Midday

Today on Midday, it's another edition of Smart Nutrition, with our good friend Monica Reinagel — a licensed nutritionist who hosts podcasts, blogs and on-line programs at Nutrition Over Easy.com.

A survey conducted by the American Psychological Association found that 42% of Americans gained an average of 29 pounds during just the first year of the pandemic. (Perhaps all those sourdough starters we were using to make bread had some less-than-ideal endings.) As is always the case, many of us resolve to lose some weight and get in better shape as the new year begins.

And, of course, we’d all like to see a quick turnaround, but if we follow the science, as they say, slow and steady is our best bet.

This is the time of year we hear a lot from weight-loss companies. Some of those companies are hearing back from a lot of unsatisfied customers. What’s behind the backlash against some of those wellness apps?

Monica Reinagel joins us on Zoom to talk about successful weight control and sensible eating.

A little later in the program, we're joined on Zoom by Michelle Petties, a colleague of ours here at WYPR and the author of a compelling memoir of her journey with weight gain, and weight loss. It's called Leaving Large: The Stories of a Food Addict.

We invite our listeners to join the conversation...

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's guest today is Congressman Jamie Raskin, who represents Maryland’s 8th District, which includes parts of Montgomery, Carroll, and Frederick Counties.

Raskin came to national prominence early last year when he was tapped by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be the lead manager in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. Trump was charged with “incitement of insurrection” for the purpose of overturning the results of the 2020 election.

As Rep. Raskin writes in his new book, although the Senate demonstrated the most bipartisan support ever for conviction in a presidential impeachment trial, Mr. Trump “beat the constitutional spread,” in Raskin’s words, and avoided conviction. The final vote was 57-43, 10 votes short of the number needed to convict.

Rep. Raskin is a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol. The committee has interviewed more than 300 witnesses in private sessions. It plans to hold public hearings in the coming weeks.

This Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol. But for the Raskin family and legions of their friends, last Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of a terrible tragedy. The Congressman’s son, Tommy, a 25-year-old student at the Harvard Law School, succumbed to depression and died by suicide.

The riot at the Capitol occurred just a week after Tommy Raskin’s death. Jamie Raskin has written a book that weaves the story of Tommy’s life into the Congressman’s work as the lead impeachment manager, reflecting on his personal anguish, and the national anguish that the country experienced as the very foundations of democratic rule were threatened.

The book is called Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.

Congressman Raskin joins us on Zoom from his home in Takoma Park.

If you or someone you know needs help now, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today, in our first show of the new year, it’s the Midday HealthWatch. Tom's guest is Dr. Leana Wen, who for years has been so generous sharing her time and expertise with Midday listeners.

Dr. Wen is an emergency physician and former Baltimore City Health Commissioner. She teaches at the George Washington University School of Public Health. She’s also a columnist for the Washington Post, a medical analyst for CNN, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health.

This morning, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for 12 to 15-year-olds, and it lowered the time frame for everyone getting a booster from six months to five months after the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will review the FDA panel’s ruling. They’re expected to make an official recommendation on Wednesday.

Over the New Year’s weekend, the US was reporting nearly 300,000 new cases of COVID-19 every day. That number has climbed to more than 400,000 daily cases as of today and it’s likely much higher, given the number of people who are self-testing for the virus, and not reporting positive results. And it’s not all due to the omicron variant. The Delta variant still accounts for more than 41 percent of cases in the United States, as of the week that ended on Christmas Day.

The positivity rate in Maryland is nearly 27% and Maryland hospitals are under orders to limit various procedures so that scarce medical personnel can concentrate on patients with severe COVID-related disease. Maryland reported more than 14,000 new cases in the last 24 hours. More than 2,700 people are currently in Maryland hospitals; that’s nearly 200 more than on Sunday.

As we mentioned, children over the age of 12 will soon be eligible to get a booster. But, first things first: nationally, only 32% of kids above the age of 5 have received their first shot.

And, a year into vaccine availability, only about 62% of Americans are fully vaccinated, well behind dozens of other countries.

Dr. Leana Wen joins us on Skype for the hour to discuss these and other COVID-related developments...

And as always, we welcome your questions and comments.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired on December 7, 2021)

Welcome to this archive edition of Midday. Tom Hall's guest today is the acclaimed writer, Ann Patchett. She is the winner of many awards, including the 2002 Pen Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.

She is the author of eight best-selling novels, the latest of which, The Dutch House, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her break-out book was a novel she published in 2001 called Bel Canto, which was made into a movie in 2018. She is the author of several non-fiction titles, including Truth and Beauty, a memoir of her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, and a wonderful collection of essays called This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

She also co-owns Parnassus Books, an independent bookshop in her hometown of Nashville, with her business partner, Karen Hayes.

Her new book was published two days before Thanksgiving. It’s another collection of essays called These Precious Days. Like her fiction, Patchett’s non-fiction work is musical, powerful and compassionate. She has a great ear, and a quiet, unfailing eye. And like her fictional characters, the real-life friends and family that Patchett writes about are people you are simply delighted to meet.

