Midday

(This conversation originally aired on September 13, 2021) Welcome to an archive edition of Midday. Nearly 70% of Americans have a Facebook account, and Facebook’s unrelenting mission is to add even more people to its huge list of subscribers, and to keep all of us glued to those accounts for as long as possible, every day. Executing that mission has made Facebook insanely profitable. The co...

It's the 6th anniversary of the universally beloved What Ya Got Cookin-Thanksgiving Edition, here on Midday . Last Thanksgiving, the rule of thumb was cancel, or keep it super small. COVID infections are once again on the rise, but lots of people, even those as young as five, have been vaccinated and boosted, so many more people are venturing back to the Thanksgiving table. Our mission here on Mid...

Now, we turn our attention to two of Maryland’s most prominent voices in the world of poetry. A little later in the program, Tom speaks with our state’s poet laureate, Grace Cavalieri . But we're joined first by Baltimore poet Kondwani Fidel. Last year, he released his debut poetry EP “The Mud Was Made For Us.” He’s also the author of the non-fiction book, The Anti-Ra...

The COP26 UN Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow, Scotland, ended 10 days ago, with deep divisions between some of the world’s largest contributors to global warming still intact. President Joe Biden tried to re-assert American leadership on climate, and following his return from Scotland, the House passed his bipartisan infrastructure bill, which contains $47 billion in environmental fu...

Today it’s Midday on Development.   A little later in this hour, Tom speaks with Klaus Philipsen , an architect, urban planner and the president of ArchPlan, Inc . , a design firm in Baltimore. He also hosts The Community Architect blog and he's the author of Baltimore: Reinventing an Industrial Legacy City.   Philipsen discusses the proposal to revive the old "dollar house" homest...

Today on Midday, Tom's Newsmaker guest is Baltimore City Police Commissioner Michael Harrison. So far this year, 303 people have been victims of homicide in Baltimore City, and 639 other people have shot. By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard the reports of what everyone refers to as the “grim milestone” we passed earlier this week when five-year old Nivea Anderson became the city&rsq...

It's time for another visit from Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins Tom this week with her review of The Great Leap, playwright Lauren Yee 's 2018 socio-political fable about personal ambition, set amidst a Sino-American "friendship" basketball match in 1989, on the eve of China's brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. The play is getting a regional premie...

In the fall of 1968, just a few months after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, an extraordinary thing happened in northwestern Montgomery County. A Black Methodist church in a community called Quince Orchard, and two nearby White Methodist churches decided to merge into one congregation. Cities across the country, including Baltimore, were...

Every ten years, following a national census, Congressional seats are re-allocated, and Congressional district boundaries are re-drawn to assure that each member of the House represents roughly the same number of constituents. As the population of the US shifts, certain states will lose seats in the House, while others will gain them. New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, West Virginia...

Tom's guest for the hour today is Celeste Headlee , an award-winning public media journalist and author who is heard frequently as a guest host on NPR and American Public Media. Her TEDx Talk about how to have better conversations has been viewed more than 26 million times, and she has served as a consultant to companies around the world on race, diversity and inclusion. She is the author of three...

Today on Midday , we examine the challenges facing nursing homes, home-care providers and the elder-care industry as a whole. Nursing homes, like hospitals and other care providers, are facing severe staff shortages. The pandemic has led to labor shortages throughout the economy. Restaurants have had to scale back hours because they can’t find enough servers and cooks. The supply chain has b...

Tom Hall 's guest today is the acclaimed author, Louise Erdrich . She is the author of 18 novels, a collection of short stories, three collections of poetry, more than a half a dozen children's books, and two works of non-fiction. She has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award; she has also won a National Book Award, and last June, she won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her nove...

Is it time to bring back Baltimore's "Dollar House" program of the 1970s? WYPR’s Aaron Henkin — the award-winning producer and host of Out of the Blocks , which ended a nine-year run a few months ago — looked into that question, submitted by listener Tracy Gosson, for a recent episode of Aaron's new podcast, The Maryland Curiosity Bureau. Aaron joins Tom to discuss the podcast, a...

