Midday

Tom's guest for today's Newsmaker interview is Baltimore City Police Commissioner Michael Harrison. A recent Baltimore Police Department report describes the status of the department’s five year plan to reduce violence and implement a court-ordered Consent Decree. Crimes other than homicide are down, and the department claims improvements in managing resources, data, and technology. But as is the...

Tom's guest today is Adam Gopnik, a staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine for the past 34 years. The author of numerous books, including eclectic essay collections and children's novels, Gopnik's latest is an homage to liberalism. The book explores liberalism's roots with the French Renaissance philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, and the so-called Age of Enlightenment, and traces its history thro...

It’s the Midday Healthwatch with Dr. Leana Wen, the former health commissioner of the City of Baltimore. She writes about public health issues as a columnist for The Washington Post, and she teaches public health policy at George Washington University. More than 4.2 million people have been infected with the Coronavirus in the United States. Worldwide, that number is more than 16 million. About 65...

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to keep the nation's theaters shuttered and their stages dark, theater companies have kept busy developing and producing new plays for a variety of streamable, online platforms. Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins us again today to spotlight a few of the best current offerings, from Single Carrot Theatre's we broke up to The Public Theater of New York's T...

It's another edition of the Midday Newswrap, and this week we spotlight the simmering civil rights street protests in Portland, Oregon, and the forceful and controversial actions taken against demonstrators by teams of camouflaged federal Border Patrol agents, tactical units the Trump Administration deployed to the city against the wishes of the Portland mayor and Oregon's governor and legislators...

They entered Congress together in 1987. Congressman Kweisi Mfume (D., Md. 7th) joins Tom to reflect on the legacy of his friend, the late civil rights icon, Representative John Lewis, who died July 17 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. John Lewis's body will lie in state at the US Capitol next week, with a public viewing that will take place outdoors because of the coronavirus pandemic, accord...

Today, it’s Midday on Ethics. We're exploring the ethical issues surrounding digital contact tracing and the clinical trials for a vaccine to combat the Coronavirus. Dr. Jeffrey Kahn is the director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. He oversaw a project that led to a new book with recommendations to ensure that contact tracing is not only effective, but ethical. Dr. Kahn joins us...

Tom's guest for the hour is the journalist and best-selling political author, Thomas Frank. In his provocative new book, "The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism," Mr. Frank contends that most of our notions about populism are wrong. Today “populism” is a term used to describe the racist and illiberal philosophies of Donald Trump and far right extremists in America and Europe. But the rea...

And now, a conversation about housing in Baltimore City. A new Abell Foundation report examined why the rate of homeownership in Baltimore has fallen over the last decade, and the barriers for homeownership, particularly in communities of color. That report's co-author, UMBC researcher Sally Scott, joins Tom. Another Abell report looks at who is leaving Baltimore, and who’s moving in, and examines...

We begin today with former Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, who served as the city’s top cop from 2015-2018. Mr. Davis recently wrote an opinion piece in The Baltimore Sun that pushes back against the idea of defunding the police, and which offers a suggestion for a national approach to police reform, including creating a cabinet-level position of national secretary of police. Email us a...

Coming up at the end of the program today, we remember Congressman John Lewis, who died Friday at the age of 80. In an excerpt from a 2013 Time Magazine interview, the civil rights leader remembers the speech he delivered at the historic March on Washington in August 1963. But first, it’s Midday on the Law. Tom is joined by two legal scholars for a conversation about the recently completed term of...

Tom's Newsmaker guest today is the former Solicitor of Baltimore City, Andre Davis. In 2017, Judge Davis left his seat on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and answered then-Mayor Catherine Pugh's call for him to serve as his hometown’s top lawyer. He was front and center in efforts to recruit Michael Harrison as the city’s police commissioner after Daryl De Sousa resigned amid scandal. When Mayor...

