Midday

It’s Midday with the Mayor.  As he does each month*, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott joins Tom Hall for an unrehearsed conversation about key issues on the city's agenda. Top officials in the city are at loggerheads about a deal that the Scott Administration negotiated with BGE to manage the city’s elaborate, 741-mile underground conduit system , which houses electric and fiber optic cables for BGE...

Midday on Foreign Affairs continues now as Tom welcomes Eric Hontz to the program. He is the director of the Center for Accountable Investment at the Center for International Private Enterprise , a Washington based affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Endowment for Democracy. Mr. Hontz has worked in Ukraine for years, beginning as a Peace Corps volunteer, and continuing as a bu...

Today on Midday , we turn our focus to foreign affairs , with conversations about Israel and Ukraine. Later in the hour, Tom speaks with an American lawyer and consultant who works with businesses in Ukraine about how Ukrainians are coping with the ravages of Russian aggression. But we begin with Israel, which is experiencing tremendous internal political tension and terrible new incidents of viol...

Tom's Midday Newsmaker guest today is Shantay Jackson , the Director of the Baltimore Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) . Director Jackson is in charge of implementing the Mayor’s plan to reduce violence in Baltimore City. At the heart of that plan is the GVRS , or Group Violence Reduction Strategy , a pilot of which was begun last year in the Western District. MONSE has...

Jimmy Carter , at the age of 98, is America’s oldest former president. Last week, the Carter family announced that Mr. Carter was entering hospice at his home in Plains, Georgia. As the world prepares to bid farewell to the 39th U.S. president, re-assessments of his extraordinary life and legacy have begun in earnest, drawing new attention to the unique sweep and impact of Jimmy Carter's accomplis...

We open this edition of Midday with music by Gustav Holst ("Mars," from his "Planets" Suite), in a performance by the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Jonathon Heyward . Mr. Heyward, to borrow a phrase, is young, gifted and Black. And next season, he will become the new Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra . A 30 year-old from Charleston, South Carolina, he is the first person...

Tom's Newsmaker guest today is Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, Jr . Concerns about public safety are on the front burner for County residents after a fatal shooting in the heart of Towson this week and other instances of violence in the County Seat. Also, what does the future hold for Baltimore County Public Schools ? Superintendent Darryl Williams will leave in June after a controver...

It's time for another visit with Midday ' theater critic, J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins us each week with her reviews of Maryland's regional stage. Today she spotlights the new ArtsCentric production of Crowns , playwright Regina Taylor 's spirited musical tribute to the traditional Black church, adapted from the book by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry . The musical — which blends gospel, poet...

BUILD — the acronym for the influential community action organization known as Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development — has published a report that proposes new ways to change the trajectory of our city, which is losing population quickly, and whose huge stock of vacant houses remains a fundamental problem. The actual number of vacant houses in Baltimore City is difficult to quantify, but m...

Today on Midday , guest host Jayne Miller explores the prospects for adopting a regional approach to governing Baltimore City and Baltmore County, and possibly reunifying them under a single regional government... Since the mid 1800s, when the Maryland legislature split Baltimore City and Baltimore County into two jurisdictions, the two have operated more or less independently, each with its own l...

Welcome to Midday , with guest host Jayne Miller   sitting in for Tom Hall. Today, our focus is Baltimore's transit system, and the associated development it  generates. In 2015, then- Governor Larry Hogan abruptly eliminated the Red Line project –an east west transit line planned to run from Baltimore County on the west side to Canton in Baltimore City on the east side. Now, Governor Wes Moore ha...

Today on this Presidents' Day edition of Midday, guest host Jayne Miller , the award-winning former WBAL-TV investigative reporter who retired last summer, begins a three-day stint in the Midday host chair while Tom Hall i s away. Our focus today: the future of work. The pandemic has had a lasting impact on how people work, when they work and where they want to work. Remote and hybrid options are...

