Baltimore: Engaging a City

Fall 2018

The summer before I began my job as dean, I was frantically trying to finish a book manuscript that was due to the publisher during my first semester at the Krieger School. My reward at the end of every day at the computer was to watch an episode or two of The Wire, the epic tale of Baltimore’s modern social history. As the series has millions of fans around the world, I was hardly unique in my complete fixation on the characters and the gritty story of street life, the working class docks, the machinations of City Hall, the efforts of social workers and teachers to rescue troubled kids in the schools, and the cat and mouse pursuits of the police department. When I reached the end of The Wire (and the completion of my book), I hardly knew what to do with myself.

So I moved to Baltimore! As a sociologist with long-standing interests in the lives of the nation’s working poor, I was eager to embed myself in my new home town. I have not been disappointed. In my first year at the helm of the Krieger School, I have been welcomed by the staff of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who taught me about the many remarkable programs unfolding here to address public safety, employment for teenagers, literacy, the consumption of healthy food, innovative housing for low-income artists, and reform of the city’s school system.

Nonprofit foundations—from the Annie E. Casey and Abell foundations to the Associated Black Charities and Catholic Charities —whose leaders have welcomed my interest in their work, are at the forefront of innovative programs to increase minority business ownership, foster entrepreneurship, and care for the homeless and the hopeless. Our sister universities, from the historically black university of Morgan State, to our public partners, the universities of Maryland and Baltimore, provide robust educational opportunities for thousands of Maryland students here in the city. It has been a privilege to meet the many talented people who put shoulder to wheel to make it a better place.

When President Ron Daniels arrived at Hopkins in 2009, he called for a new level of engagement for our university in the life and future of Baltimore. I could not agree with him more. Indeed, one of the most exciting parts of my job involves thinking of ways to combine the basic mission of the university—to educate the next generation of leaders— with its responsibilities as the largest employer (in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System) in Maryland. Universities like ours are engines of economic growth, sources of innovation that lead to new employment opportunities, and partners to social service agencies, the public school system, museums, and other cultural institutions that matter in the city’s quest to becoming a tourist destination and a community of thriving neighborhoods for residents of long standing.

Our greatest resources in this evolution are our students and our faculty. In this issue of the magazine, you will read about our new summer internship program that places our undergraduates in nonprofit social service organizations, where they have an opportunity to contribute in a serious way to the improvement of the lives of Baltimore’s neediest citizens. Having spoken to a number of the “summer scholars,” I know that the experience has changed their lives. Some have determined that their summer mission will become their life’s mission. But whatever this program has done for them as individuals, it has done even more for the Krieger School itself. These young people are leading the way in defining a new relationship with our neighbors.

Our faculty constitutes an immense well of people whose theoretical and substantive work can and does make a difference in Baltimore and, as a policy voice, in the nation’s capital nearby. Robert Moffitt, in the Department of Economics, works on the labor supply decisions of female heads of households in response to the country’s welfare policies. Karl Alexander, chair of the Department of Sociology, studies what determines persistence in school attendance and how we can identify precursors to dropping out, while his colleague Stefanie Deluca is working on how vocational education has the potential to boost the graduation rate of young people from low-income households. Our political scientists study the formation of public policies that impact cities like Baltimore and the role that interest groups play in the allocation of federal dollars. The historians in Gilman Hall are combing the archives to understand how the patterns of stratification and disparity we live with today have evolved over the last two centuries. The artists in our theater, dance, visual arts, and museum programs are out in the community every day adding to the creative stock of Baltimore. And the list goes on.

These colleagues are a brain trust for the city we call home, and we are looking for opportunities to engage their talents and increase national attention to the work they do as the country confronts the most serious economic and social challenges since the 1930s.

I cannot think of a more opportune moment or a more talented community to link arms with the city we call home.

Sincerely,

Katherine Newman

Preserving the Past

Fall 2018

It takes a steady hand and lots of expertise to preserve an old and damaged but historically important print. Just ask Emily Pellichero, this year’s Kress Book and Paper Fellow at Johns Hopkins’ Sheridan Libraries. Working in the Department of Conservation and Preservation, Pellichero meticulously repaired a print of Baltimore, circa 1752, which has been on display at the Homewood Museum. Here, she fills in hairline fractures using a mixture of toasted cellulose powders.

