Selected Clips
American culture valorizes the uncompromising dreamers, single-minded in their pursuit of greatness, and delights when they are plucked from obscurity. Robert Henke’s monastic life is a testament to that ideal, but he is also, as a former boss says, a “Captain Ahab of our generation,†willing to wreck everything – including his family – chasing a dream that has become an obsession. Livingston Award finalist.
Legislators get tax breaks for ineligible properties
Several state legislators have been receiving thousands of dollars in undeserved property tax breaks under the Homestead Tax Credit program. In some cases, the lawmakers have reduced their tax bills on “principal residences†even though they don’t live there. Others have been getting tax breaks on multiple homes, a duplication forbidden under the law.
Black colleges struggle to reach goals in face of low graduation rates
During a period of massive investment, Maryland’s black colleges have experienced troubling declines in traditional measures of academic performance. And despite a series of federal desegregation plans stretching back to the 1960s, the four schools – Morgan State University and Coppin State University in Baltimore, Bowie State University in Prince George’s County and the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore – remain in a distinct second tier in the state’s higher education system.
Sen. John C. Astle wore banana-colored slacks to a recent voting session, and lobbyist David Carroll has worked the State House hall in Nantucket Red trousers. But it was the Maryland House of Delegates and the Seersucker Six who won the premature preppiness award on the last day of the 2009 session.
College porn screening scuttled by Maryland Senate
Maryland lawmakers know pornography when they see it, and they know how to stop it: by threatening to halt funding to the state’s flagship public university.
Faulty bid on slots blurs Md. horse racing’s future
The stunning turn of events left many Magna supporters in Annapolis confused and angered. But to some longtime observers of the company, which owns Laurel Park, Pimlico Race Course and tracks around the country, it appeared to be another in a history of missteps.
No-show regents at Morgan State
Some of the most prominent members of Morgan State University’s Board of Regents have routinely missed meetings since at least 2000, a pattern of absenteeism that critics say robs the Baltimore school of key oversight at a time when it is under criminal investigation by the Maryland attorney general for its fiscal practices.
Professors lash out; But criticism is purged from accreditation report
As part of its formal case for reaccreditation, Coppin State University officials watered down a faculty and staff-written report critical of the college’s treatment of its core academic staff, records show. A copy of the draft report reveals long-standing tensions between academicians and administrators at the public university, which suffers from the lowest graduation rate among Maryland public schools, and one of the lowest among its peers nationally.
A death at Bowling Brook 
I teamed up with prisons reporter Greg Garland to investigate the death of a youth who was being restrained at the Bowling Brook Preparatory School, a private residential program for juvenile offenders. Among our findings: that state authorities ignored whistleblower warnings about dangerous conditions in the school five months before the death. The school was eventually shut down, staff members indicted on criminal charges, and statewide reforms adopted. The FBI also began an investigation. Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild 2007 Front Page grand prize and investigative awards.
Commision-based recruitment of foreign students criticized
The University of Maryland’s distance-learning college pays a headhunter in Taiwan to sign up doctoral students there under a commission-based contract that critics say is troubling. UMUC’s foray into “offshoring†— the exporting of U.S. degrees to foreign nationals in their native countries — offers a case study of the lightly regulated trend’s promises and potential risks.
From Baltimore’s City Paper:The secret history of the Galaxy tall teeÂ
The “tall tee” isn’t showing any sign of joining the one-strapped overalls and backward-pants in hip-hop heaven. Yards of white cotton hang from young black men from Pennsylvania Avenue to Monument Street. They drape the knees of white hoodrats in Hampden and Pigtown, and billow like drag-racer parachutes behind teenagers racing down Greenmount Avenue on mini-motorcycles. Those who value the gownlike shirt for its thug-life cred might be dismayed to learn of its provenance as women’s sleeping gowns. Download as PDF.
Behind the bulletproof glass of a legendary Baltimore tavern
Sunday is the biggest day of the week for the bar still known in this Southwest Baltimore neighborhood as “Scallio’s,” after the family that owned and operated it from 1934 until 1996. But few will step inside the bar. Not today and not most days, not for years now. Like many Baltimore taverns that operate in neighborhoods ravaged for decades by drug addicts and the violent dealers they keep in business, the Hollins Street Pub is basically a package-goods store entombed in security glass.
The Balti: North Baltimore’s lacrosse mullet
A cultural history of the laxer mullet, perhaps the only hairstyle that Baltimore can properly claim as its very own.
