Midday

Joining Tom now are two African American activists and organizers who are part of the leadership team steering The Baltimore Children and Youth Fund. The Fund was created in 2017, after being approved overwhelmingly by voters in a referendum the year before. The Fund is virtually unprecedented in that its assets come from city property tax revenues, but the process for distribution of those assets...

President Joe Biden has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu several times since the conflict in the Middle East began last week, amid increasing calls from the international community to stop the violence that has killed more than 200 Palestinans and a dozen Israelis. On Tuesday, President Biden told the Israeli Prime Minister that he expected a “significant de-escalation on the...

On today’s edition of Back to the Garden , we’ll check in again with two of our favorite green gurus: Denzel Mitchell, the Deputy Director of the Farm Alliance of Baltimore and a leader of the Alliance's new Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy ...and Carrie Engel , the veteran greenhouse manager and plant specialist at Valley View Farms Nursery in Cockeysville. They join us on our dig...

We open today's edition of Back to the Garden with an update on something else that's getting back to the garden this month. In many parts of our listening area, back by entomological inevitability, the Brood X (Ten) cicadas are once again making a grand entrance onto the scene, for the first time since 2004. In just a little bit, we’ll check in with Denzel Mitchell, the Deputy Director of t...

A central tenet of Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s approach to crime reduction in our city is the certainty that the traditional strategies that Baltimore has employed for decades have come up short, and that public safety must be re-imagined if the levels of violent crime are to be brought down. Murders and non-fatal shootings have for so long been a part of the landscape of certain neighbo...

Yesterday, Mayor Brandon Scott issued an 11th hour veto of a hotly debated bill designed to give renters more options for paying security deposits to their landlords.  WYPR’s Health and Housing reporter Sarah Y. Kim joins Tom  with details on the Mayor's decision, and reactions to it from the City Council and city housing advocates. Sarah Y. Kim joins us on our digital line. Email...

(This conversation was originally broadcast on March 22, 2021) Tom's guest on this archive edition of Midday has written a thoughtful and insightful books on the subject of racial inequality. Heather McGhee is the former head of the think tank, Demos, an organization that focuses on inequality. She is now the chair of the board of Color of Change , an on-line racial-justice advocacy group with 7 m...

(This conversation was originally broadcast on March 3, 2021) Tom's guest in this archive edition of Midday is the American author, George Saunders . He’s published hundreds of short stories, and his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2017. Saunders’ short stories have been published in The New Yorker , Harper’s and many other magazines, a...

(This conversation originally aired on March 16, 2021) Tom's guest on this archive edition of Midday is Alec MacGillis , an award-winning reporter for ProPublica whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and The Atlantic , among other publications. His latest book is about Amazon, and about the seismic shifts that it has caused not only in the American economy, but in...

Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins Tom today with her review of Serious Adverse Effects , playwright Derek Lee McPhatter 's contemporary — and timely — drama about medical ethics. The world-premiere play, developed under the aegis of the National Black Theatre’s I AM Soul playwright residency program, is being staged by Rapid Lemon Productions , presented live before mas...

With vaccinations up and COVID cases down, this summer’s travel season is expected to be considerably better than last year’s. Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer, is a little over a week away, so today, we thought it would be good to catch up with the mayor of Ocean City , a small town (pop. 7,102) on Maryland's Atlantic shore that's a big destination for families acr...

The worst of the COVID-19 pandemic might be behind us, but the pandemic's economic impact remains significant. With more than 8 million people still out of work across the country, the most recent jobs report showed considerably fewer jobs added than had been expected. Even before the pandemic, the Federal Reserve reported that 40% of Americans do not have enough savings to cover an unexpected exp...

Four times each year, a grassroots organization called Baltimore Ceasefire 365 holds sacred space rituals and a variety of other events to call attention to the efforts that so many in our community are making to stop the violence that so often plagues some of our neighborhoods. After each Ceasefire Weekend, we invite one of the co-organizers of the movement to Midday to talk about this important...