And now, a conversation about the state of local journalism with C. Fraser Smith, a veteran scribe who spent more than 50 years as an award-winning reporter and columnist. Fraser Smith spent a good chunk of his career at The Baltimore Sun, as well as right here at WYPR, where he was our senior news analyst and the host of Inside Maryland Politics. He’s also written several books, including a biogr...

Tom's next guest is Dr. Charissa Cheah, a professor of psychology at UMBC. She received a National Science Foundation Rapid Response Research Award this spring to research the extent of racism toward the Chinese-American community during the pandemic -- and the effect of that racism on parents and their children. Email us at midday@wypr.org, tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Yesterday afternoon, Gov. Larry Hogan and Maryland Secretary of Labor Tiffany Robinson announced that the state had uncovered a huge fraud scheme involving unemployment insurance. WYPR State House reporter Rachel Baye joins Tom to discuss the latest regarding what Hogan called a massive identity theft scheme that led to more than 47,500 fraudulent unemployment insurance claims worth more than than...

Today on Midday, perspectives on economic development in Baltimore as businesses deal with the ongoing challenges presented by COVID-19. Tom’s guests today are Shelonda Stokes and Colin Tarbert. Stokes is president of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore. Tarbert is the President and CEO of the Baltimore Development Corporation, the agency that handles economic development for Baltimore City. Ema...

In the primary elections in Maryland last month, most voters cast their ballots by mail for the first time. For the State Board of Elections and local elections officials, it was the first large-scale effort to hold a vote by mail in Maryland history. The mail-in process was, in the words of The State Board's July 2 report on the June 2 elections submitted to Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, “not wi...

Tom's Newsmaker guest for the hour is Chris Van Hollen, Maryland's Democratic junior senator, who has served in the U.S. Senate since January, 2017. From 2003 to 2017, he was the U.S. Representative for Maryland's 8th congressional district. Among the topics in today's conversation: A major resurgence of COVID-19 coronavirus infections is overwhelming health systems in several states, as viral spr...

(This program was originally broadcast on June 18, 2020) Before he murdered George Floyd on Memorial Day in Minneapolis, former police officer Derek Chauvin had been the subject of 17 previous complaints of misconduct. As streets around the world filled with protesters against police use of force and violence against people of color, further examples of the very kind of behavior that animated the...

(This program was originally broadcast on September 30, 2019) Tom’s guest today is the acclaimed writer Ann Patchett. She is the winner of the Pen Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for fiction, and her work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Patchett is the author of eight novels, the latest of which, The Dutch House, was just published last week. As with some of her other immensel...

(This program was originally broadcast live on December 10, 2019) The business of diversity is booming. Corporations and cultural institutions spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on diversity training, yet despite the ubiquity and expense of these efforts, overall racial, gender and ethnic diversity remains an aspiration rather than a reality. Today on Midday: what's been tried, what...

(This program was originally broadcast on October 15, 2019) Today, Tom’s guest for the hour is the award-winning novelist, literary scholar and artist, Charles Johnson. Dr. Johnson is best-known as the author of Middle Passage, the epic novel about the 1830s slave trade for which he won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990. At the time, he was only the second African-American man to have wo...

(This program was originally broadcast live on June 17, 2020) Nationally, the United States ranks 26th in the world in voter turnout. Given the pandemic, a battered economy, widespread civil unrest and all that is at stake in the upcoming presidential election, it remains to be seen whether more voters will embrace the power they yield at the ballot box in November. Tom’s guest is Kim Wehle, a con...

Today, conversations with two acclaimed authors. Tom's first guest is Madison Smartt Bell, the author of a dozen novels, who is perhaps best known for his award-winning trilogy of books on the Haitian Revolution and its iconic leader, the 18th century general, Toussaint Louverture. He’s also written several non-fiction books, including a biography of Louverture, and a literary biography of an icon...

Tom's guest is the award-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative correspondent who covers race and social justice issues for the New York Times Magazine. She won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for The 1619 Project, a multi-platform exploration of the history of enslaved people in America. That series began last summer. Last Sunday, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote the cover story...