Baltimore Fishbowl former senior editor Rachel Monroe, who left last year to pursue a freelance career, looks at the effects a single decaying home has on a block near Greenmount Cemetery in “The New Republic.” The house is no longer there, but the story behind it reveals why so many abandoned houses plague Baltimore and other cities. Read an excerpt below and view the entire story at newrepublic.com.

Read more at The New Republic.

In 2018, Baltimore sports fans may be able to watch professional soccer matches very close to home.

According to the Washington Post, the United Soccer League team that’s currently playing in North Carolina as the Wilmington Hammerheads is seriously pondering a move to Baltimore. They would likely adopt a new name (May we offer a suggestion: the Baltimore Crab Cakes?) and play at Towson University’s Unitas Stadium.

(Actually, the WaPo reports that the team would most likely be named Baltimore FC. For “Baltimore Football Club.” Snore.)

If it happens, the Baltimore TBAs will join the city’s professional indoor soccer league, the Baltimore Blast, making this a very football-friendly town.

Twenty elementary school children were riding home from school earlier this week when their bus caught fire. (Don’t worry, this story has a happy ending for everyone except the bus.)

According to an account posted on Facebook by a local parent, driver Renita Smith calmly got all 20 kids off the bus even as it was going up in flames. She didn’t seem to think her heroic act was all that remarkable: “I am a mom of two kids. It’s my job to save them,” she said.

Earlier this year, more than a dozen people were injured when a car crashed into a school bus in Baltimore County. There was no fire that time, though.

In this case, all 20 kids made it home safe. The bus doesn’t look so good, however.

It was a big deal last year when Johns Hopkins University finally attained a long-time goal of being ranked as one of the top 10 universities in the country, as ranked by US News. This year, when they once again hit the mark, it’s kinda like… meh.

Actually, this year’s ranking is a bit different than before; last year, Hopkins had to share the tenth place slot with CalTech. This year, Hopkins occupies the spot all by itself. (CalTech is now 12th, and longtime Hopkins rankings rival Dartmouth is stalled out at 11th place.)

Now, of course we all recognize that such rankings are easily manipulatable systems that prioritize data points that may be of questionable educational value. That said, it’s also true that Hopkins’s rise in the rankings comes after the university–long considered a school that prioritized graduate research and treated its undergrads as a second thought–has started placing much more emphasis on the undergrad experience. On the Hopkins Hub, the university details some of those efforts, from new dorms to more financial aid to a new emphasis on undergrad research.

And so, despite our skepticism of the whole rankings project, we can’t help but feel proud to see Hopkins thriving in this way. Congrats, Blue Jays!

Last year, Johns Hopkins was slapped with a $1 billion lawsuit stemming from an unethical experiment the university was involved in in the 1940s. This week, that suit was dismissed — though it may soon be refiled.

The lawsuit centers on a government research project, during which hundreds of Guatemalans– including prisoners, psychiatric patients, orphans, and children at state run schools– were intentionally infected with syphilis and gonorrhea. The goal? To get some more information about how to treat STDs in American troops.

The tie to Hopkins was not as direct as it was in another famous instance of medical ethics gone wrong, the case of Henrietta Lacks. However, even though this was government research, the ties to the university were still strong:  the director of Johns Hopkins’ Venereal Disease Division led the committee that approved the research; three other people affiliated with Hopkins also served on the committee. According to the lawsuit, at least one Hopkins researcher had on-going input during the course of the experiments.

842 victims and their family members filed suit against the university last year. This week, a judge dismissed the case, saying the suit didn’t include enough specific details about the damages. But he also said that the plaintiffs could amend their suit and file again next month–something that, according to the Sun, they plan to do.

The university has called the lawsuit “an attempt by plaintiffs’ counsel to exploit a historic tragedy for monetary gain.”

Last night, Baltimore joined cities like Dallas and New York by spraying insecticide in an attempt to fight back against the Zika virus.

So far, the handful of Zika cases reported in Baltimore have all been attributed to travelers who got the disease elsewhere. But, according to Baltimore City Health Commissioner Leana Wen, Zika is a “quickly developing situation,” and mosquito-borne Zika has spread to South Florida. Last night’s mosquito spraying was an attempt to keep it from becoming a bigger problem.

City employees are also canvassing neighborhoods, looking for the standing water that mosquitos love to use as breeding grounds.

Of course, airborne pesticides come with their own health risks; naled, the pesticide commonly used to spray for Zika, is banned in the EU because of the potential risks it poses to health and the environment–but according to the CDC, it’s both safe and effective. The city health department has been updating Twitter with its plans for future spraying; stay tuned, and make sure to close your windows and keep your pets inside!

Baltimore City has had a rough few weeks, news-wise. Now it seems as though it’s Baltimore County’s turn.