30 Years or Less

Fall 2018

Michael Diliberti

In November 2010, Variety listed Michael Diliberti ’04 as one of “Ten Screenwriters to Watch.” He was only 28 years old, but he had already worked as an assistant, executive assistant, associate producer, and executive before hanging out his own shingle as a screenwriter. In August, 30 Minutes or Less, which he co-wrote with close friend Matt Sullivan, arrived on movie screens across the country.

Diliberti wrote his first full-length story when he was in the sixth grade, and he has not stopped since. After graduating from Poly Prep in Brooklyn, N.Y., he began his undergraduate work in the Hopkins Writing Seminars, and soon became interested in the Film and Media Studies Program.

At Hopkins, Diliberti finished a novel (as yet unpublished) with Stephen Dixon, professor in the Writing Seminars. In the film program, he was always being pushed—and encouraged—by his professor John Mann, who laid out the rules of good screenwriting time and again. “We would sit and talk about his rough cuts and all he wanted to know was what was wrong, what was lacking, and how could he fix it,” recalls Mann.

Diliberti “always questioned everything,” says Linda DeLibero, associate director of Film and Media Studies. She adds, “It would be irritating if it weren’t clear that he cared so much and had so much talent.”

It was during Diliberti’s summer and winter breaks at Hopkins that he got his first hands-on experience in the film industry. Returning home to Brooklyn, he took advantage of producer Scott Rudin’s internship program, which is known for its aggressive recruitment of young, hard workers. “Going to the set was a big treat,” says Diliberti. “I went every day.” He carried coffee and answered phones, and he enjoyed the camaraderie on the set. “this was our shot,” he says. “We were all really happy to have this chance.”

Rudin was so impressed with Diliberti that he hired him as an assistant, after college, and then promoted him to executive assistant. While with Rudin, Diliberti worked on the crew of several films, including Notes on a Scandal, Failure to Launch, Freedomland, and Margaret. He stayed with Rudin for one and a half years, and continued to work as an assistant in Hollywood for a total of four years—“carrying coffee and answering phones is a lot of what you do”—until, at age 25, he was promoted to an executive position at Paramount Vantage.

Within six months of being promoted—“It was the first time I wasn’t an assistant”—Diliberti was writing on spec with Sullivan. Warner Brothers hired them to write a remake of Brewster’s Millions,, and Diliberti left Paramount. In 2009, he and Sullivan wrote 30 Minutes or Less, a caper in which wanna-be criminals kidnap a pizza delivery guy to help them rob a bank. The screenplay was picked up by Ben Stiller’s production company, and it stars Danny McBride and Jesse Eisenberg; Variety calls it an “irreverent comedy.”

Despite his success as a screenwriter, Diliberti straddles both the fiction and film worlds. He is always writing, and is currently at work on a novel, as well as other projects.

“I just want to find people who are willing to read what I’ve written,” he adds. “All day, I’m begging people to read my stuff.”

And what’s up next? “The next logical step is directing,” he says.

[iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/nn9DoxS_nck”]

Bringing Writing Into Baltimore Schools

Fall 2018

“I want you to think about how to get rid of wishy-washy words,” Writing Seminars graduate Phyllis Zhu ’11 instructed asmall group of Baltimore middle school students during a summer writing workshop at Barclay Elementary/Middle School. Standing next to a white-board loaded with “wishy-washy” words and phrases, she pointed at the first example. “What’s a better way to write ‘not so often’?”

“Oh I know!” shouted Alecia Shuler, who was just a few days from starting the sixth grade. Her raised hand was mostly for show, as an answer was forth- coming whether Zhu called on her or not. “Rarely!”

As it turns out, simple lessons in writing and communication like these are becoming increasingly rare in less affluent schools—in Baltimore, and else- where. According to the Maryland State Department of Education, about 24 percent of Baltimore City students are “not proficient” readers when tested in the fifth grade. That figure jumps to 39 percent when students are tested in the eighth grade. (Writing ability is not as thoroughly tested in many Maryland schools, but the pattern appears to be similar.) Though language arts are taught during those middle school years, writing instruction has virtually disappeared in many less-privileged schools state-wide, and writing proficiency has followed suit.

One Johns Hopkins alum has set out to reverse that trend. Patrice Hutton founded Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS) within months of her 2008 graduation from the Writing Seminars with little more than some helpful mentors and a newfound passion to teach. “When I was at Hopkins, I taught a writing workshop at Roland Park Elementary/Middle School, which was arranged through the Writing Seminars program,” she says. “The kids were just awesome. I mean, I met a seventh-grade boy who was writing an epic sci-fi novel all on his own. Working with him and his classmates really resonated with my experience in high school and at Hopkins. They helped me realize that this could be so much bigger.”

