Midday

Early in September each year, Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck skips her usual weekly review to look ahead at the upcoming theater season, and spotlight some of the interesting productions coming to the region's stages. Judy begins her 2018-19 Season Preview by noting the exciting news from Baltimore Center Stage, which last month announced its new artistic director, Stephanie Ybarra, current...

Today, it’s Midday on Poetry: Tom and his guests explore two very different poetic styles that both resonate with universal themes. Tom is joined first by two local poets who enjoy international acclaim:Michael Collier has written numerous books of poetry over the past forty years, including The Ledge -- a finalist for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award. He served as Poet Laureate of Mary...

On this installment of Midday Culture Connections: we look at one of the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade that might not immediately come to mind: modern business management. A new book looks at how the pecuniary practices of slave owners have endured and how those practices continue to inform capitalism. Caitlin C. Rosenthal, an Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley in California...

(This program originally aired August 7th, 2018)Today, a conversation about what has come to be known as the ----Black Tax.---- It is imposed on people of color, in different ways and in different places, every day. Reports of hate crimes are on the rise, and in 2017, once again, African Americans were targeted more than any other group. And in the last few months, social media have been rife with...

(This program originally aired October 10, 2017.)Today, for the Labor Day holiday, we present an archive edition: Midday, WYPR and the Baltimore Museum of Industry team up for a special program -- presented as part of BMI's Issues in Industry series -- examining Baltimore's calamitous de-industrialization, the challenge of rebuilding the city's workforce, and the future of work in Baltimore's incr...

This program originally aired on July 16, 2018. It has been a little more than three years since the city of Baltimore was convulsed with violence following the funeral of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody on April 19, 2015. After the National Guard went back to their barracks, after the fire at the CVS Drugstore at the corner of Penn and North was extinguished, and after the curfews were l...

(This program originally aired July 11, 2018)Today, a conversation about sports -- kinda, sorta. Not the World Cup. Certainly not the Orioles, God help us. Not the Ravens, who start training camp a week from Thursday, but instead, we’re going to talk about a simple question, that when applied to certain moments and historical realities in sports can lead to some delicious fantasizing. That questio...

This program originally aired on October 24, 2017Tom’s guest today is Alice McDermott, the New York Times best-selling author of eight novels. Three of them, After This, At Weddings and Wakes and That Night, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Another novel, Charming Billy, won the National Book Award in 1998.Her eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, published in 2017 and available in paperback in Sept...

This program originally aired on August 9, 2018.Today, Tom's guest is Dr. Brit Kirwan, chair of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, better known as the Kirwan Commission. For the past two years, the commission has been studying the public K-12 education system in our state, and it’s planning to release a series of recommendations as to how the state should re-order its educat...

On this edition of the Midday News Wrap: pressure continues to mount on the White House this week with a conviction and a guilty plea in the cases of two of President Trump's associates, and an increasingly contentious relationship between Trump and his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. Guest Host Nathan Sterner speaks with David Smith, the Washington Bureau Chief of The Guardian about the tumult s...

Earlier this month (August 1), a special edition of The New York Times Magazine went online, and a few days later hit the newsstands. The issue contained a single 30,000 word article titled, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” Penned by NYTMagazine writer-at-large Nathaniel Rich, with grant support from the non-profit Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, and based on 18 m...

It's Thursday, and time again for our weekly visit with theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck. Today, she joins guest host Rob Sivak with a review of Consent, a new play about medical ethics from playwright Glennyce Lynn. It's being produced by the Spotlighters Theatre in collaboration with the Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Directed by Andre Tittle, the play is set in an unfamiliar near-future, where c...

On, today's program a discusion about he basic unit of Artificial Intelligence – The Algorithm. What does it do? Who creates an algorithm? Who’s served by it? Who’s ill-treated by it? And why? Sci-fi movies and books give us dramatic scenarios about possible dystopian futures, impending singularities, and computers overthrowing their human creators and spelling the destruction of our species, but...

