Midday

On today's show, it is Midday on the Law. My first guest is Ali Velshi, chief correspondent and the host of Velshi on MSNBC. He is also the author of an introduction to a book that compiles all of the indictments against the former president in one volume.

Placing all four indictments together makes a powerful statement about the gravity of the allegations against Mr. Trump, and Velshi makes a persuasive and passionate case for how important it is for us to truly understand what prosecutors are alleging, and why it matters so much to the future of our democracy.

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The Tony-Award winning musical "The Wiz" is returning to Broadway. The classic tale of Dorothy and her friends Lion, Tinman and Scarecrow easing down the road to meet the wizard is the first return to the stage in 40 years.

This time, the yellow brick road starts in Baltimore with a pre-Broadway run at The Hippodrome Theare. Tom's guests to discuss the return of "The Wiz" are Ron Legler, the president of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center, which includes the Hippodrome Theater and the show's director Schele Williams. 

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It's time for another visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck, who joins us each week with her reviews of the Maryland, DC and Virginia regional stage.

“Celebration: A Musical Revue” celebrates Arena Players’ 70th anniversary, and continues at Arena Players through Oct. 1.

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On today's show, it’s time for another installment in our series, Midday in the Neighborhood.  Today, Tom turns his attention to south Baltimore and the communities near the Port of Baltimore.

Due to the proximity, residents in the Port of Baltimore area are faced with environmental issues such as air and noise pollution. With planned expansions of business to the port, how can they partner with the surrounding communities to abate any future pollution concerns?

Tom's guests on this issue are Meredith Chaiken, Executive Director of the Greater Baybrook Alliance and Tasha Gresham-James, Executive Director of Dundalk Renaissance.

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Our guest today is Vincent Schiraldi, the Secretary of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services. Last week, the department released a report on juvenile crime. While the percentage of crimes committed by young people is drastically lower than crimes committed by adults, Maryland has seen an increase in juvenile crime over the last two years, although levels are down sharply over the last ten years.

But the finding that is most concerning in this report is that violent crime committed by juveniles is up, as is the number of juvenile victims of crime.

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On this edition of Midday on Higher Education, I speak with Kent Deveraux, who was appointed the President of Goucher College in Towson in 2019. Over the summer, his contract was extended to 2027.

Facing the same kind of enrollment challenges that many private colleges around the country face, Goucher is opening up its campus to senior citizens who want to continue their life long learning in tandem with young undergraduates.

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About 13,000 auto workers went on strike at four plants in Missouri, Michigan and Ohio last Friday morning. So far, only a fraction of the United Auto Workers' 146,000 members have been called to strike, but more plants could strike Friday if talks don’t produce progress.

Does the strategy of striking on only certain auto plants increase the union’s leverage against the big three automakers, Ford, GM and Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler?

Joining Tom to talk about that strategy and to put this historic strike in context is Andrew Ziaja, a labor lawyer and law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Scott Shane joins Midday. He worked for 36 years with the New York Times and, before that, with the Baltimore Sun.  Shane is the author of an award-winning book, Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President and the Rise of the Drone.  

He retired from the Times in 2019, and dove into a very different kind of project: a book that tells the story of the extraordinary Thomas Smallwood. Born into slavery, Smallwood purchased his freedom and helped hundreds of other enslaved people escape their bondage in the Baltimore-Washington area. He capped off these successful escapes by taunting slave holders in print. Along the way, Smallwood coined the term “underground railroad.”

Scott Shane has written a compelling, assiduously researched and eye-popping book that I hope will catapult Thomas Smallwood out of obscurity, and into the light of recognition he richly deserves. It’s called Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland.

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Today, a conversation about equity and AI. Tom's guest is Dr. Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and tech expert who is working to reduce the negative effects of artificial intelligence.

In 2021, Dr. Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), a non-profit she currently serves as executive director. Before that, she was employed at Google, where she co-led the Ethical Artificial Intelligence research team. She was fired in 2020 — although the company insists she resigned — after a dispute with Google about its suppression of some of her research, and her criticism of the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)

policies. She had previously done ground-breaking work at Apple and Microsoft.Dr. Gebru is also the co-founder of Black in AI, a nonprofit whose stated mission is "to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI."Dr. Timnit Gebru joined us on Zoom from San Francisco.

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After a long career as a journalist and foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, Dan Fesperman turned his attention to writing award-winning thrillers, often set in the foreign locales he covered for the newspaper.

His latest novel is a terrific page-turner, set in Berlin, Germany around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is called Winter Work. 

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