Midday

Tom's guest today is the newly appointed chief of the Baltimore Police Department. Darryl De Sousa is the Commissioner-Designate. His confirmation hearing at the Baltimore City Council is slated for a week from today. Mr. De Sousa has been on the job for less than a month, but he’s been a member of the Baltimore Police Department for more than 30 years. Prior to his elevation to Commissioner, he s...

On the latest edition of Whatcha' Ya Got Cookin', we speak with Culinary Historian Michael Twitty. His new book is called “The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South.” It’s part personal memoir, part history, and part cook book. It’s a startling and poignant chronicle of how people held in bondage, with little to nothing of their own, created a culinary...

We are joined by the Emmy Award winning filmmaker, Stanley Nelson, whose latest documentary chronicles the history of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The HBCU tradition in the United States was born out of necessity, animated after the Civil War by the conviction that education would be the foundation upon which the success of Freedmen and Freedwomen would be built. There are current...

Tom’s final guest today is Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. The U.S. Senate is scheduled to take up immigration reform tonight. During budget negotiations that resulted in two brief government shutdowns, Senate Democrats extracted a promise from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to begin debate on a fix for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) a...

Continuing with Midday’s focus on immigration today, Tom welcomes Dr. Perla M. Guerrero. Guerrero is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and U.S., Latina and Latino Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park. Her new book is called Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians and the Remaking of Place -- on what can happen when an influx of immigrants settles in places that had been almost en...

Today on Midday: three perspectives on immigration. First, let’s consider what we might call Immigration Amnesia. It seems like a good way to describe politicians and others who speak derisively about immigrants -- when they themselves are, like everyone except for Indigenous people, descendants of people who came to this country from somewhere else. My first guest is Jennifer Mendelsohn. With her...

A conversation with Timothy Kreider, a writer who grew up in Baltimore, and has become one of the most highly respected cartoonists and essayists on the literary scene today. For more than a decade, his cartoon, The Pain: When Will it End ran in the City Paper here in Baltimore and in other alternative weeklies around the country. His cartoons have been published in three books. His work has also...

On today's News Wrap, we take a look at the latest state and local headlines. For nearly three weeks, in the trial of two Baltimore police officers indicted on corruption charges, a steady stream of witnesses, including other members of the elite Gun Trace Task Force who have pleaded guilty to similar charges, have detailed longstanding practices by many officers that involved robbery, drug dealin...

It's Thursday and time for our regular weekly visit with theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck, who joins us today with her review of the new production of Eugene O'Neill's dark classic, Long Day's Journey Into Night, now on stage at Baltimore's Everyman Theatre. With director Donald Hicken​ helming a seasoned cast of resident company* and guest actors, the play recounts a summer day and night in 1912 in...

The Motor Trend International Auto Show opens today at the Baltimore Convention Center and runs through Sunday. There are more than 500 cars at the show, and we wondered: What’s hot and what’s not? Midday host Tom Hall stopped by the car show last night and wandered around with Rory Cahill. Rory knows a lot about cars, and his expertise has attracted the attention of a lot of folks. On two occasio...

Few musical artists of our day have had a more sustained impact on contemporary culture than Canadian singer-songwriter, Joni Mitchell. As a composer, Mitchell’s harmonic language and literary sophistication are unparalleled. As a performer, she has riveted audiences for decades from her days as a willowy, guitar-slinging soprano, to her long career as an exacting and imaginative bandleader whose...

Illinois US Senator Tammy Duckworth made headlines recently when she announced that she would be expecting her second child this spring. She will become the first sitting Senator to give birth. While her announcement might be an historic first for Congress, Sen. Duckworth is one of 25 million working mothers in the United States. The #MeToo movement has given voice to women from assembly lines to...