After graduation, Hutton worked with local principals and administrators to launch a pilot summer writing workshop at Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle School, just a few blocks from the Homewood campus. Within months, Writers in Baltimore Schools was up and running, at first with in-school programs meant to complement city curricula, and eventually hosting after-school writing clubs and workshops. Hutton plays the role of director, fundraiser, and instructor, with advice from Bill Tiefenwerth, director of the JHU Center for Social Concern, and Mary Jo Salter, a professor and poet in the Writing Seminars. “I keep waiting to find some book or formal training that teaches me the secrets to everything,” says Hutton, “but until then I’ve realized that I can do a lot with just trial and error and guidance from people like Bill and Mary Jo.” Hutton recalled WBS’s first open mic night, where she challenged her students to practice oration and celebrate their creative writing by reading their stories in front of an audience … and only one student showed up. “I’ve learned to be more tenacious, even if it means I have to meet a student at their parents’ house and walk them to class or an event.”

In spite of not yet finding the book that explains everything, Hutton has grown WBS into a full-fledged nonprofit, having initiated in-school writing workshops, after-school writing clubs, and summer writing workshops in five underprivileged schools around Baltimore City. More than 300 middle school students have worked their way through at least one WBS program, a head count that has required Hutton to enlist interns and volunteer teachers—mostly Writing Seminars students like Phyllis Zhu.

Thanks to funding from more than 60 corporate and individual supporters, WBS is now a full-time job for Hutton, who is looking to expand programming—inside and outside Baltimore’s city limits. She recently started a similar after-school writing program with a few of her favorite childhood teachers in Wichita, Kansas, her hometown. “There is really no limit to how many schools we could reach,” she says.

Watch Hutton and the Writers in Baltimore Schools in action below:

Grappling with the Politics of Washington…State, That Is

Fall 2018

Adam Kline (l) and Fred Finn are dedicated to Washington state residents.

Adam Kline (l) and Fred Finn are dedicated to Washington state residents.

They were two dedicated Washington state politicians out to support a beleaguered candidate on election night at a local restaurant, when someone mentioned the city of Baltimore.

“Baltimore?!” In the Pacific Northwest, it sounded almost like a foreign country.

“I’ve been there,” volunteered State Senator Adam Kline ’68.

“I went to Hopkins,” replied Representative Fred Finn ’67.

“So did I,” said Kline. So in 2007, the two Johns Hopkins graduates, who had been just one year apart at the Krieger School, met for the first time, politicking in a state 2,800 miles away from where they had begun more than 40 years ago.

The paths of these two New York natives have diverged and converged since they started out at Johns Hopkins—both as psychology majors—at opposite poles of the tumultuous political atmosphere of the 1960s. Kline, who characterizes himself as a “foot soldier” in his generation’s battles, took time off from his Johns Hopkins studies to work for an anti-poverty project, sponsored by the radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Greenwood, Miss. Witnessing the racial discrimination there was “life-changing,” he says.

During that same era, Finn had signed up for the Army and was assigned to an anti-aircraft operation based in Huntsville, Ala.

Their academic interests converged with law school. Kline attended University of Maryland in Baltimore, and Finn went to Fordham University in New York City. Finn wound up in Washington, D.C., as a partner in a downtown law firm, and served as president of Home Satellite Television Industry. Kline’s more peripatetic route took him to distant lands working on a Swedish ship, and then back to Baltimore to work as a reporter.

So how did they both end up in Washington state serving in the state Legislature?

“I was 40, driving along the George Washington Parkway, thinking I don’t know what I want to do next,” recalls Finn. A client sent him to Seattle to check the market for a radio station.

“It was a beautiful summer day, water all around,” recalls Finn, who from his cell phone, describes eagles soaring and other wildlife cavorting outside his living room window. He sold his practice to his partners, bought the radio station, and later dealt in commercial real estate. Along the way, as a father of young children, he grew involved in education issues and served as a school board president. Then in 2007, he won election to the Washington state House of Representatives.

Similarly lured by the natural beauty and climate of the state, Kline did not hesitate to accept a job offer from a legal services project in Seattle. He enthusiastically describes his surroundings during an interview by cell phone. “I am sitting on a log with my dogs in the middle of a virgin forest in Seward State Park. We have salt water, lakes, and mountains in every direction. I am so happy I came here.”

