Midday

Today on Midday , a conversation about the violence that persists on our city’s streets, and what can be done about it. Last week, four children were injured when gun fire erupted in a largely blighted block of North Milton Avenue in the Broadway East neighborhood. One girl was 17, two girls were 14 year old twins. The other victim was a 12 year old boy. They were among the more than 500 peo...

It's time for another visit with Midday theater critic, J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins Tom this week with her review of Baltimore Center Stage 's live production of The Swindlers: A True-ish Tall Tale . Playwright Noah Diaz , the author of last season’s critically acclaimed Richard & Jane & Dick & Sally, based this new, Center Stage-commissioned play "loosely" on the real-life explo...

There has never been anyone like Muhammad Ali . The uniquely charismatic boxer from Louisville, Kentucky, who died in 2016 at the age of 74, was known for many things. One was the clownish bragging he did before all his bouts, like his memorable rant at a September 1974 press conference before the “Rumble in the Jungle,” one of his famous fights with George Foreman, which earned him th...

Today, it’s Midday with the Mayor, and Mayor Colin Byrd joins us. He’s a progressive Democrat who was elected in 2019 -- at the age of 27 -- as the youngest mayor ever elected to lead the city of Greenbelt, Maryland , his native city. One of the mayor’s initiatives concerns reparations for African Americans and Indigenous people who, for decades after the town's creation as a pla...

Tom's next guest is the internationally acclaimed jazz singer, Dee Dee Bridgewater . She’s won three Grammy Awards, and a Tony Award. She hosted a show called JazzSet for 23 years on NPR. She is a UN Goodwill Ambassador , and in 2017 was named an NEA Jazz Master . She's just released a new CD called Memphis: Yes, I'm Ready . And she’s appearing now in Baltimore at Todd Barkan 's Keysto...

Tom's guest today is Dr. Jelani Cobb, one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, a scholar and commentator who has offered invaluable insights in the study of racial equality in America in several books, and as a staff writer at the New Yorker. Dr. Cobb, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary, teaches journalism at Columbia University and is a frequent commentator on...

Tom's next guest is Deborah Ramsey . She’s a former detective with the Baltimore City Police Department. In 2016, she was named an Open Society Institute Community Fellow. In 2015, the year of the riots and uprising in Baltimore that followed the funeral of Freddie Gray, she began a program for children in the Penn North neighborhood, called Unified Efforts . Now, she is looking to expand th...

Tom's next guest today is Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Letitia Dzirasa , who gives us an update on the city’s progress in dealing with the delta variant and getting more people vaccinated against COVID-19 , as a Johns Hopkins study gives the city high marks for its efforts so far. Plus, the rationales for mask and vaccination mandates, and why the city's holding off for now on thos...

We begin today with an update on the recall election of California Governor Gavin Newsom . Millions of California voters have cast mail-in ballots over the past several weeks. Today (Tuesday) is Election Day in the state, the last day voters can make their sentiments known. As of today, almost 40% of registered voters have already cast their early voting or mail-in ballots, indicating a bigger tur...

Nearly 70% of Americans have a Facebook account, and the giant social media platform's unrelenting mission is 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 company is also unquestionably problematic and unapologetically purposeful in its manipulation and marketing of our personal data, most of which w...

Tomorrow, America will acknowledge that it's been 20 years since terrorists in four hijacked passenger jets launched coordinated attacks that brought death and destruction to New York City, the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The victims’ families will gather at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in lower Manhattan to remember their loved ones. The first responders &mda...

Tom's Newsmaker guest today is US Senator Chris Van Hollen (D., Md). Last evening, President Biden outlined a 6-part strategy to get the country ahead of the curve on the COVID-19 pandemic. The strategy includes requiring some businesses to mandate vaccines or testing. Federal government employees and contractors working for the government will also be required to be vaccinated. As it has through...