Yesterday, Buzzfeed released an investigative report looking into Baltimore County’s high track record of rapes deemed to be false or baseless: “The Baltimore County Police Department is one of a number of law enforcement agencies nationwide with an alarming record of dismissing rape cases, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of FBI statistics,” the site reports. Thirty-four percent of the rapes reported to Baltimore County police are deemed “unfounded” and their cases are subsequently closed–a rate far, far higher than national averages, and the highest in the nation for a department of its size. What this points to, experts claim, is a pervasive culture of disdain for sexual assault victims within the BCPD.

Here are some of the article’s more troubling findings:

• Police routinely did little to no detective work at all, labeling rape reports unfounded after cursory interviews with the victims.
• Detectives who are trained to handle sex crimes often never even met or spoke with the alleged victim, but instead dismissed the allegation simply after reviewing a case report made by a beat cop.
• The officers writing the reports often dismissed rape allegations because they believed the women did not fight back hard enough — or, as one police report put it, “did not resist to the best of her ability.” Even if a woman submits to sex against her will because she fears for her life, these reports indicate, her assailant hasn’t committed a crime and can walk away without so much as a police interrogation.

It makes for pretty bleak reading, particularly when it results in men who commit sexual assault face no consequences — and then re-offend. Or women who attempt to ward off assailants who choke, smother, and/or threaten to kill them, but whose cases are dismissed because detectives determined they didn’t fight back hard enough–whatever that means.

Read the whole thing, if you can stand to. The only silver lining: Hopefully a report this damning will lead to some real, substantial change.

In case you haven’t heard, our health care system is messed up.

Exhibit 242813 is this new research out of Johns Hopkins, which looks at how some hospitals engage in blatant price gouging in order to maximize profits. The study’s authors looked at how much hospitals charged for a procedure, compared how much it actually cost them to provide it. While certain procedures, like routine inpatient care, had a charge-to-cost ratio that was close to even, other procedures were massively skewed. In some cases, the researchers found, hospitals were charging 28.5 times the cost of a procedure.

Analyzing the specifics of the mark-ups led the researchers to conclude that such price manipulations are more common among for-profit hospitals than their non-profit or government-run peers; and that complex procedures were more likely to have higher charge-to-cost ratios than more routine care.

Even if insurance providers are generally the ones bearing the brunt of this price gouging, it’s still a big problem in the industry. “[Steep markups] affect uninsured and out-of-network patients, auto insurers and casualty and workers’ compensation insurers,” study co-author Gerard F. Anderson, of the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, said. “The high charges have led to personal bankruptcy, avoidance of needed medical services, and much higher insurance premiums.”

Pretty soon, Baltimoreans will be able to order up a land-taxi and a water-taxi and a snack via Uber. (Though presumably not all at the same time.)

UberEATS, the company’s food delivery service, added Baltimore to its list of 20 cities nationwide where you’re able to get an Uber driver to bring dinner to your door. The service (which runs on a separate app from regular Uber) charges $4.99 to bring you food from restaurants including Grano, Lebanese Taverna, and Terra Cafe in about 35 minutes.

The company told the Sun that one reason it expanded to Baltimore is because of the city’s burgeoning food culture. It’s great to see Baltimore getting that recognition–but if you really want to show your local pride, you should probably get your delivery through OrderUp, the similar service that was founded right here in the city.

Last month, two Johns Hopkins public health professors published a 143-page paper that’s won them widespread condemnation from human rights groups.

The paper, which was published in an explicitly conservative, religious (and not peer-reviewed) journal called The New Atlantis, makes a number of controversial assertions, but its general gist is that gender identity is an elusive concept, and thus leads to questions about whether it’s legitimate to identify as trans.  More concretely, the paper’s authors argue that young people who identify as trans are actually harmed by medical and societal accommodations.

The study’s authors are also being given some extra scrutiny, and for good reason. Paul McHugh, the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins and a co-author of the paper, has said that homosexuality is “erroneous,” opposes gender-reassignment surgery, and supported efforts to block gay marriage; his fellow author, Lawrence Mayer, is a scholar in residence in the psychiatry department at Hopkins who testified as an expert witness in North Carolina’s contentious battle over letting trans people use the bathroom that conforms to their gender identity. I’ll give you one guess to figure out what side he was on.

Human Rights Watch, the nation’s leading LGBTQ rights organization, has issued a strongly worded statement opposing the paper; behind the scenes, the HRC has been calling on Johns Hopkins to distance itself from McHugh and Mayer. The Johns Hopkins Hospital is just one of 150 health care institutions nationwide to have received a perfect score on the HRC’s Healthcare Equality Index; this research puts that at risk, NBC reports. Meanwhile, the two authors stand by their paper: it “may be politically biased but it is not scientifically biased,” Mayer told ThinkProgress.

Bob Dylan is a man of many talents… including, apparently, casino sculptures.

The musician has created a 26-by-15 foot iron gateway for the MGM National Harbor in the DC suburbs, Rolling Stone reports.

Dylan has apparently enjoyed welding since at least the 1970s; his current projects incorporate found objects, including everything from old farm equipment to tools to guns. “I’ve been around iron all my life ever since I was a kid. I was born and raised in iron ore country — where you could breathe it and smell it every day. And I’ve always worked with it in one form or another,” he wrote on the occasion of his first exhibition of iron sculptures in 2013. “Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.”