A private law practice led Kline to get involved in civil rights issues. In 1997 he was appointed to fill a vacant term in the Senate. He recently won an overwhelming vote for reelection to his seventh term. Not surprisingly, both men belong to the League of Conservation Voters, which works to promote smart growth. But apart from the fact they are both Democrats and Hopkins alumni, most of their political positions are at odds. Kline, an unabashed liberal who represents African American and Asian constituents as well as many unemployed people in Seattle’s 37th district, is a proponent of spending more federal money to create jobs and does not shirk the idea of adding a state income tax (Washington has no state income tax) for the strapped state economy. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he has been involved with legal issues, protecting civil rights of the disenfranchised and middle class.

Finn, who settled in rural Thurston County, staunchly opposes raising taxes. He notes that their approaches to politics differ according to the needs of their districts as well as their political philosophy. “Adam’s district is very urban and very liberal; mine is more blue collar and rural.” So Finn is involved with protecting the life of the salmon, the geoduck (pronounced gooey duck), and other sea life, which is a thriving industry in his district. He is proud of working to pass environmental laws to clean up Puget Sound and Hood Canal, as well as education reform.

Avoiding the acrimony of the U.S. Congress, both Kline and Finn have found that the Washington state Legislature is a good place to build consensus. Their collegiality, rooted in their Johns Hopkins connections, continues despite their differences in political philosophy. The two men chat and occasionally get together for a drink, a Hopkins alumni event, or dinner. Kline still has the fervor of his student activist days, but the passion is infused with judgment. “When my name came up for the Judiciary Committee, some thought I was too liberal. But I do what a chair does, act on the behalf of the whole caucus. I get that,” says Kline.

After this session, Finn will return to develop some real estate projects in his district. The legislative job, which pays $42,000 per year, requires full-time attention, so he has had to set aside his business for a while. “It’s been a wonderful experience, and I think we’ve been fortunate that we haven’t had that gridlock [seen at the federal level].”

Doing Something Disruptive

Fall 2018

Chieh Huang ’03 (right) could have been a lawyer, and Chris Cheung ’03 could have become a financier. They could have used their degrees in economics to climb corporate ladders in what Cheung calls “shirt-and-tie jobs.”

Instead, they drew on their experiences in the shirt-and-tie world to develop Office Heroes, a satirical iPhone game that lets users become pocket CEOs who perform “important office work” like tossing paper, surfing the Internet, playing solitaire, and ordering lunch.

Huang and Cheung, who have known each since middle school, joke that their foray into corporate America was ill-fated from the start. They both began new jobs—Huang at a white-shoe law firm and Cheung at Goldman Sachs—in September 2008, when the U.S. economy collapsed. As Huang walked to work on his first day, he passed the Lehman Brothers building; streaming out onto the sidewalk were former employees who had just been fired in the wake of Lehman’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing.

It wasn’t long before Cheung and Huang gave up their salaried jobs and holed up in a frigid New Jersey basement to develop smartphone games. (No, their parents definitely were not happy about this decision.) They decided to hedge their bets on mobile devices, to make games only for smartphones. In part, they were compelled by the “truly democratic” way in which iTunes distributes titles, making relationships with retail stores irrelevant. The decision crystallized for Huang when he logged onto his email account from a computer—instead of a cell phone—and it felt all wrong. He had a feeling that all the money and users were heading toward mobile devices. “We just needed to make a good product, and the App Store would handle distribution.”

Literally overnight, Office Heroes became wildly successful. The game launched on July 22, 2010, and on Day Two, the duo woke up, checked iTunes, and saw that they had top advertising from Apple. Within a couple of days, the game was downloaded several hundred thousand times.

Their success caught the eye of DeNA, a Japanese mobile gaming giant, which invested in them. Soon after, they gave birth to Astro Ape, which became a 20-person studio in Manhattan in less than a year and is one of the only purely mobile social game developers in the nation. They’ve developed three iPhone games (Office Heroes, Dessert Heroes, Monsterz’ Revenge) totaling millions of downloads, and in June their newest game, Vegas Strip City, was released across smartphones in Japan. (The game is available on U.S. Android phones now, via Mobage.)

The irony is not lost on either partner. Says Huang, “We quit our office jobs to make a game about office jobs, and now we run an office.”

Cheung, who is Astro Ape’s CCO, appreciates the mountains of data available to them—because users are always online and connected, he and his colleagues can monitor usage patterns. For example, they can see when usage spikes occur and find out what features in their games are most popular. “At no time in the history of video games have we had insight into how players are playing in real time,” says Cheung. Huang, the CEO, says, “Traditional console game studios used to ship games and move onto the sequel. [But] the heavy lifting in social gaming actually starts when you ship the title.”