Ann Patchett joined us on the line from Nashville…

This conversation was recorded earlier, so we’re not able to take any calls or comments today.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired on September 15, 2021)

Good afternoon and welcome to this archive edition of Midday. Tom Hall's guest is 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 contributor and staff writer at The New Yorker. Dr. Cobb also teaches journalism at Columbia University, and is a frequent commentator on MSNBC.

Jelani Cobb’s latest book is about the Kerner Commission. The commission’s report was released in 1968, just one month before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The commission was established by President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of nearly two dozen riots that had taken place in cities across America over the preceding three years.

In his televised address to the nation on the evening he announced the commission in July 1967, President Johnson said:

"The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack— mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence. All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. We should attack these conditions—not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is simply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America."

Jelani Cobb makes a compelling case for the Kerner Commission’s relevance today. In his trenchant and enlightening introduction to the report, he contends that “Kerner establishes that it is possible for us to be entirely cognizant of history and repeat it anyway.”

The racial injustice and inequity that the Kerner Report described more than 50 years ago still create barriers to advancement for people of color. Much of the analysis of the racial dynamic in America that the report offers rings as true today as it did in its day.

His book is called The Essential Kerner Commission Report. His co-editor is Matthew Guariglia. Jelani Cobb joined us on our digital line from New York.

Because our conversation was recorded earlier, we can’t take any calls or on-line comments.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation was originally aired on November 12, 2021)

Welcome to this archive edition of Midday.

Tom Hall's guest today is the acclaimed author, Louise Erdrich. She is one of the most gifted and compelling writers in American literature today. Readers all over the world are irresistibly drawn to her bevy of complex and endearing characters who navigate the world in fascinating and unexpected ways, and whose stories are told with grace, compassion and persuasive authority.

Erdrich is the author of 18 novels to date, a collection of short stories, three collections of poetry, more than a half-dozen children's books, and two works of non-fiction. She has won the National Book Critics Circle Award three times; she has also won a National Book Award.

In April of 2020, Tom spoke with Louise Erdrich on this program about her novel, The Night Watchman. This year, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. That wonderful novel drew its inspiration from the true story of her grandfather, a leader of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in the 1950s.

Her new novel, published in November, takes place in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2019 and 2020. It also explores Indigenous identity and the complexities of the relationship between native and white cultures. Most of the characters in this book are employees or customers at a store inspired by Birchbark Books, a bookstore Louise Erdrich owns. The novel even includes a character who is an author named Louise. 

It’s called The Sentence.

Louise Erdrich joined us on Zoom from Minneapolis.

(Our conversation was pre-recorded, so we’re not taking any new calls or on-line comments today.)

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired October 15, 2021)

Welcome to this archive edition of Midday. Today, we revisit a conversation host Tom Hall had this past fall with the acclaimed author, Alice McDermott. She is the winner of a National Book Award. Three of her novels have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and she’s garnered many other prizes and accolades in a career that has spanned 40 years, and counting.

Alice McDermott is an insightful and brilliant observer of the passing parade, and her prose is simply a delight to encounter. Books like Charming Billy, After This, Someone, or her most recent novel, The Ninth Hour have afforded her readers some of the most enjoyable and enlightening experiences available in modern fiction.

Alice McDermott has long been revered as a teacher of writing as well, serving for many years on the faculties of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her latest book is a work of non-fiction, in which she proffers what might be dubbed a Bill of Rights for readers, and a How-To Guide for writers. It is a celebration of great writing, and an investigation into what makes great writing, great.

It’s called What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Alice McDermott joined us on our digital line from her home in Bethesda, Maryland.

(Because our conversation was recorded earlier, we aren’t able to take any calls or comments today.)

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

(This conversation originally aired on October 22, 2021)

Welcome to this archive edition of Midday. Tom's guest today is Elizabeth Strout. She is the best-selling author of eight novels and many short stories. She won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for her wonderful novel, Olive Kitteridge. A film series adaption of that book, starring Frances McDormand on HBO, won eight Emmy Awards.

Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Olive Again, re-visited Olive Kitteridge. Her latest novel, published in October, puts us in touch again with another one of her magnificent characters, Lucy Barton, who figured prominently in two of her previous novels, My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible.

This third Lucy Barton novel centers on Lucy’s first husband, a successful scientist named William Gerhardt. It’s in part a road-trip story. Lucy and William, long divorced, set-off together on a journey to find a sister who William only recently discovered he had.

Elizabeth Strout often writes about people with big hearts who live in small towns. When we encounter Lucy and William in this novel, they are prosperous New Yorkers who struggle with reckoning about their small-town roots. Lucy and William are fantastic, complicated, wondrous characters who are crafted with compassion and grace and first-rate writerly skill.

The novel is called Oh William! Author Elizabeth Strout joined us on Zoom last fall from Nashville, Tennessee.

This conversation was pre-recorded, so we aren’t able to take any calls or on-line comments.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Hello, and Happy Holidays! Welcome to the Midday Christmas Eve Special, with your host, Tom Hall.

Today, we’ll spend the hour listening to some music and some poetry of the season, plus, a story by Baltimore writer Rafael Alvarez.