It was clear from watching Super Bowl 52 this past Sunday -- regardless of which team won -- that the tradition of companies spending millions of dollars for a 30-second Super Bowl advertisement to promote their brands is still going strong. ETrade, M----Ms, Avocados from Mexico, as well as Amazon and Netflix, all took the expensive plunge. Beer and cars, not surprisingly, were well-represented to...

Deborah Hazlett as Mary Tyrone, Kurt Rhoads as James Tyrone in LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHTCredit Photo by Stan Barouh. Edit | RemoveEveryman Theatre’s new production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning masterpiece (premiered posthumously in 1956), begins on a bright summer day in the Connecticut home of the Tyrone family. But the play soon swee...

The headlines today are dominated the impending release of a memo prepared by staffers for Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee. The FBI and the Justice Department are strongly opposed to making the memo public. President Trump is eager to have it released. Devon Nunes, the Committee Chair, also wants it made public, despite refusing to share it with his counterpart, Richard Burr...

It's Thursday again, so it's time for the weekly review from our peripatetic theater critic, J. Wynn Rousuck. This week, she spotlights Waitress, the new traveling production of the hit Broadway musical that's now on stage at Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre. Based on the popular 2007 movie of the same name, the musical stage version of Waitress is energized by an all-female creative team, with orig...

It's another edition of Midday at the Movies, our monthly get-together with Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday and the Maryland Film Festival's founding director, Jed Dietz, who's just back from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. They join Tom in Studio A with a report on the mood at Sundance, as the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements continue to be a force at festivals and award...

Ira Aldridge was 17 years old when he left his father’s home to pursue his dream of becoming a professional actor in England. Born in 1807 New York, Aldridge grew up during at a time when chattel slavery was legal, and black actors who performed works associated with Anglo culture, were met with chastisement and violence. Alone in a strange land, Ira would go on to become one of the most celebrate...

In a speech that was Bill Clinton-esque in its length, President Donald Trump called for unity, while Trump outlined his vision for a “safe, strong and proud America.” Touching on many themes he embraced during his campaign, Trump took an hour and 20 minutes to take credit for a booming stock market and low unemployment. He declared that the war on American energy was over, that the veterans admin...

Today, another edition of the Midday Healthwatch with Dr. Leana Wen, the Health Commissioner of Baltimore City. Lawmakers in Annapolis and Washington are wrestling with competing views on prescription drug affordability, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, legislation to stem the rising tide of opioid addiction, and changes to the Affordable Care Act, among other issues. What are the feds and...

Last month, Ajit Pai, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, made good on a promise to repeal Obama- era regulations that governed the internet. By a vote of 3-2, the commission ended regulations that required Internet Service Providers to treat all content the same. Before, ISPs couldn’t pick and choose which content loaded fast and which loaded more slowly, or not...

On today's Midday NewsWrap, Tom begins with a review of some of the week's major national and international developments, from President Trump's ----America First---- speech this morning to the World Economic Forum in Davos, to the bombshell New York Times report that the President ordered the firing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller last June, but then backed off. Tom is joined on the line by jou...

Every Thursday, our resident theater critic, J. Wynn Rousuck, joins Tom in studio to regale us with her review of a local theater production. This week, she spotlights a new production of the opera Trouble in Tahiti at Stillpointe Theatre. Originally composed and conducted by the legendary Leonard Bernstein (whose other works include ----West Side Story----), this opera centers on a young suburban...

When actress Alyssa Milano tweeted the words Me Too, at the peak of the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault scandal last October, the response from women around the globe was immediate. In 24 hours her message had garnered tens of thousands views and shares across twitter. Me Too had become a beacon for women to rally around and share their stories of sexual abuse and harassment. To date #MeToo has be...

The African Children’s Choir joins Tom in Studio A to preview their concert tonight in Baltimore. These 18 young singers, aged between 7 and 10 years, are all from Uganda. They are on a 9-month, nearly 50-concert tour of the United States. After Baltimore, they'll venture across the mid-Atlantic, up to New England and then out west to Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. Over the years, the Afr...