Midday

And now, a conversation with a fan favorite of NPR listeners, aficionados of televised comedy specials, lovers of late-night TV, and just about anybody who has been paying attention over the last several decades. Tom is joined by Paula Poundstone . She is a frequent panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me , the host of the hit podcast, No One Listens to Paula Poundstone and a stand-u...

President Joe Biden wraps up his appearance at the world leader’s summit of the UN Climate Change Conference today. Biden addressed the conference yesterday . Later this afternoon he’ll take questions from reporters, after which he will leave Glasgow, Scotland and return to Washington. His press conference is scheduled to begin at 3:30. WYPR will carry NPR’s live coverage. The Pr...

Today, it’s Midday on Tech .  Frances Haugen has worked at several tech companies, including Facebook , whose corporate name has just been changed to Meta . When she testified to Congress recently and subsequently released thousands of internal Facebook documents, she exposed the extent to which Facebook designs algorithms that are intended to keep users glued to the program, and the pe...

We close our Midday on the Arts program today with our weekly visit from Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck . She joins Tom with her review of The Thanksgiving Play, a new production of Native American playwright and MacArthur fellow Larissa Fasthorse 's popular seasonal satire about cultural myths and "white wokeness," now at the Olney Theatre Center . Raymond O. Caldwell directs the wickedly...

It’s Midday on the Arts.   Tom's next guest is an actor who is part of the three-person cast of a new play that will receive its world premiere this weekend at Baltimore's An die Musik Live performance space. It’s called Hand Through the Veil .  Terrence Fleming , an Alabama-born artist who's been living and acting in Baltimore since 2016, plays the famed magician and escape...

Today, it’s Midday on the Arts .  Coming up a little later in the hour (and posted separately to our Web page), Tom talks with Terrance Fleming , an actor who stars in a world-premiere play this weekend, and our theater critic, J Wynn Rousuck will review the new show at the Olney Theater Center. But we begin with Cara Ober . She’s an artist, arts writer, curator, and founding edit...

President Joe Biden met with House Democrats this morning to discuss a framework that he says can pass the Senate, hoping to garner a commitment from his caucus to vote for the infrastructure bill that has already passed the Senate. He made comments on the framework in the East Room of the White House about a half hour ago. At this hour, he is on his way to Rome for a meeting with the Pope and to...

Now, a conversation about a dispute over the Harford County Health Department’s handling of the COVID 19 pandemic. Dr. David Bishai is a public health expert on the adjunct faculty of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was abruptly removed as the County’s Health Officer last Friday. We will hear from Dr. Bishai later in the program, but first, we're joined by Maryl...

Tom's next guest is Dr. James Karmel . He’s a Professor of History at Harford Community College and the Director of the Harford Civil Rights Project . The Project team has put together an interactive online and mobile-app exhibition that chronicles the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s in Harford County. Dr. James Karmel joins us on Zoom from Bel Air, Maryland, to tell us abou...

Tom's Newsmaker guest today is Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, Jr. The County is Maryland’s third largest jurisdiction. The Towson Loop was recently introduced to address traffic congestion in the County Seat, and Mr. Olszewski is moving to electrify the County’s fleet of cars. School construction and renovation remain hot topics. And like other large and small cities and...

It’s the Midday Healthwatch with Dr. Leana Wen . Dr. Wen is a visiting professor at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health , a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution , a contributing columnist at The Washington Post, a CNN medical analyst, and mother of two. The former Baltimore City Health Commissioner joins us every month with the latest on...

Tom's guest for the hour today is the acclaimed writer, Elizabeth Strout . She is the best-selling author of eight novels and many short stories. She won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Olive Kitteridge . A film series adaption of that book starring Frances McDormand on HBO won eight Emmy Awards. Elizabeth Strout’s previous novel, Olive Again , re-visited Olive Kitteridge....

