It began with a visit, on a calm December day, to a spacious, sunlit farmhouse on the edge of Leakin Park. There I encountered for the first time John Clark Mayden’s Baltimore “street portraits”—photographs set worlds away from that peaceful...

For thousands of years, people have written about the Roman Republic, how it achieved its empire, and why it collapsed. Scholars of each generation have specialized in different aspects of Rome’s republic. Modern scholars tend to focus on laws,...

When I was writing The Collectors of Lost Souls (2008), the picaresque yet tragic story of investigations of the lethal neurological disorder called kuru, the...

In 2014 Johns Hopkins Press editor Vince Burke suggested to me an intriguing idea for a unique book on the history of American mathematics. He proposed that I scan the history of the nation, and for each decade find an event of mathematical...

Photography is my passion and I enjoy the process of bringing stories to life. With each facial expression, setting, or environment in the picture, there is a personal or communal untold story to be shared. The pictures in ...

Golden Rice was unusual both in its origin and gestation. I had written an earlier book (Regenesis, 2012) with the Harvard molecular biologist George Church, who...