Midday

About a month ago, the Food and Drug Administration authorized booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds, and it lowered the time frame for everyone getting a booster from six months to five months after the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. The CDC made a final recommendation to allow it soon thereafter. About a month from now, it’s expected that the...

It's time for another visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins Tom each week with her reviews of important local stage productions. This week, Judy spotlights the new production of White Noise , a powerful drama about romance, race and politics by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks . Park's 2019 play is now on stage at Studio Theatre in Washington, DC, with Reg...

It's Midday At the Movies , our monthly look at films and filmmaking, and Tom is joined again by two of our favorite movie buffs: Ann Hornaday , the film critic for The Washington Post and author of the best-selling movie-goers guide, Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies ; and Jed Dietz, the founder and former director of the Maryland Film Festival and the historic Parkway Theatre . They'll discu...

Now, Tom welcomes to the show an author whose literary debut is getting a lot of buzz. Her debut collection of stories centers on two Taiwanese American women who have been best friends since the second grade. As adults, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen lead very different lives, but there is a poignant and complex bond that binds them together, through good times and bad. Author Jean Chen Ho   writes...

It’s Midday with the Mayor.   Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott joins Tom Hall for the first half of our show. It’s a sad week for our city. Yesterday, the three firefighters who were killed while fighting a fire in a vacant house that collapsed were honored at a memorial service and laid to rest at Dulaney Memorial Gardens in Timonium. Mayor Scott, Governor Larry Hogan and other...

Today on Midday , It’s Midday on Politic s. We'll be previewing Governor Larry Hogan ’s final State of the State speech tonight, and talking with two political journalists about what bills are moving forward in these first few weeks of the General Assembly Session. One of those bills is called the Juvenile Interrogation Protection Act, and Tom's first guest is its sponsor, State Sen. J...

Today on Midday on the Media, we mark WYPR's 20th anniversary in conversation with Your Public Radio Corporation 's president, WYPR general manager and NPR board chairman, LaFontaine E. Oliver . LaFontaine joined WYPR in 2019, bringing his broad experience in both commercial and public radio, and a perspective that is both local and national. In the years before coming to WYPR, he was the general...

Joining Tom now for today's News Wrap segment is Missy Ryan . She is a foreign affairs reporter with years of experience. She covers diplomacy and national security for the Washington Post.   Ryan was in Ukraine earlier this month , and she has been keeping a close eye on the increasingly tense situation there, where Russia has stationed more than 100,000 troops and amassed tanks and other mi...

We begin today with Tom's Newsmaker guest, Dr. Sonja Santelises. She is the CEO of the Baltimore City Public Schools . We make it a point to check-in with her periodically for an update on what’s happening in our schools.  Tom talks with Dr. Santelises about how the school system is responding to the ongoing surge in omicron variant infections, protocols for COVID mitigation in the clas...

Tom's next guest is Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins us each week with her reviews of regional stage productions. Today she tells us about a new production of William Shakespeare's 1598 comedy, Much Ado About Nothing , that's live on stage at Baltimore's Spotlighters Theatre . Much Ado 's storyline, propelled by some of the Bard's wittiest wordplay, revolves around two romantic co...

We open this segment with the music of Steve Gunn , one of the artists featured in a recent episode of Essential Tremors , a terrific and very popular podcast from WYPR's Podcast Central that explores the musical influences of composers and performers across a full spectrum of musical genres. The podcast debuted in 2018, and it's just dropped its 50th episode. Joining Tom now to talk about the pod...

The Maryland General Assembly began its 2022 Session a couple of weeks ago. Today on the Midday Newswrap , we begin with an update on the early goings-on in Annapolis, with two of our colleagues from the WYPR News Department: State House reporter Callan Tansill-Suddath and News Director Joel McCord. Email us at midday@wypr.org, tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's Newsmaker guest today is Jason Mitchell , the Director of the Baltimore City Department of Public Works. Mitchell comes to Baltimore from Oakland, Califoirnia, where he served as the assistant city administrator. He became acting director at the Baltimore DPW in May of last year, and he was confirmed by the City Council in July. Before the search for his job got underway, the City Council ap...