Time again for a visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck, who joins Tom this week with her review of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company 's live production of Mohegan playwright Madeline Sayet 's Where We Belong , being presented at Baltimore's Center Stage . Directed by Mei Ann Teo , Where We Belong is a one-woman autobiographical narrative in which playwright Sayet weaves together Shakespear...

Now, we turn our attention to a program at the University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB) that is working to address the lack of diversity in the biomedical field, by inspiring students to pursue STEM-based careers. It’s called the CURE Scholars Program . CURE stands for Continuing Umbrella of Research Experiences . Now in its sixth year at UMB, the CURE Scholars Program partners with three West...

We begin today with Midday on Politics .   Sean Yoes joins me. He’s a former columnist for the Afro Newspaper , and as he keeps his journalist's eye trained on the local political scene, he's venturing into some independent media projects. He’s now hosting a new podcast called Sean Yoes is Live from West Baltimore . As of tomorrow, you can find that on YouTube. He’s also mad...

Tom's Newsmaker guest today is Dr. Sonja Santelises, the CEO of the Baltimore City Public Schools. Students and teachers have returned to their classrooms. Teachers and staff are required to be vaccinated, and everybody is wearing masks while indoors. As Liz Bowie reports in the Baltimore Sun, the City School system is the only one in the Baltimore metro region that tests unvaccinated students and...

Tom's next guest is Emily Sullivan , WYPR ’s City Hall and politics reporter, who joins us with news that less than 20% of the $9.2 million donated to competitive candidates in Baltimore’s 2020 mayoral race came from city residents, according to a new report from Maryland PIRG Foundation. Sullivan says the left-leaning advocacy group found that non-individuals, such as PACs and corpora...

Jury selection began yesterday in the trial of three White men accused of chasing and killing Ahmaud Arbery , a 25-year-old Black man from Brunswick, Georgia. Video from the incident in February of last year shows two of the men confronting and shooting Mr. Arbery as he was jogging. The men are charged by Georgia authorities with malice and felony murder. They have also been indicted with federal...

Maryland’s COVID numbers continue to trend in the right direction. The CDC reports that more than 85% of adults in our state have had at least one dose of the COVID vaccine. That’s about six points better than the national average. Our positivity rate is down about 31% since August, and hospitalizations are down since their peak at 65% a few months ago. Our state’s wealthiest jur...

Now, it’s Midday on Transportation.  Dr. Lawrence Brown of Morgan State University coined the phrase “The Black Butterfly and the White L” to describe the boundaries between Black and White neighborhoods in Baltimore, and the socio-economic disparities between them. A new report on transit equity shows environmental and public health impacts within those boundaries as well....

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell died this morning at the age of 84. In a statement posted on Facebook, his family said that Gen. Powell was fully vaccinated, but he died due to complications from COVID 19.Gen. Powell was the first African American to serve as national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and US secretary of state. Joining Tom to reflect on the legacy of G...

Tom's guest today is the acclaimed author, Alice McDermott . She is the winner of a National Book Award. Three of her novels have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and she’s garnered many other prizes and accolades in a career that has spanned 40 years, and counting. She’s an insightful observer of the passing parade and her prose is a delight to encounter. Books like Charming Bil...

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is traditionally one of the biggest shopping days of the year; the kick-off of a shopping frenzy that retailers hope will sustain them for many months. This year, those hopes may be dashed. Supply chain problems are affecting sectors up and down the economy. What can sellers and buyers expect this year? Joining Tom now is Dr. Tinglong Dai, Professor of Ope...

In Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott ’s Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan , Oakland, California is held-up as a city that has had significant success in reducing violence. In 2019, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence published a report entitled A Case Study in Hope: Lessons from Oakland’s Remarkable Reduction in Violence. It documented that between 2012-2019, shootings and...

It's time for another visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins Tom this week with her review of Everyman Theatre 's live (and streamed) production of Flyin' West . Pearl Cleage 's 1992 play tells the story of four 19th-century Black women forging a new life, working their own land, and beating the odds as strong-willed homesteaders in the all-Black town of Nicodemus, Kansas. Di...