“We wanted to do something disruptive,” Huang adds, referring to what happens when a small shop disrupts how an entire industry currently does business.

“Every day is quite a roller coaster,” says Cheung.

“If you’d told us we’d be running a video game studio… there’s no way you could’ve sold that script,” says Huang.

Can the Federal Reserve Save America?

Fall 2018

animated man in a suit walking up a steep blue path carrying a united states shape
Illustration: Robert Neubecker

At no time in recent history has the Federal Reserve garnered quite so much attention, at home and abroad. America’s central bank was thrust into the spotlight during the credit crisis of 2008 and has remained there since, employing all sorts of methods to keep the U.S. (and at times, the world) from financial collapse. We asked Olivier Jeanne, a professor in the Department of Economics and in the Center for Financial Economics, whether the Fed has the tools to continue to keep America out of another Great Depression.

Q: Can the Federal Reserve save America?


A: In principle, the Fed should keep stimulating the economy because inflation is low and unemployment is high. In a situation like this you would want the Fed to lower interest rates by increasing the money supply. That’s what the Fed does in recession. The problem is that they have already lowered interest rates to 0 percent and greatly increased money supply—and the economy has not recovered. This is called a liquidity trap.

Perhaps the only remaining option for the Fed to escape this liquidity trap is to provide “forward guidance” for its policies, that is, make announcements about what they will do in the future. The Fed could announce that interest rates will stay low as long as it takes for the inflation rate to rise or unemployment rates to fall. For example, [Federal Reserve chairman] Ben Bernanke could promise to keep interest rates at 0 percent until the inflation rate increases to, say, 5 percent. Having 0 percent interest rates and higher inflation will make it more costly to save and cheaper to borrow. Thus households and firms will be encouraged to spend more, which will stimulate the economy. This will increase the price of houses, depreciate the dollar, and stimulate exports.

The problem is that it is not clear how the public will respond to this kind of announcement. It might generate more uncertainty, increase long-term interest rates, and have a counterproductive impact on the economy. This is clearly a risk. But there is not much else on the table and what the Fed has done so far has not produced a stimulus strong enough to revive the economy. The only other alternative is to let things run their course, but that would likely lead to a high unemployment rate for at least five more years.

I would choose moderately higher inflation over higher unemployment. Ideally, the Fed would encourage a moderate annual rate of inflation for a few years, something like 5 to 6 percent, and reassure the public that the long-run inflation target remains lower, something like 2 percent. This is a tricky balancing act, and I am not sure the Fed or other central banks can pull it off.

There is a tendency, in public discussions, to take low inflation as the only criterion for the success of monetary policy. But if the inflation rate reaches 5 or 6 percent, that is not necessarily a bad sign. In the current context, it could be a sign that the Fed is doing the right thing.

Number Sense? Count On It from Birth

Fall 2018

Illustration: Robert Neubecker

When Melissa Libertus was in high school, she loved math—and was so good at it that she often tutored her classmates. When she wasn’t helping others sort out math puzzles, she puzzled on why people have such a wide range of math abilities. “I always found it fascinating that some people had such an easy time learning math and others just didn’t understand it and had a hard time grasping even simple concepts,” she said. “I always wondered where this came from.”

Now a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Libertus is making inroads toward an answer. In a new study, published in Developmental Science, Libertus and her colleagues find that an intuitive sense of number, known as the approximate number system (ANS), is present in preschoolers and related to their math ability before they get any math training. This may suggest that part of math ability is probably inborn.

The ANS is more commonly known as “number sense”—the ability to approximate about how many items are in a group with a quick glance. In previous research, Johns Hopkins associate professors Lisa Feigenson and Justin Halberda discovered that adolescents with superior number sense also had better math abilities than those whose number sense wasn’t as attuned. However, these findings could have been skewed by the math training these young adults had already received.

To find out whether number sense, and its corresponding math ability, is present before any substantial math education takes place, Libertus, Feigenson, and Halberda tested preschoolers between the ages of 3 and 5. If number sense and math ability matched up in these young children, they reasoned, at least a portion of math ability may be innate.

Working with 200 local preschoolers, the researchers had their study subjects view quick flashes of clusters of blue and yellow dots on a computer screen and estimate which color group contained more dots. The flashes were too quick for the children to count—an ability that many of them lacked anyway—so they had to rely on their intuition.

