Midday

(This conversation was originally broadcast on November 25, 2024)

Best-selling author Ann Patchett joins Midday to talk about her most recent book, an annotated edition of her 2001 popular novel, Bel Canto.  

In the latest version, Patchett walks us through what she wrote, page by page, and comments on what she thinks could be improved. She shares insights into her creative process with the same kind of grace, humor, and gifts of perception that draw us all to her novels and essays.

(This episode originally aired on Midday on May 12, 2025.) Internationally-acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie joins Midday to discuss her latest novel. Dream Count is her first work of fiction since Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award 12 years ago.

Adichie's latest novel is a rumination on friendship and feminism, and a study of what makes relationships work and why they fail. The story is about different people, of different backgrounds and on different continents seeking an elusive fulfillment.

Adichie was raised in Nigeria and splits her time there and in Maryland.

Midday host Tom Hall remembers some of his remarkable Baltimore friends and fellow travelers who departed this Earth in 2025.

Helicon & Friends join Midday in Studio A for a preview of their live Winter Solstice Concerts Saturday at Goucher College's Kraushaar Auditorium.

Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck reviews "Deceived," Everyman Theatre's production of a 2024 adaptation of the classic play, "Gas Light."

Tom's guest today is the president of the Baltimore City Council, Zeke Cohen.

He’s been a strong advocate for a package of zoning bills that originally enjoyed wide support from the council, but now it appears that some members are having second thoughts. 

   

Tom and the council president discuss what kind of input from the community council members have received in recent weeks, and what that means for the bills moving forward.

Council President Zeke Cohen joins us in Studio A.

What happens when a predominately-white evangelical megachurch in the Midwest creates a program to address racial inequity?

Dr. Hahrie Han followed the journey of Crossroads Church in Ohio, where Pastor Chuck Mingo said he felt called by God to combat racial injustice, within the church and their wider Cincinnati community.

Han's book, released in September 2024, is called Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church. She takes a deep look into a congregation's wrestling with race, political divisiveness and fraught political times.

Han is a political scientist and the head of the SNF Agora Institute, a scholarly and public forum dedicated to advancing dialogue and civic engagement, at Johns Hopkins University.

Han joined Midday on September 30, 2024, to discuss her book, which covers a persistent divide in American religious and secular life.

If you walked into a Baltimore night club in the 1980s or 1990s, you were likely to hear something like I Got The Rhythm by Sounds of Silence.

Baltimore Club Music featured fast-paced, repetitive beats, low-fidelity vocals, a dizzying array of samples and raunchy humor. The influential genre of electronic dance music blossomed in places like Odell’s Nightclub or Club Fantasy into a beloved symbol of the city’s charm and grit.

Music journalist Al Shipley's new book, Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music, follows the genre from hometown sound to beyond the bounds of Charm City.

Midday on Music continues as Tom is joined in the studio by Geoffrey Himes.

Himes is an award-winning author, music journalist and podcaster who wrote about music in the Washington Post for 23 years. He has also written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Downbeat, Jazz Times, and many other publications. His books include In Law Country: How Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Their Circle Fashioned a New Kind of Country Music, 1968-1985 and two new collections of poetry co-written with Maryland’s former poet laureate, Grace Cavalieri: Fables from Italy and Beyond and The Third Voice. Himes recently launched a podcast on Substack called Hard Rain and Pink Cadillacs, in which he explores the Americana music scene with co-host Mark Finkelpearl.

Himes's latest book is an encyclopedic exploration of the music of the legendary Texas singer-songwriter, Willie Nelson. It’s called Willie Nelson: All the Albums: The Stories Behind the Music.

The lavishly illustrated, 250-page coffee-table book is a compendium of informed essays about each of Willie Nelson's 150+ albums. Himes provides copious details on the writing and recording of every release, and describes how each album fits into the arc of Nelson's influential career — an ongoing career that's spanned seven decades and along the way, created a unique American songbook.

In an era of acute political and social polarization, it's tempting to think of people in America and around the world as sequestered in insular camps, talking over each other and rarely achieving a meeting of the minds that can lead to cooperation and progress.

But separating and isolating ourselves from each other attenuates or destroys any chance we might have to grow together from the collective wisdom we all can help cultivate.

Tom's guest for the hour today is a renowned data scientist whose new book argues that our societies cannot move forward if we don't actively share the stories that form what we know about the world.

And he contends that advances in powerful digital technologies such as artificial intelligence can help us craft civic structures and institutions that further human rights and build strong, open communities.

Alex Pentland is a research fellow at Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and faculty lead at the Institute's Digital Economy Lab. Previously, Pentland founded and directed the Connection Science and Human Dynamics Lab at MIT. He has advised the UN Secretary General’s office; he’s a regular at the World Economic Forum in Davos; he serves on advisory boards of major corporations, and as an entrepreneur, he has founded more than a dozen companies himself.

Enriched by his expertise in Artificial Intelligence, or AI, Pentland’s new book is Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI. It is a hopeful treatise on how AI can help to advance, not harm, the human condition.

Professor Alex Pentland spoke with Tom on December 9, 2025. Because our conversation was recorded, we aren’t able to take any calls or online comments today.