We've put together a playlist of our selections, and you can find them below in the order you'll hear them in the program:

1. MUSIC: I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In. A carol arranged by Robert Shaw and Alice Parker.(from a 2010 CD recording by the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, "Christmas at America’s First Cathedral," Tom Hall, conducting.)
2. POEM: Ring Out Wild Bells, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (read by Midday producer Cianna Greaves)
3. MUSIC: A Clean Heart. A motet for a cappella chorus by James Lee, III. He’s on the faculty of Morgan State University, and his music is performed all over the world. This is a setting of a text from the Psalms, Create in Me a Clean Heart. (from "Christmas at America’s First Cathedral.")
4. MUSIC: Ogo ni fun Oluwa, by the great African American composer Rosephanye Powell, sung by the Baltimore Choral Arts Society. This is an African Praise Song, on a text from the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria. The title means "Rejoice! Glory be unto the Lord." (from "Christmas at America’s First Cathedral.")
5. READING: "Aunt Lola," written and read by Baltimore writer Rafael Alvarez.
6. MUSIC: Ring the Bells, by Rosephanye Powell, commissioned by Tom Hall when he was the Music Director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society. (from "Christmas at America’s First Cathedral.")
7. MUSIC: Have You Seen the Baby Jesus? by Rosephanye Powell, with soprano Janice Chandler Eteme. (from "Christmas at America’s First Cathedral."
8. READING: A Chinese proverb, read by WYPR Digital producer, Jamyla Krempel.
9. MUSIC: Precious Gifts. Music by Dave Brubeck; text by his wife Iola. Most people know Dave as one of the most iconic pianists in the history of jazz. But Dave was also a frequent composer of choral music, in collaboration with Iola. This is one of their beautiful, a cappella gems, in its world premiere recording, featuring the Baltimore Choral Arts Society.
10. POEM: The Journey of the Magi, by T. S. Eliot. Read by Tom Hall. The poet was born in St. Louis in 1888, but he moved to Britain as a young man and eventually became an English citizen.
11. POEM: "Twas the Night Before Christmas," by Clement Moore; a classic reading by Louis Armstrong.

We hope you enjoy this hour of holiday inspirations. Thanks for listening!

We wish you all a joyous holiday season, and a happy and healthy New Year!

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

It is my custom on this program to take some time near the end of the year to remember, briefly, some of the people in our local area who have passed away during the year. As always, this is not an exhaustive list. I simply want to mention a few of the people in the area who I was blessed to know, and who our community was blessed to have.

Leslie Starr died in February. She was a wonderful musician, friend and colleague; one of the first people I met in 1982 when I arrived in Baltimore to lead the Baltimore Choral Arts Society. Leslie and I did countless concerts together. I will always remember her quiet countenance, her consummate skill, and her warm way. Leslie was 70 years old.

George Wills also died in February at the age of 84. George was a charmer; gregarious, preternaturally positive, and a person who lifted the spirits of all. George was also a terrific water colorist, and a great lover of music and the arts.

And when it comes to music and the arts, there are few people in the history of our town who matched the dedication, commitment and accomplishments of Buddy Zamoiski, who passed away in February at the age of 93. A passionate philanthropist for Johns Hopkins and many other organizations, Buddy was a singular, driving force behind the growth of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The BSO as we know it today is simply unimaginable without his leadership and his tenacity.

The wonderful painters, Ruth Pettus and Raoul Middleman passed away as well. Ruth was just 63 years old when she died in March, but she produced an acclaimed body of work that fascinated, provoked and delighted legions of fans. Raoul was 86 when he passed away in October. His work is acknowledged in museums and galleries around the world as distinctive and brilliant. Raoul and Ruth both loved music too, and a good laugh.

In my years as a musician, I had the pleasure of working with many wonderful singers. Jason Ryan’s powerful bass voice was deep, rich and resonant, and he could always be counted on to anchor the choral chord. Jason passed away in March.

Our friend and former colleague, Fraser Smith died in April. Fraser was WYPR’s resident sage and Senior News Analyst. He was our mentor, our guide, and our north star. His keen insight into politics and people was honed from years of skilled listening and superb reporting. He was a gentleman, and a model of gentility. Fraser Smith was 83 years old.

Bishop Douglas Miles was an extraordinary man, an erudite religious scholar, and a persuasive, compelling and imaginative social justice activist whose work as an organizer and as a mentor to other activists form an important and indelible legacy. One of the founders and longtime leaders of Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, Doug was one of our city’s most eloquent and effective crusaders for racial equity and fairness. He was 72 years old when he passed away in August.

Earlier this month, Ernie Imhoff, described as the “heart and soul” of the Baltimore Evening Sun died at the age of 84. Ernie was my wife’s boss at the paper when we met in the mid-1980s. He became our wise and wonderful friend, an inspiration for us as journalists, and a model for us as people.

For the blessing of knowing all of these bright lights of Baltimore, I am grateful, for what they’ve meant to me, and for how they enlivened and enhanced our city.

-- Tom Hall

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.