Libertus and her colleagues also gave each child a standardized test that’s commonly used to measure math aptitude in this age group. The test assessed abilities such as how well they could count items in a group, identify Arabic numerals, and answer simple word problems (for example, “If Joey has two blocks, and gets one more block, how many does he have altogether?”).

Finally, the researchers had each child’s parent check off words on a list that they’d heard their child say—a way to assess general aptitude, to make sure the children who aced the other tests didn’t just have more inherent abilities overall.

The new findings revealed that, just as in adolescents, preschoolers with the best ability to intuit the relative number of dots had the best math ability overall. Importantly, their verbal ability didn’t correlate with these skills, suggesting that math ability develops independently.

Libertus notes that their study just shows a correlation—it doesn’t explain why number sense and math ability are connected. It could be that children with better number sense might learn basic number skills faster, such as counting, and consequently tack on more complex skills at a more accelerated pace. Another idea, Libertus posits, is that children with better number sense are more drawn to math for fun and build skills through games and puzzles.

Regardless, she says, it may be possible to give children some training early on to boost their number sense—an enhancement that could help their future math abilities in countless ways.

Landlocked

Fall 2018

Location, location, location—the popular adage implies a property’s geographical site is the most important consideration in determining its value. Generally, people want to live in neighborhoods that are first and foremost, safe and clean. In Jim Crow-era America, however, the norm was to add the word “segregated” to that list of desirables.

Now Nathan Connolly, assistant professor in the Krieger School’s Department of History, is setting out to show that a complex black “property rights movement” was under way in America’s Southern states during the early- to-mid-20th century. He has a book forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press called A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida.

“Understanding American history requires understanding Americans’ economic dependence on segregation,” posits Connolly. “Property owners throughout the 20th century learned to govern American cities through and profit from racial segregation.” He says that the site of his case study, South Florida, and Miami in particular, had a perfect storm of booming real estate development, an influx of immigrants, and a relatively new position as a tourist destination, all facilitated through the enforcement of Jim Crow segregation. And people were making money—mostly whites but also some blacks, who themselves hoped that property ownership could lead them to the middle class.

By design, the real estate markets of the post-World War II period became more racially segregated, thanks to official and unofficial rules about who could live where. That setup fed a network of hungry rental property owners. These so-called slumlords were able to keep state regulators at bay, ignore property upkeep, inflate rental costs, and they even received federal support for massive housing projects. They expanded their power—and wallets—in black neighborhoods and beyond.

“By the mid-20th century, Miami slumlords were making about 27 percent annual yield on their returns,” says Connolly. “That compares to today’s annual yields in the rental market of between 4 and 6 percent.” Blacks were pouring money into monthly rents as their chances of home ownership faded.

Connolly says some people bristle when he points out that whites weren’t the only slumlords. “Some African American leaders—even some black civil rights leaders—owned slum properties. Of course it’s illogical to think that segregation and poverty can be conquered by investing in it.”

In the 1960s, with the civil rights movement gaining momentum, low-income blacks started speaking out against the evident paternalism between landlords and tenants. Those protests ultimately resulted in a controlled dispersal of the poor and, Connolly argues, “the institution of racial segregation without Jim Crow.” Near the end of the 1960s, as blacks gained greater civil rights, the stronghold that slum landlords had on Miami began to crumble, and pockets of urban renewal started to crop up. Using eminent domain as a tool, however, the state approved huge land projects such as highways, ultimately taking over private property, displacing more than 12,000 people, and destroying black business districts.

Although law no longer dictates racial segregation, Connolly says dilapidated properties owned by slum landlords still dot the nation’s inner cities, added to the many suburbs that, through speculation, have become run-down; the recent predatory lending crisis has resulted in more people losing property.

“I don’t know if I’m optimistic,” admits Connolly. “It will take a concerted effort on the part of private investors, developers, and governments to invest in mixed use, viable communities. We’ve got to reimagine geography in a sense, and that takes a lot of work.

Art and Amnesia: Solving Recovery’s Puzzles

Fall 2018

Back in 2007, Lonni Sue Johnson was a successful artist and illustrator living in upstate New York. Her clever, whimsical illustrations had graced the covers of The New Yorker and had appeared on the Museum of Modern Art’s holiday cards, in children’s books, and in ads for AT&T and IBM. But by the year’s end, that life had disappeared.

An attack of viral encephalitis left 61‐year‐old Johnson with severe brain damage. A woman who’d enjoyed a vibrant professional life filled with colorful art was left with neither the memory of it nor the capacity to create it.

