Midday

Michael Braverman, the Commissioner of the Baltimore City Department of Housing ---- Community Development, joins Tom today. Any conversation about housing in our city is a conversation about two Baltimores. There’s the Baltimore of downtown and the Inner Harbor, with its strong history of public and private investment, and the stable, majority-white neighborhoods that stretch in a narrow line nor...

Last week, Michael Harrison became the fourth Baltimore City Police Commissioner to lead the troubled BPD in the past 14 months. Commissioner Harrison has spent the past month introducing himself to the people of Baltimore at community meetings. He comes to the BPD after nearly 30 years with the New Orleans Police Department, which he joined as a new recruit in 1991Today, Commissioner Harrison joi...

Today, another in our occasional series, Midday on Higher Education. From time to time, Tom sits down with the presidents of Maryland colleges and universities to talk about the challenges that each of their institutions face, and how those institutions are connected to the fabric of the communities in which they are located. Today, Tom’s guest is Dr. Jay Perman, the president of the University of...

An iconoclastic professor of literature at Oxford University named John Carey wrote a book a few years back called What Good Are the Arts? which examines, among other things, why people make a distinction between the so-called fine arts, and all the other kinds of arts. Are a pink flamingo on a lawn in Hampden and a Renaissance statue in the sculpture court of the Walters Art Museum fundamentally...

Four seasons ago, Baltimore's Everyman Theater launched an initiative called the “Salon Series: Women's Voices,---- a program that explores the work of women playwrights in informal staged readings, directed by the women members of the Everyman Resident Acting Company. On Monday night, March 18, the new Salon Series season begins with ----What's Next?---- -- readings of the work of Washington-DC b...

Last August, Baltimore Center Stage announced the appointment of Stephanie Ybarra as its new Artistic Director. She succeeds Kwame Kwei Armah, who left to become the Artistic Director of the Young Vic Theater in London. Stephanie Ybarra comes to Baltimore after six years as the Director of Special Artistic Projects at the Public Theatre in New York City, where she oversaw its popular Public Forum...

Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins Tom for her weekly review of a regional theater production. Today, she spotlight the new production of Flyin' West now running at Arena Players in Baltimore, the oldest continuously operating African-American community theater in the United States. Flyin’ West is a historical drama by playwright Pearl Cleage that premiered in Atlanta in 1992 and has been...

Last Thursday, the Maryland House of Delegates passed a bill that would allow terminally ill patients with a prognosis of less than six months to live to obtain prescription drugs that they could choose to take to end their own lives. A similar bill is moving through the state Senate. This is the fourth year that such a bill has been proposed in the Maryland General Assembly. On today's installmen...

Today, we’re discussing the crisis of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Last month, 190 bishops and 10 women of religious orders convened at the Vatican for a summit to address the international problem of predatory priests and others in the hierarchy of the church. However, many survivors don't think that the summit went far enough. Joining Tom today: Mary Dispenza is a former nun, a survivor...

Today, it's Midday on Education. Tom's guest, Dr. William ----Brit---- Kirwan, is the chair of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, also known as the Kirwan Commission. Dr. Kirwan was formerly president of the University of Maryland, where he served on the faculty for 34 years. He was also Chancellor of the University System of Maryland from 2002-2015.The Kirwan Commission was...

Yesterday, the Baltimore City Senate Delegation to the Maryland General Assembly voted to approve legislation that will allow Johns Hopkins University to establish its own private police force. The House City Delegation was scheduled to vote this morning, but it appears they have postponed that vote. If this legislation is ultimately approved, Johns Hopkins will be the first private university in...

Today, Live in Studio A, the internationally celebrated guitarist Grigory ----Grisha---- Goryachev joins us to perform two selections from his upcoming Baltimore Classical Guitar Society concert at UMBC. A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, the 41 year-old Goryachev is renowned for his extraordinary musical sensitivity and technical virtuosity in both classical and flamenco styles. He is one of the...