Tom's next guest is Nicholas Jones , the director and senior advisor of Race and Ethnicity Research and Outreach in the US Census Bureau’s Population Division . Their conversation spotlights the changing make-up of America that is revealed in the new data from the 2020 Census . The largest race or ethnicity group in the United States is still the group that identifies as White alon...

On this month's edition of Midday with the Mayor , Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott   joins host Tom Hall to discuss some of the key issues on the mayor's agenda, including: encouraging data on the city's efforts to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, impending vaccine mandates for city employees, the 2020 Census and the Mayor’s Growth Plan to reverse the city's declining population, the Homeown...

It's time for another visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck , who joins Tom this week with her review of Single Carrot Theatre 's production of Every Brilliant Thing , a solo show being performed outdoors in multiple neighborhood venues with a rotating cast of three SCT actors. Co-written in 2016 by British playwright Duncan MacMillan with Irish actor Jonny Donahoe , Every Brilliant Thi...

Today on  Midday,  lessons that can be learned from previous pandemics. Tom's guest is  Dr. William Foege . He was the director of the CDC in the late 1970s and early 80s, and he was instrumental in the eradication of smallpox. What can his former agency do moving forward to put a nail in the coffin of COVID 19? Email us at midday@wypr.org, tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-6...

Tom's next guest is the legendary singer, Johnny Mathis . He has been touring and recording for 65 years, and in that time, he's recorded 79 original albums of love ballads, many of which have become part of the American song book. Mathis, who turns 86 on September 30th, is currently on his "65 Years of Romance" tour across the country. He’ll be appearing at the Music Center at Strathmore in...

In 2013, the Human Rights Campaign started tracking violence against the Transgender community in the United States. Violence against trans people has increased in recent years. In 2020, more trans people were victims of hate crimes than at any other time. So far this year, nationally, more than 30 trans people have been victims of homicide. Today on Midday , conversations with trans activists who...

(This conversation was originally aired on July 23, 2021) Welcome to an archive edition of Midday .  Tom's guest on this Labor Day broadcast is a country music artist from Baltimore. Brittney Spencer has been making her mark on the country music scene of late. Spotify and Pandora call her an artist to watch. She’s been featured in national media, and her debut EP, Compassion, has garner...

(This conversation was originally aired on August 3, 2021) On this archive edition of Midday , Tom's guest is Dr. Leana Wen , an emergency room physician who is the former Health Commissioner of Baltimore, a columnist for The Washington Post , a professor of public health at George Washington University , a non-resident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution , and a medical analyst for CNN . S...

(This conversation was originally aired on March 3, 2021) Good afternoon and welcome to an archive edition of Midday.  My guest is the author, George Saunders . He’s published hundreds of short stories, and he’s the winner of the Man Booker Prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo . Saunders’ short stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and many...

(This conversation was originally aired on July 6, 2021) Today, on this archive edition of Midday on Politics ,  a look back at last year’s chaotic and unpredictable Presidential election cycle. In a new, comprehensive study of the 2020 race for the Democratic nomination, journalist Edward-Isaac Dovere reports that after losses in early primaries in the beginning of 2020, a despondent J...

(This conversation was originally broadcast on June 18, 2021) Tom's guest on this archived edition of Midday is the author and historian Annette Gordon Reed . She is best-known for her study of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Her book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her latest book is a beautif...

(This conversation was originally aired on July 12, 2021) On this archive edition of Midday , Tom's guest is the internationally acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie . She is the author of the novels Americanah , Purple Hibiscus , and Half of a Yellow Sun.   She has also published best-selling collections of essays and short stories. She has won several prestigious awards, including the...

(This conversation was originally aired on July 20, 2021) Welcome to this archive edition of Midday.  Today, a conversation about Nancy Pelosi , the most influential and powerful woman in American political history. Born and raised in a tight-knit Italian family in a home on Albemarle Street in the Little Italy neighborhood of Baltimore, Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi is the daughter of a thr...