It's time for another visit with Midday 's theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck , who stops by each week with her reviews of Maryland's regional stage. Today, she joins guest host Ashley Sterner to tell us about the world-premiere production of Ghost/Writer, the new drama by trans Black playwright Dane Figueroa Edidi at Rep Stage in Columbia. The theater's program describes Edidi's new work as "part his...

Welcome to a science and tech edition of Midday , with guest host Ashley Sterner sitting in once again for Tom Hall. Earlier this month, four unidentified flying objects were spotted moving across U.S. airspace. The first object was eventually identified as a surveillance balloon deployed by the Chinese government, and was shot down once it had floated over the Atlantic coast. The other three obje...

On Midday today, guest host Ashley Sterner spotlights some of the legislative, health policy and spiritual developments in transgender rights here in Maryland. Democratic leaders in the General Assembly have made strengthening abortion rights in Maryland a top priority. This session, they’re expected to approve a bill that would create a state constitutional right to abortion access. If the amendm...

Today on Midday , guest host Emily Sullivan , the enterprise City Hall reporter for The Baltimore Banner, takes a closer look at the annual Baltimore City tax sale. Let’s say you’re a homeowner who had a tough year – and you don’t pay your property tax bill. The city can place a lien on your house… and auction off that lien at the annual tax sale each May. (The online auction is scheduled this yea...

Tom's guest today is the novelist and nonfiction author Madison Smartt Bell . He’s written 13 novels, including a trilogy of historical tales about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, one of which, All Souls Rising , was a 1995 finalist for the National Book Award . He’s also written three collections of short stories and two biographies. His latest book is a novel set in the gritty,...

Tom's guest today is Ben Jealous . In 2008, at the age of 35, he was the youngest person ever chosen to lead the oldest civil rights organization in the United States, the NAACP . He’s a former journalist and executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association . He’s a philanthropist and venture capitalist, and in 2018, he was the Maryland Democratic party’s nominee for governor (w...

So, how did you sleep last night? Did you get up feeling rested and ready, or tired and frustrated? Today on Midday , tackling the problem of insomnia. Tom's guest today is Dr. Jade Wu. She’s a board-certified behavioral sleep psychologist and researcher at the Duke University School of Medicine 's School of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine , and she has written a terrific book that outlines a s...

It's time for another visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins us each week with her reviews of Maryland's regional stage. Today, she spotlights Strand Theatre Company 's new production of Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin 's High School Coven . The topical coming-of-age drama focuses on four high-school girls who form a witches' coven to cope with the pressures of being teenage girls. Th...

Continuing our observance of Black History Month , we begin today with a conversation about an important aspect of Black history here in Maryland concerning breaking the color barrier in the legal profession. Next Thursday night (February 16), the University of Baltimore School of Law will host a symposium with two attorneys and legal historians, who will talk about the first Black lawyers in Mary...

Now, another installment in our Midday in the Neighborhood series, which we are producing in cooperation with our news partners at the Baltimore Banner . Today, we meet a Baltimore native who has toured the world as one of the legendary Harlem Globetrotters , and who has returned to his hometown to give back in a substantial way. Charles "Choo" Smith , who founded and heads a youth coaching enterp...

President Joe Biden gave his second State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress and the nation last night. His 72-minute address, his first since Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, was met with an abundance of partisan heckling, and even a couple of moments of bipartisan approval. Many consider the speech to be Biden’s opening gambit in a bid for re-election...

As soon as he was overwhelmingly elected to a second term as Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis wasted no time re-planting a flag in the national culture war. It is widely assumed that DeSantis will be a candidate for President in 2024 . It remains to be seen whether or not his attempts to alter the curriculum for the teaching of Black History will prove to be a winning strategy in the Republican p...

This past weekend was the city's first Promise of Peace weekend; three days of peace-elevating events organized by the Baltimore Peace Movement . Two of the founders of this community-based, non-profit organization (which last November changed its name from Baltimore Ceasefire 365 ) join us to reflect on the weekend events and their group's new mission focus. Erricka Bridgeford and Letrice Gant ar...