Today on Midday, a few different takes on the subject of housing. A little later, WYPR’s Aaron Henkin , the host of WYPR's new podcast The Maryland Curiosity Bureau, will join me to talk about his reporting on the Baltimore dollar house program. Then, our theater critic, J Wynn Rousuck, will review a production of Rent, the Tony Award and Pulitzer prize-winning musical that opened on Broadwa...

Tom's next guest is Derecka Purnell . She is an activist and human rights lawyer with a law degree from Harvard University. She's a scholar-in-residence with Columbia University's Initiative for Social Justice , and a columnist for The Guardian . She's also the author of a new book that challenges our long-held assumptions about policing and incarceration. In fact, she argues that police departmen...

President Biden was here in Baltimore two weeks ago for a CNN town hall at Baltimore Center Stage, and this afternoon, he’ll be in town again to tout the infrastructure bill that passed after months of grueling, messy internecine fights within his party. With the aid of 13 Republicans, House Democrats passed the package that the Senate had passed last August. The bill passed without the supp...

Tom's next guest today is a long-time advocate for police reform. Ray Kelly is the former director of the No Boundaries Coalition , which works on behalf of people in the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor in West Baltimore. Ray was a leader of the West Baltimore Commission on Police Misconduct . He also served as the chair of the Community Oversight Task Force , which was mandated by the 2017 consent d...

Tom's Newsmaker guest today is the Baltimore City State’s Attorney , Marilyn Mosby . A week and a half ago, she released the names of 91 current and former Baltimore City Police Officers she says can’t be trusted to testify in trials. The Baltimore Sun reports that 26 of the officers on the "Do-Not-Call" list are on active duty. Twenty-four of those officers have criminal cases that ar...

According to the MD Center for Economic Policy, MD spends about $1 billion dollars per year incarcerating roughly 20,000 people convicted of crimes. A third of them come from the city of Baltimore. In 2015, our state spent $17 million dollars locking up people from one neighborhood alone: Sandtown Winchester in West Baltimore. For many of those who are given long sentences, their lives end while t...

Baltimore Ceasefire 365 is a volunteer organization founded 4 years ago to try to end the epidemic of violence in Baltimore, where so far this year, according to the Baltimore Police Department, 289 people have been murdered. Four weekends each year, the group holds events to encourage those who would do harm to act peacefully, and to help those who are in danger or in mourning. On the Monday foll...

It's time for another visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins Tom Hall this week with her review of Scharf's Shorts, a collection of short works by local playwright Mark Scharf , presented live in-the-round to open the Spotlighters Theatre 's 59th season. Erin Klarner & Jen Sizer direct an ensemble cast in the eight-play bill: Monument: Nick Cherone & Sean Eustis; Our...

It’s Midday at the Movies, our monthly look at films and filmmaking, with Ann Hornaday , 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 founding director of the Maryland Film Festival and Parkway Theater . How are independent movie houses faring as COVID numbers go down? Have you headed back to...

Tom's next guest is Stewart Bainum . He is a successful businessman (as board chair of the worldwide Choice Hotels chain), philanthropist, and former Maryland delegate and senator. Last year, he tried to buy the Baltimore Sun with the intention of turning it into a non-profit news organization focusing on local news. That effort was rebuffed by the Sun’s owners, a hedge fund called Alden Glo...

It’s Midday with the Mayor . Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott joins us on the first Thursday of every month to talk about how he and his administration are meeting the challenges our city faces. Today, Tom and the mayor discuss how the City Health Department will provide newly-approved COVID vaccinations for 5 to 11 year-olds through school vaccine clinics; how the mayor's new Office of Recover...

Today, a conversation with John McWhorter , one of America’s foremost Black public intellectuals. He’s a linguist and historian who teaches at Columbia University and writes a column and newsletter for the New York Times .  He hosts a podcast about language called Lexicon Valley , and is the author of more than 20 books. In his latest, he writes: “ America’s sense of w...