullover, carrying a white folder with notes. He flashed a wry smile when the play was called. It was worthy of a SportsCenter highlight.

But attention for this team is hard to come by in a crowded sports landscape. This isn’t a Division-I team like Maryland. Cherry thinks back to his sophomore year, when nearly 1,500 fans showed for the Blue Jays’ first round playoff game against Wesley College, the same team from Dover, DE, they’ll face this week.

“It was like, ‘Man, I’m really playing college football,’” Cherry said. “Other times, it’s like, ‘Oh man, there’s not many people here.’ But when you’re out there with your teammates and having a good time, you don’t have time to think about that. We have each other, and our coaches, and that gets us through.”