As in most states around the country, the moratorium on evictions in Maryland ended last year, and certain kinds of evictions have increased ever since. On Tuesday (1/25), the Baltimore City Council held a hearing about evictions. Lawmakers in the General Assembly in Annapolis will consider some measures to protect tenants from evictions during this year’s session. Today on Midday, we explor...

Now, a conversation about the legal ramifications of COVID 19 . If you contract the virus at work and you are unable to work for a period of time, or worse, you suffer from the effects of Long COVID, or you even die of the disease, can your employer be held liable? This is an argument that took place in Washington at the beginning of the pandemic. Republicans were unsuccessful in their attempt to...

Tom's first guest today is the legendary reporter and author Carl Bernstein , who, with his Washington Post colleague, Bob Woodward , broke the story of the Watergate break-in , which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon and the birth of modern investigative journalism. Bernstein has written two memoirs about that iconic story, and a book about his parents’ encounters with McCarthyism dur...

Tom's Newsmaker guest today is Maryland's senior senator, Ben Cardin . Senator Cardin is a longstanding member of the Foreign Relations Committee. President Joe Biden is reportedly considering sending troops to NATO countries near Ukraine, NATO is sending ships and aircraft to the area, and the State Department is beginning to draw down personnel from the US embassy in Kyiv. Is an invasion inevita...

It's another edition of Midday on Ethics. Two weeks ago, a surgical team at the University of Maryland Medical Center transplanted the heart of a genetically altered pig into a 57-year-old man, David Bennett. Mr. Bennett, so far, appears to be doing well. Xenotransplantation, or transplanting animal organs into humans, has long fascinated physicians and scientists, and the success of the operation...

It’s another edition of Midday with the Mayor.   Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott joins us once a month here on Midday to discuss important issues affecting the city and its people. The news of the death of DaShawn McGrier, a Safe Streets violence interrupter in East Baltimore, was another tragic reminder of the intractability of the violence that some Baltimore neighborhoods continue to e...

It's time again for our weekly visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins Tom with her review of the new touring production of the hit 2018 Broadway musical, The Prom , now on stage at Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre. Billed as "a musical comedy about big Broadway stars, a small town, and a love that unites them all," The Prom's touring company comes to Baltimore helmed by a Tony...

Now, we turn our attention to a scathing report issued last week that gives a comprehensive account of the failure of the Baltimore Police Department to identify and root-out the corrupt cops who continually broke the law for years as part of the Gun Trace Task Force . Joining Tom now is journalist Justin Fenton . He covered the unfolding GTTF story for the Baltimore Sun , and he’s written a...

The Maryland State Health Department is reporting nearly 8,900 new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours. 68 fewer people are currently hospitalized for COVID, knocking that number below 3,000 for the first time in a while. Positivity rates that were closer to 30% a couple of weeks ago are now reported to be 18%. We’ve been reporting these findings for two years. How accurate are the number...

Tom's guest is the acclaimed photographer, Mel D. Cole . Celebrated for his compelling images of music and soccer celebrities, his new book of photographs marks a dramatic change of focus. It's titled “American Protest: Photographs 2020–2021.” It features stunning scenes from the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the country following the May 25, 2020 police killing...

It’s been a couple of months since vaccines were approved for young children, ages 5-11, but parents are not rushing to get their kids inoculated. Nationally, only about 17% of kids have gotten their jab so far. And with the arrival of the omicron variant, hospitalizations for children under the age of 18 have rocketed to the highest they’ve been since the pandemic began. Today on Midd...

Tom's guest today is Dr. Thomas Scalea . He’s a professor of Trauma Surgery and Director of the Program in Trauma at the University of Maryland School of Medicine . And for the past 25 years, he's been Physician-in-Chief of the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC). For Dr. Scalea and his staff, the terrible numbers of homicide and non-fatal s...