From The New York Times book review.

In a 1942 essay for Opportunity, the journal of the Urban League, the novelist Chester B. Himes warned his readers, “The character of this writer is vulnerable, open to attack, easy to be smeared.” Lawrence P. Jackson’s captivating biography of Himes confirms this appraisal, as Himes is far from invincible, never a hero and rarely even a sympathetic figure. Though Himes had a penchant for mistreating himself and others, he was also brilliant and courageous in his depiction of the absurdity of black American life and the violence of white supremacy.

From The Hub:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a combined $1.725 million to Johns Hopkins University and the Community College of Baltimore County to support collaborations between the two institutions on humanities curriculum and pedagogy.

The two schools will partner to implement a new initiative called Humanities for All, designed to inspire students by deepening the learning experience; enriching course content; focusing on recruitment, retention, and transfer; and strengthening faculty connections between CCBC and JHU. A Mellon Scholars Program will be established to give CCBC students research opportunities and interaction with faculty and graduate students at Johns Hopkins.

From The Hub:

Five proposals submitted this spring to Johns Hopkins’ Idea Lab crowdsourcing website will receive funding by virtue of garnering the most support in online voting.

In its third year, the Idea Lab offered three areas in which ideas were welcome from the Johns Hopkins community: The Ten by Twenty Challenge to support individual excellence, the Diversity Innovation Grants to promote inclusion, and the Hopkins Eco-Smart Acorn Grant to drive sustainability.

In second place, with 784 votes, is a student-run online medical journal called The Hippocrates Med Review. The journal’s creators, who launched a website in January, say they hope to provide “a world-class forum that showcases a holistic view of medicine as told by the brightest minds in the medical field.”

From The Hub:

Call it the Villon epiphany. François Villon was a 15th-century French poet. His work has been passed down in many hand-scribed manuscripts, but none of them are originals in the author’s hand. On an autumn day in 1980, Stephen Nichols was in Paris studying different parchment manuscripts of the poet’s Le Testament. Like all textual scholars of the day, Nichols, who is now a Johns Hopkins professor emeritus in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, often worked from a modern critical edition of Villon’s work; that is, a text assembled from multiple sources by scholars and meant to represent the definitive version that Villon intended. “I was astounded to see the way the texts had been prepared and presented in the critical edition, which tied them up very nicely and gave them endings,” Nichols says. “In the [actual medieval] manuscripts, I couldn’t find those endings! I suddenly realized that editors, starting in the early 19th century, couldn’t stand that a literary work didn’t have a nice ending. And I realized that I was looking at evidence that in the Middle Ages, people had a high tolerance for just reading poems that didn’t have to have a neat beginning, middle, and ending.”

From The Hub:

Bernadette Wegenstein, a Johns Hopkins professor of media studies and filmmaker, recalls working on her new documentary, The Good Breast, and feeling a bit hesitant to put too much of herself into the film.

Yes, her voice is heard asking questions, since she’s the director. And her considerable research shaped The Good Breast, which is a deep dive into understanding surgical breast cancer interventions in a cultural context. But could she also be more of an onscreen presence shaping the cinematic experience?

From The Hub:

Katherine Robinson uses three different translation dictionaries in her work, but she isn’t learning a new language. She’s learning a very, very old language—Middle Welsh, which predates the language of Shakespeare by centuries.

Robinson has been familiarizing herself with the medieval language as part of the prep work for her dissertation research, which she’ll undertake as part of the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship program. Established in October 2000 by a donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship program welcomes students from outside the U.K. to pursue a full-time postgraduate degree at the University of Cambridge.

From The Hub:

For writer and historian Lawrence Jackson, joining Johns Hopkins University was an appealing homecoming for several reasons.

Beyond the emotional resonance of Baltimore—Jackson grew up here, still has family here, and has written frequently about the city—there’s the academic proximity to the roots of many research topics that intrigue him, including the histories of Billie Holiday and Frederick Douglass.

From The Hub:

Johns Hopkins University historian N.D.B. Connolly will soon become a co-host of the national radio program and podcast BackStory with the American History Guys.

BackStory brings historical perspective to current events. Connolly joins the program, which airs on dozens of stations nationwide, including D.C.’s WAMU, beginning Feb. 3. He joins co-hosts Ed Ayers, Brian Balogh, and Joanne Freeman.

From the Winter 2016 edition of Johns Hopkins Magazine:

Two decades before the Oculus Rift became the first sophisticated and relatively affordable virtual reality headset to hit the market, Thomas Dolby created “The Virtual String Quartet.” As part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium series, Dolby had museumgoers don VR headsets upon entering a gallery. In the headset’s virtual space, computer-generated musicians played Mozart’s String Quartet no. 18 in A Major as you stood among them. Move about and what you heard changed. Approach the violinist, for example, and the violin became more prominent.