Today on Midday : What will it take for cities like Baltimore to bounce back, not only from the ravages of the Coronavirus pandemic, but from the problems that have plagued many mid-sized American urban centers for years prior to COVID 19? We begin today with a conversation about a new book that looks at the challenges facing six cites: Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and S...

Today on Midday : We're looking at how cities like Baltimore can recover, not only from the ravages of the Coronavirus pandemic, but from the problems that have plagued many mid-sized American urban centers for years prior to COVID-19. Now, we turn to two keen observers of the local business environment and Baltimore's rapidly changing cityscape: Ethan McLeod is associate editor at Baltimore Busin...

Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins Tom today with her review of Berta, Berta , the latest virtual (.i.e, filmed) production from Baltimore's Everyman Theatre. Playwright Angelica Cheri 's moving drama, about a romance rocked by a man's shocking crime, world-premiered three years ago at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Cheri's play gets a new rend...

It’s the Maryland Film Festival edition of Midday at the Movies . The annual film festival runs from May 19-27 . Once again, it will be an all-virtual affair, although people holding an all-access pass will be invited to a few in-person screenings. The Parkway Theater does remain closed at the moment. Some local theaters are beginning to re-emerge from the pandemic hiatus. The Regal Theaters...

Now, Tom welcome back to the show Dr. Julie Schablitsky , Chief Archaeologist with the Cultural Resources Division of the Maryland Department of Transportation 's State Highway Administration. Dr. Schablitsky led the MDOT/SHA team that recently discovered important new information about a once-enslaved Black man named Ben Ross, the father of famed abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Ha...

It’s Midday with the Mayor , as Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott joins us live. The city’s seemingly intractable epidemic of homicides continues. Gov. Larry Hogan has been critical of the Mayor and other city leaders on their crime-fighting efforts. Can the city count on the state’s assistant to turn the tide? Will the Mayor sign a controversial bill giving renters alternatives...

Today on Midday, two conversations about policing and police reform... It was a familiar scene: the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York on Monday delivered an impassioned eulogy of a Black man killed by police. Andrew Brown, killed during a traffic stop in which police were trying to serve a warrant, was laid to rest in North Carolina on Monday. Last week, a judge ordered that video tape of the incident...

Today's edition of Midday at the Museum continues with the new executive director of The Jewish Museum of Maryland , Dr. Sol Davis . He comes to Charm City from Tucson, Arizona, where he was director of The Jewish History Museum and Holocaust History Center . He joins us today on Zoom… The Jewish Museum will host a virtual program next Tuesday night. Dr. Ilana Kaufman , the Executive Direct...

Today it's Midday at the Museum . Tom's guests are the new executive directors of two of Baltimore’s most cherished institutions. A little later, Tom speaks with Dr. Sol Davis, who has recently taken the reins of The Jewish Museum of Maryland . But we begin with Terri Lee Freeman . Before coming to Baltimore, she served for six years as the director of the National Civil Rights Museum in Mem...

Every year, the City of Baltimore sells liens on properties in an effort to collect past-due property taxes and other charges. This year’s sale is scheduled to take place in two weeks. Yesterday, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced that the city will remove some homes from its annual tax sale so that people, particularly first-time homeowners, aren’t put in danger of losing their h...

About 105 million adults in the United States have been fully vaccinated against COVID 19. New England states have the highest percentage of those who are inoculated. MD ranks 15th in the country, with 2.1 million people fully vaccinated so far. Finding a vaccine is no longer a problem. Convincing everyone to get a vaccine is now the focus of public health officials and experts. Today on Midday, i...

They’re baaaaack….live concerts, that is. The great ‘cellist Amit Peled — heard in the opening of this segment playing Ennio Morricone's Love Theme from his score for Cinema Paradiso — is the founder and music director of a chamber orchestra called the Mount Vernon Virtuosi. A week from tomorrow, he will conduct the group and play as a soloist in a concert that marks...