Guest host Jamyla Krempel sits in for Tom Hall today for a conversation about sex education in Maryland's schools. In the era of the “Me Too” Movement – with its steady stream of stories about actors, politicians, clergy, executives, people in virtually every profession being accused of sexual assault, is sex ed teaching students that power can be used to hurt others, and the importance of consent...

Tangier Island, Virginia, has been home for eight generations to a unique community of now some 470 hardy souls, many of whom make their living harvesting the region’s prized blue crab. But their island home -- a barely 2-acre sliver of mud and sand and grass in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay -- is fast disappearing beneath the waters. Whether the culprit is erosion by the Bay’s relentless curre...

Time for another edition of The Midday Newswrap, when we look back at some of the week's important local, national and international developments, and invite perspectives from our guest panelists. In the first segment: Three years after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, a scathing report by the Justice Department and a consent decree, a viral video shows a police officer assaulting a ci...

And now, a little music from a former Balti-moron who enjoys both a national and international career. Victoria Vox is an award-winning singer/songwriter who is one of the leading artists on the ukulele scene. She’s also a fixture on the national folk music scene. She’s opened for Jackson Browne, Leo Kottke, Cheryl Wheeler and Tom Chapin, among others. She moved from Baltimore to Costa Mesa, Calif...

It's Thursday, and that means our theater critic, J. Wynn Rousuck, joins us for her weekly review of one of the region's thespian offerings. Today, she spotlights a show about love and loyalty: ArtsCentric's new production of Aida, on stage at the Motor House on North Avenue in Baltimore. This Aida is not the famed Verdi opera, but rather the Disney-produced version (with book by Linda Woolverton,...

A couple of weeks ago, we had the pleasure of traveling to Chestertown for a live broadcast of our show from historic Sumner Hall, a building that was for many generations central to the lives of African Americans on the Eastern Shore. One of our guests that afternoon was a community activist and former member of the Kent County Historical Society, Airlee Ringgold Johnson. She told us a little abo...

Today, we’re going to talk about education in Baltimore City. Tom's guests are teachers in the city school system, who teach at the elementary, middle school and high school levels. We hear a lot about teachers, but it’s not as often that we hear from teachers. Their perspective comes from daily interactions with students, parents, and colleagues, and they know better than most the challenges they...

Today, another in our series of Conversations with the Candidates: the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, Boyd Rutherford, joins Tom in Studio A.In a Gonzales poll released this morning Governor Larry Hogan enjoys a 16 point lead over Democrat Ben Jealous. If he sustains that lead through November, he’ll be the first Republican Governor to serve a second term since Theodore McKeldin in the 1950s. Bo...

Today, Tom's guest is Rudolph S. Chow, the director of Baltimore City’s Department of Public Works, an agency he has led since 2014. One of the DPW's many responsibilities is the water system. And when it comes to water, the department’s reach extends far beyond the city's 615,000 residents, but actually services 1.8 million people in the region. The city’s infrastructure is aging, and fragile. Wa...

Today on the Friday News Wrap, guest host Nathan Sterner takes a look back at a week of dramatic political news, from the Paul Manafort trial to the arrest of a Republican congressman on corruption charges, and a special congressional election in Ohio that’s given Democrats new hope for winning a majority in the House this November. NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley joins Nathan on the l...

Today, Tom's guest is Dr. Brit Kirwan, Chair of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, better known as the Kirwan Commission. For the past two years, the commission has been studying the public K-12 education system in our state, and it’s planning to release a series of recommendations as to how the state should re-order its educational priorities, improve accountability, and fu...

Today we begin the hour with another edition of the Midday Healthwatch. Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen is here to discuss some of the troubling new data on Maryland’s opioid problem, and some new efforts by Congressman Elijah Cummings and Senator Elizabeth Warren to help address it. She'll explain why the city has joined a lawsuit to stop the Trump Administration’s continuing eff...