Friday Mini (02/20/2026)
8-Across: It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.
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8-Across: It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.
4-Across: Tasty torus
1-Across: Acela’s owner
With the Seattle Seahawks’ victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX, Seahawks QB Sam Darnold has reached the summit of professional football. However, his climb has been anything but smooth. Darnold’s career shows that the combination of perseverance, dedication and the right support can completely warp one’s trajectory.
When I was in my junior year of high school, my AP Calculus teacher played a video for us the day before winter break. It was a TED Talk by Tim Urban, the popular blogger behind “Wait But Why,” who delved into the mind of a procrastinator: featuring the Instant Gratification Monkey (the one who replaces the Rational Decision Maker in our mind and takes us on quests such as doomscrolling when there’s an impending deadline, eliciting a mix of anxiety and unearned gratification) and the Panic Monster (who eventually takes the wheel from the Instant Gratification Monkey when a deadline comes too close, leading us to pull all-nighters to save ourselves from the consequence of an unfinished task).
The sound of a blender at seven in the morning is usually the herald of a New Year’s Resolution. It’s the sound of frozen blueberries, spinach, protein powder and milk being pulverized into some slush; the kind of health smoothie that promises a fresh start with a healthier body and mind.
On Tuesday, Feb. 10 the Student Government Association (SGA) convened for their weekly meeting.
We were stranded in North Carolina after a delayed flight caused us to miss our layover. I was sitting on a metal chair stolen from a nearby Starbucks. There was a numbing pain in my arm, suggesting to me it had been a mistake to use it as a pillow. Drowsily, I attempted to focus on the fan of cards in my hand and the voice of a friend as he tried to explain the rules to a game we were too sleep deprived to understand properly. Nevertheless, we huddled around the deck of cards, shuffling and dealing until the rising sun signaled us to go catch the next flight. Somehow, the chaos of travel had shrunk into the small space between us, captured and organized by fifty two pieces of paper.
When I was twelve, I wrote a children’s book called What’s In My Lunchbox? for my sixth-grade English class, which detailed the origins of a B.L.T. sandwich, an apple juice box and a bag of potato chips. As I put together drawings of a little ant crawling his way through the genesis of my lunch, I learned that Mott’s apple juice is bottled in my home state of New York, that the potato chip factories often throw away entire truckloads of potatoes if too many are found to be blemished and that the crispy bacon in my sandwich was produced in a massive industrialized farming facility run almost entirely by an underpaid migrant workforce. My book was celebrated with many prestigious literary awards (check pluses, gold stars...). I became a vegetarian shortly afterwards.
Nanjing, China. I thought I would eventually write this. It’s just too emotional for me. It’s hard to put into words, which is funny, because you’re also where my words began.
This is a historic year for the twelve nations competing in hockey at the Milano-Cortina Olympics. These twenty days in February are a welcome break from the NHL season. Competition started on Feb. 11, and ends on Sunday, Feb. 22. While I enjoy watching my city play, there’s nothing like routing for your country to take gold. While I could do a detailed game-by-game breakdown, these jerseys caught my eye and they deserve their own spotlight. To preface, this is just my take almost purely based on aesthetics.
Dr. Debraj “Raj” Mukherjee is a neuro-oncosurgeon at the Hopkins Hospital. In an interview with The News-Letter, he discussed his medical career and work with the Peace Education Program in Baltimore, for which he was recently awarded the 2025 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Community Service.
Jeff Bowen is a social psychologist who has been an associate teaching professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences since the fall of 2017. He primarily teaches undergraduate research methods and statistics classes and also runs an undergraduate research lab focused on the social psychology of interpersonal relationships. In an interview with The News-Letter, Bowen discussed his lab’s focuses on romantic partnerships, how people navigate both online and in-person social experiences and the methods used to measure these concepts and experiences.
The University has begun construction of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Institute (DSAI) by cutting down trees on Remington Avenue in early January 2026. Construction has closed Wyman Park Drive to drivers and soon will to pedestrians in summer 2026. The project is scheduled to conclude in 2029.
On Feb. 8, the Hopkins Tea Club hosted its third annual “Tea Formal.” The Tea Club is a cross-campus student organization with members from both the Peabody and Homewood campuses. Its mission, to educate Hopkins affiliates on the practices of tea brewing, serves to spread the traditions of tea to all through events such as the Tea Formal.
On Wednesday, Jan. 21 President Ronald J. Daniels announced that Executive Vice Provost Lainie Rutkow will serve as the interim provost in mid-February. This follows a previous email by Daniels in early January which announced that current Provost Ray Jayawardhana will conclude his role to become the next president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) starting July 1, 2026.
On Thursday, Feb. 5, the Center for Social Concern (CSC) held a discussion on Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as part of its Hop Talks series. The event was held from 6 to 8 p.m. in Levering Great Hall.
Anicca Harriot, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins specializing in tissue engineering, was recently awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Community Service at Hopkins’ Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration on Jan. 16. This year’s theme for the award was “Impact: The Power of Communities.” As the CEO of Vanguard: Conversations with Women of Color in STEM, #VanguardSTEM for short, Harriot has greatly contributed to the community of women and non-binary people of color pursuing careers in STEM-related fields.
As the year prepares to take off, let’s take a moment to reflect on the scientific discoveries that have already made it so special.
Hopkins Sports in Review (Feb. 2–8)