But what’s the connection between Dylan and casinos? Jim Murren, the CEO of MGM International, tried to make the connection between the two: “As a company founded upon entertainment, we’re truly inspired by artists who channel their energy into diverse paths. We’re proud to collaborate with Mr. Dylan and bring his vision to MGM National Harbor’s Heritage Collection in a way that enhances this sensory resort experience.”

Or he could’ve just said: Bob Dylan is cool and weird; we have money; and we wanted to get a piece of whatever he’s up to now.

The sculpture will be on public display at the casino, which is slated to open by the end of the year–after many delays and cost overruns of more than $1 billion.

As our phones have gotten fancier, our 911 systems have not kept pace.

That’s one reason for the $4 million grant Baltimore County just received to upgrade its emergency call system; Baltimore City’s move to what’s called Next Generation 911 is already underway.

Next Generation 911 is intended to allow emergency callers to not only call 911, but also send text messages, photos, and videos that will then be transmitted via 911 dispatchers to emergency responders. It makes sense: These days, the vast majority of emergency calls come from cell phones, which are able to provide much more than just a voice call. And such information could be incredibly valuable in a life-or-death situation–but it requires getting all new equipment that can handle those kinds of messages.

The Baltimore County equipment upgrade is due to be complete by next September, but it might still be months–or years–after that that you’ll be able to text 911. That’s due to other necessary steps in the process: upgrading software, training personnel, and coordinating with cellular companies to make sure their systems are integrated. Baltimore City’s switch is moving along the same timelines, though perhaps a bit slower since, as the Sun reports, they’re still looking for a vendor for the new equipment.

So while changes are coming, don’t try to Snapchat 911–yet.

In Baltimore County Public Schools, your effort–not your accuracy–will be the main thing that counts when it comes to homework.

The county is trying out a new grading policy that mandates that homework not be graded. It also eliminates things like behavior and attendance from being factored into a child’s grade. The idea is to move away from focusing on performance as it relates to individual assignments, and rather on a student’s holistic understanding of the topic at hand. To that end, students who score poorly on a test are also given the chance to re-take it for a higher grade.

The new policy has met with much debate, both within the school system and in the wider world. Critics argue that it discourages effort; advocates argue that by shifting attention away from assignments and more toward knowledge, the school system will reduce drop-outs and foster at atmosphere of knowledge, rather than just task-completion.

The policy is currently being tested out in the schools; presumably, if students lose all their motivation and all become lazy, unmotivated slugs, the school board can shift course. I imagine that won’t be what happens, though.

Baltimore’s biggest, richest university has a long and complicated relationship with its home city.

In more recent years, Johns Hopkins has tried hard to address the conception that the university is in the city, but not exactly of it. This week, The Economist takes a look at the evolving relationship, detailing Hopkins’s new commitment to fostering closer ties with the city it has sometimes been accused of ignoring (at best) or exploiting (at worst).

The university’s current president, however, has made a point of at least attempting to bridge the gap between the university and the community. As The Economist details,

The university has promised to increase its use of local and minority-owned construction businesses, to favour hiring local residents, especially those from distressed communities, and to use local vendors. It has encouraged more than two dozen other Baltimore companies, including BGE, a large regional utility, which already relies on local suppliers, to do the same. Tim Regan, the head of Whiting-Turner a large construction firm which signed up, says that Mr Daniels has tremendous power as a convener. In April the companies he recruited pledged $69m over three years, kick-starting what Bishop Miles calls “the most significant economic and jobs initiative in the life of the city”.

The article also notes the close relationship that some Hopkins professors have with city officials–for example, Daniel Webster, the head of the university’s Center for Gun Policy and Research, who’s working with Police Commissioner Kevin Davis to curb gun violence in the city.

It’s encouraging to read about some of the many ways that Johns Hopkins is trying to be a better citizen in Baltimore. That said, as other universities can teach us, there’s a relationship between community development and gentrification, one that Johns Hopkins would do well to pay close attention to.

Did you know that Maryland has a chastity defamation statute? Me neither!

The Guardian informed me that in the state of Maryland, “A single or married woman whose character or reputation for chastity is defamed by any person may maintain an action against that person.” And Melania Trump is alleging that that’s exactly what happened to her earlier this campaign season, when the Daily Mail and a Montgomery County blogger both claimed that she had worked as an escort before marrying her husband. (The blogger, Walter Tarpley, has retracted his post.) Another interesting twist: The lawyer representing Trump in this case is the same guy who brought down Gawker on behalf of Hulk Hogan.

The lawsuit isn’t all that shocking or interesting, given the Trumps’ affinity for taking their nemeses to court. But this chastity defamation law has an interesting backstory: It turns out that before the 19th century, insulting a woman’s sexual past wasn’t considered slander under the standard definition. Defamation laws were actually seen as a step forward, even as they now seem woefully outdated. Okay, I suppose that’s enough legal history for a Friday morning.