Her story is the centerpiece of Puzzles of the Brain: An Artist’s Journey through Amnesia, an exhibit at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, presented in partnership with the Krieger School’s Department of Cognitive Science. It runs through December 11.

Above, a drawing by Lonni Sue Johnson she made during her ongoing recovery.

Barbara Landau, the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor of Cognitive Science, has known Johnson for years; they grew up in the same area. When she learned of Johnson’s illness, Landau paid her a visit and confirmed that she indeed “had deep losses but also retained much of her original humor and creative abilities.”

Johns Hopkins and the Walters Art Museum had collaborated on a previous art and science exhibit, and a second was coming soon when Landau suggested the idea to Gary Vikan, director of the Walters.

Fortunately, Johnson’s “family had done an outstanding job of preserving all of her art, from both before her trauma and afterward,” says Landau, “and this created a situation through which—as scientists—we could probe her understanding of the world.”

Michael McCloskey, also a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins, has been studying the effects of brain damage for 30 years but had not been involved in projects related to art until recently, when he taught a course called Mind, Brain, and Beauty, which looked at neuroscience research on art and music. Hearing about Johnson from Landau sparked his interest and led him to get involved in the Walters project.

McCloskey and Landau realized that the artist had suffered extensive brain damage that destroyed her hippocampus— an area important to memory and spatial navigation. It had affected other areas of her brain, too, such as the left temporal lobe, useful for language and perception. Immediately after her illness, she could not walk or write her name—or even hold a pencil. She had to relearn those basic motor skills.

“Vocabulary was one of the few types of knowledge remaining to [her] after her illness and gave her something to work with when she began putting pencil to paper,” McCloskey says.

“The real turning point,” says Landau, “came when a friend gave Lonni Sue a book of word‐search puzzles.” Johnson filled the books quickly, asking her mother for more. “Meanwhile, she just proceeded to invent her own lists of words and put them in matrices—and this was the onset of creating word puzzles that could then support her art.”

Those puzzles bridged the large memory gap to reconnect the artist with her creative past.

Take, for example, a New Yorker cover Johnson created more than 25 years ago, in December 1985. At first glance the cover seems to depict a brightly ornamented Christmas tree. A closer look, however, discloses a stream of gift‐carrying people in colorful coats, standing in a line of zig‐zagging green stanchions. The December after her illness, she had created a word puzzle. “Clothes that Hang Up in the Closet” is a grid‐filled hanger, letters in the squares spelling out words that fit the bill—“dress” and “vest”—and words that don’t—“tights” and “bra.” They are arranged across, down, and diagonally. Some connect like crosswords; some don’t. And all the words used are listed below, alphabetically.

While the first work was created with an intact memory, the second piece was not, yet it is distinctly of Johnson—the playful style of a woman who continues to draw on the visual pun and its multiple layers of meaning with a sophisticated humor. This is evident from the 12 pre‐trauma works and the 24 chronological post‐trauma pieces in the exhibit.

Landau says that Johnson is still severely amnesic, and not only for events that occurred before her illness. “For example, when asked to copy a moderately complex figure, she did a perfect copy with the model in front of her, but when asked to copy it 10 minutes later, after it had been withdrawn, she had no memory of having done a copy at all.”

Despite these impairments, Johnson’s vocabulary is extensive. “She is very talkative and highly engaged in creating her art,” which she works on every day, Landau says. She has even begun to remember a few significant life events.

What does it mean for treating brain damage in the future? Johnson’s case gives researchers a glimpse into the synergies between brain function and creativity. McCloskey says that we may eventually know enough to design precise programs for each individual’s recovery. Surely, he says, “the consistent support and encouragement of loved ones can make a big difference.” Johnson’s mother, artist Margaret Kennard Johnson, intervened daily in her daughter’s artistic recovery.

McCloskey adds: “One of the lessons for anyone who has suffered brain damage is that perseverance may pay off. Given our current incomplete state of knowledge about the brain, the specific type of … training may be less important than just working persistently toward recovery.” In less scientific terms: practice.

The Digital Media Center

Fall 2018

Even at JHU, where innovative collaborations are the norm, the Brown Foundation Digital Media Center (DMC) stands apart. Part state‑of‑the‑art classroom and part supervised digital sandbox, the DMC gives students freedom to intertwine their primary course of study at Johns Hopkins with emerging technologies and digital art forms. Given the university’s remarkable scholars, the results are of little surprise: Johns Hopkins’ first entry into the Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race, a printer that produces 3D images, a bimonthly e‑zine on Baltimore culture, an electronically infused wristband that communicates with smartphones, and colorized electron microscope images for easier viewing—just to name a few.