Today, it's the March edition of Midday at the Movies, and Tom is joined in the studio by our movie-maven regulars: Ann Hornaday is film critic for the Washington Post and the author of Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies; Jed Dietz is the founding director of the Maryland Film Festival, home to the historic Parkway Theater here in Baltimore. A week after the 91st annual Oscars ceremony left mov...

It's Thursday, and time again for Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck to join Tom in the studio with another of her weekly reviews of regional productions. Today, she tells us about the Baltimore premiere of Frankenstein, a new adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's classic novel by playwright Robert Kauzlaric. The play, which kicks off Cohesion Theatre Company’s fifth season, transforms th...

Today, Tom explores the rich history of food, farming and environmental conservation in Harford County. His guest is Dr. Sharon Stowers, a professor of anthropology and sociology -- who is also a registered dietitian and nutritionist. She is Harford Community College's first Scholar-in-Residence and has been researching Harford County's agriculture and food scene. Her year-long program is called -...

On today's Midday, a journey through the rich history and the future of Maryland wine. Tom's guests are Al Spoler, the co-host of Cellar Notes and Regina McCarthy, author of Maryland Wine: A Full-Bodied History. Currently, there are 94 licensed wineries in the state of Maryland. That’s 14 more than we had just two years ago. To find more information about Maryland wine trails, click here. Email us...

On today's Midday Culture Connections with Dr. Sheri Parks: a conversation about believability, empathy and victimhood. Baltimore Police say that the murder of a Harford County Engineer, Jacqueline Smith late last year was not, as her husband claimed, committed by two panhandlers. Instead, the husband and his daughter are charged with the crime. The actor Jussie Smollett is facing felony charges f...

Today on Midday, a conversation with a veteran journalist about the intersection of journalism and business; the changing nature of how and from whom we get our news, and who pays for it; and the growing poltical assaults on truth and the news media. Jill Abramson began her career as a reporter in the early 1970s, during the Watergate Era. She spent almost a decade at the Wall Street Journal, and...

A new exhibit at the Goya Contemporary Gallery here in Baltimore is inspired by the civil rights activist and entrepreneur Madam CJ Walker, who created a company that manufactured and sold hair-care products for black women – and in the process, became a millionaire a century ago. The exhibition, called Hair/Goods: An Homage to Madam CJ Walker, is a collection of work by the internationally acclai...

It’s the Midday Newswrap. A little later, we’ll take a look behind some of the big local headlines of the week with Baltimore Sun State House reporter Luke Broadwater. But we begin today with analysis of the summit between President Donald Trump and President Kim Jong-un of North Korea, who met this week for the second time. The summit came to an abrupt end yesterday. My guest is Nicholas Eberstad...

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer is, testifying on Capitol Hill for the third consecutive day. Yesterday, in seven hours of televised testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Cohen was contrite for his past prevarication to Congress, and vehement in his depiction of his former boss as a bigot, a conman, and a liar. So, what did we learn from Cohen’s testimony? Wa...

Today, instead of her usual weekly review, theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck shares the conversation she had last week with the celebrated playwright Paula Vogel, whose works include A Civil War Christmas, The Baltimore Waltz, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive. Vogel's most recent play, Indecent, opens in previews tonight at Baltimore Center Stage. It's being produced in collabora...

In August 2016, the Department of Justice published a scathing report chronicling a pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing by the Baltimore City Police Department. In the waning days of the Obama administration, the City of Baltimore and the DOJ entered into a Consent Decree that requires the BPD to make a number of fundamental changes in its policies and procedures. In April 2017, US D...

Why does Baltimore City have a separate government from Baltimore County? Some people think it would it make more sense to combine those two jurisdictions. Some don't, of course, but it’s an idea that has been bandied about for more than 70 years. A new report by the Abell Foundation is intended to revive the conversation about a consolidated regional government in the Baltimore metropolitan area....

Tom Hall's guest is Mileah Kromer, director of the Sarah T. Hughes Center for Field Politics at Goucher College. Last week, the Center released the results of its latest Goucher Poll, which regularly surveys public policy, economic, and social issues in Maryland. The latest poll asked Marylanders about topics ranging from legalizing recreational marijuana and raising the minimum wage, to race rela...