You’ll find the stories behind all these projects, and all the information you’ll need about digital media at Johns Hopkins, at the center’s website. It’s worth a surf… even if you just want to know more about that wall of motion‑sensing colored lights in the Gilman tunnel.

Getting to Yes

Fall 2018

The tension is palpable between the two disputing parties who are seated opposite each other at a long conference table. On one side are two representatives of a local teachers union, whose bitterly overworked constituents are facing yet another round of layoffs and benefits cuts. They’re fed up and thinking about going on strike. On the other side of the table are representatives of the cash‑strapped school board, under constant pressure from the state to cut spending and increase test scores, all in the same year. They have to strike a deal before the school year starts … but how?

This is a scenario any school system would dread. For a handful of Johns Hopkins graduate students, it’s a typical Tuesday night.

“The leaders of the future need to know more about mediation and negotiation and less about command and control,” says Michael Siegel, who teaches Negotiation as a Leadership Skill. The course is offered in several degree programs within the Krieger School’s part‑time graduate division, known as Advanced Academic Programs.

“Negotiation is a skill that not a lot of people are taught, even though it’s very important in many different careers and pursuits,” says Siegel. That likely explains the diverse student makeup of each class, which often includes aspiring leaders in government, the military, and the private sector—or occasionally graduate students who would simply prefer to get a raise next time they ask for one.

Practice, Siegel says, is the critical component to his course. After learning the basics, students are divided into groups and given their first assignment, usually a smaller, more “private” negotiation, like settling an auto‑repair dispute. One team will represent the auto shop, the other the customer, and all are asked to come to a settlement by a certain deadline. As the semester progresses and the negotiators‑in‑training hone their skills, the mediations become more complicated and important. Students in the course this past summer concluded with two‑on‑two team “public” negotiations, where the groups had to settle that heated dispute between a fictional teachers union and school board.

“This is one of the classes you have to take before you graduate,” says T.J. Morales, a student in the MA in Government program, who says both the course and Siegel have achieved small celebrity within the student body. “It taught me a lot of rare practical skills that I can use almost every day at work, school, or even with friends and family, and Professor Siegel is so great at what he does.”

What Siegel “does” when he isn’t teaching this course—which is offered at night to cater to working professionals—is teach essentially the same skills to federal employees. As a senior training specialist at the Federal Judicial Center, he instructs mostly federal judges, attorneys, and court executives how to manage effectively, including negotiation and conflict management skills.

So what’s the key to becoming a top‑flight negotiator? “The central idea is focusing on interests, not positions,” says Siegel.

“I like to use the anecdote of two kids fighting over an orange. Their positions are the same—they both want the orange. But maybe they have different interests; like one wants the fruit because he’s hungry and the other wants the rind to help his parents make a pie. I try to teach students not to focus on a position (the orange) but the interest that lies behind it (the pie). If they can do that, move slowly, and plan thoughtfully, they can get much more creative in solving conflicts.” When done right, Siegel says, both parties often leave feeling as though they’ve won.

“The more you know about everyone’s interests,” Morales adds, “the easier it is to arrive at a place where what I want is the same as what you want. Professor Siegel’s experience in law helped show me that you can never really be too prepared.”

Every once in a while, thanks to Advanced Academic Programs’ footing in Washington, D.C., students gain some remarkable perspectives from guest negotiators. For example, Kenneth Feinberg has visited the class nearly every semester this course has been offered. As the man who oversees the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Victim Compensation Fund (among other equally intimidating projects), he knows a thing or two about difficult negotiations. Students have also enjoyed guest lectures from Dennis Ross, a State Department special advisor who has spent most of his career brokering peace agreements in the Middle East.

“I really appreciated that diplomatic perspective,” says Hannah Kaye, who completed the course last summer while working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Policy and Advocacy Team. “I’m very interested in the growing overlap between global development and U.S. security interests, and found this course to be even more valuable than I expected … there is never a bad time to improve your listening skills. Anyone can transfer the lessons of this course to any career.”

Kaye says she certainly took lessons from this course straight to work … but also to a few other places. “My fiancé likes to joke with me and say, ‘Don’t use your negotiation skills on me!’ But to be honest, if I really use what I learned in this course, we both usually end up happier.”