Midday

It’s Midday at the Movies, our monthly look at films and filmmaking, with Ann Hornaday, film critic for the Washington Post and author of the best-selling movie-goers' guide,Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies; and Jed Dietz, the founding director of the Maryland Film Festival and Parkway Theater.

How are independent movie houses faring as COVID numbers go down? Have you headed back to theaters yet? And what does the tragedy on the set of the film Rust tell us about how movies are being made during the pandemic? We’ll have tips on new films to check out, too, from Dune (Part One) and King Richard to The French Dispatch, Souvenir II and Belfast, plus two new documentaries, Attica and Julia.

Ann Hornaday joins us on our digital line; Jed Dietz joins us on Zoom.

Let us know what films you've been watching!

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

Tom's next guest is Stewart Bainum. He is a successful businessman (as board chair of the worldwide Choice Hotels chain), philanthropist, and former Maryland delegate and senator. Last year, he tried to buy the Baltimore Sun with the intention of turning it into a non-profit news organization focusing on local news. That effort was rebuffed by the Sun’s owners, a hedge fund called Alden Global Capital.

Working with former Baltimore County Executive Ted Venetoulis, Bainum began planning a new local news operation, an on-line, multi-pronged platform that will be overseen by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a not-for-profit foundation named in honor of Mr. Venetoulis, who passed away last month from pancreatic cancer.

The new digital news journal will be called The Baltimore Banner, and plans now call for it to launch by the summer of 2022, with a staff of roughly 50 journalists.

(Journalists and others interested in working for The Banner can apply on the Venetoulis Institute Website.)

Stewart Bainum joins us on Zoom from his office in Rockville, Maryland, to tell us more about the Banner enterprise, and what it could mean for local journalism.

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

It’s Midday with the Mayor. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott joins us on the first Thursday of every month to talk about how he and his administration are meeting the challenges our city faces.

Today, Tom and the mayor discuss how the City Health Department will provide newly-approved COVID vaccinations for 5 to 11 year-olds through school vaccine clinics; how the mayor's new Office of Recovery Programs will manage the way the city invests the millions in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds it's received, such as the $50M it's earmarked for a three year gun-violence reduction program; the mayor's view of fiscal reforms being proposed by the City Council, and other issues.

Mayor Scott joins us on Zoom from his office in City Hall.We welcome your questions and comments for the mayor.

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

Today, a conversation with John McWhorter, one of America’s foremost Black public intellectuals. He’s a linguist and historian who teaches at Columbia University and writes a column and newsletter for the New York Times. He hosts a podcast about language called Lexicon Valley, and is the author of more than 20 books. In his latest, he writes: “America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral or artistic, what it is to educate a child, what it is to foster justice, what it is to express oneself properly, and what it is to be a nation is being re-founded upon a religion.”

That "religion," McWhorter suggests, is the philosophy of those he labels “The Elect,” by whom he means writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and Nikole Hannah Jones, who have written extensively about how White Supremacy and structural racism are the root cause of racial inequity in America today.John McWhorter rejects this argument, finding it damaging and demeaning to Black people, and he dismisses the Elect as, quote, "charismatic but self-directed, and socio-politically futile.”

He argues that Critical Race Theory is a “fragile, performative ideology that rejects linear reasoning,” and he asserts that what is needed to address inequity is “complexity, abstraction and forgiveness.”

This is a book that fascinates and infuriates. Professor McWhorter asks difficult and important questions, and he does not shy away from offering controversial answers. It’s called Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

John McWhorter joins us on Zoom from New York City.

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

And now, a conversation with a fan favorite of NPR listeners, aficionados of televised comedy specials, lovers of late-night TV, and just about anybody who has been paying attention over the last several decades.

Tom is joined by Paula Poundstone. She is a frequent panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, the host of the hit podcast, No One Listens to Paula Poundstone and a stand-up comedian who will be bringing her unique stand-up talents back to Baltimore on Thursday night, when she appears live at a WYPR-supported event at Kraushaar Auditorium, on the campus of Goucher College.

For information and ticketing, click here.

You are welcome to join our conversation!

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

President Joe Biden wraps up his appearance at the world leader’s summit of the UN Climate Change Conference today. Biden addressed the conference yesterday. Later this afternoon he’ll take questions from reporters, after which he will leave Glasgow, Scotland and return to Washington. His press conference is scheduled to begin at 3:30. WYPR will carry NPR’s live coverage.

The President echoed many leaders in his plea for unity, determination and cooperation in fighting climate change, describing the climate crisis as an existential threat. In remarks to the conference after his address, Mr. Biden apologized to his fellow leaders for the Trump Administration’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, a decision Mr. Biden reversed on the day he took office.

Tom's first guest today is Scott Sklar, a clean energy expert and adjunct professor at George Washington University who serves as Energy Lead of the University’s Environmental and Energy Management Institute, and Acting Director of GWU's Solar Institute.

Scott Sklar joins us on Zoom from his solar-powered home in Arlington, Virginia.

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

Today, it’s Midday on Tech. Frances Haugen has worked at several tech companies, including Facebook, whose corporate name has just been changed to Meta. When she testified to Congress recently and subsequently released thousands of internal Facebook documents, she exposed the extent to which Facebook designs algorithms that are intended to keep users glued to the program, and the pernicious consequences of that business model.

Can these algorithms - the lifeblood of the Facebook business model - be regulated and controlled to eliminate those consequences?

Tom's two guests today offer expert perspectives on that question.

Dr. Jessica Vitak is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. She is also the recently appointed director of the university's Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Dr. Vitak joins us on Zoom.

Joe Toscano is the founder of the Better Ethics and Consumer Outcomes Network, or BEACON, and the author of Automating Humanity (Powerhouse Books, 2018). A former designer with Google, he was also featured in the movie, The Social Dilemma. He joins us on Zoom from New York City.

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

We close our Midday on the Arts program today with our weekly visit from Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck. She joins Tom with her review of The Thanksgiving Play, a new production of Native American playwright and MacArthur fellow Larissa Fasthorse's popular seasonal satire about cultural myths and "white wokeness," now at the Olney Theatre Center.

Raymond O. Caldwell directs the wickedly funny play — the most-produced comedy of 2019 — with a cast that includes Parker Drown, Megan Graves, David Schlumpf and Dani Stoller.

The Thanksgiving Play continues as a live and streaming performance at Olney Theatre Centre through October 31st. For ticketing information, click here.

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

It’s Midday on the Arts. Tom's next guest is an actor who is part of the three-person cast of a new play that will receive its world premiere this weekend at Baltimore's An die Musik Live performance space. It’s called Hand Through the Veil. Terrence Fleming, an Alabama-born artist who's been living and acting in Baltimore since 2016, plays the famed magician and escape artist, Harry Houdini, in a new play by Sean Coe. It imagines a meeting between Houdini, mystery writer Arthur Conan Doyle (played by Doug Krehbel) and the celebrated medium and spiritualist, Mina Crandon (played by Ann Turiano), at a chaotic and surprise-filled seance. The play is directed by Chris Cotterman.

Terrance Fleming joins us on Zoom to talk about the play, his role, and the acting craft.

Hand Through the Veil opens tonight at 8:00 at An die Musik Live in Baltimore. There are matinees and evening performances tomorrow and Sunday, and you can stream the show, too. For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.

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

Today, it’s Midday on the Arts. Coming up a little later in the hour (and posted separately to our Web page), Tom talks with Terrance Fleming, an actor who stars in a world-premiere play this weekend, and our theater critic, J Wynn Rousuck will review the new show at the Olney Theater Center.

But we begin with Cara Ober. She’s an artist, arts writer, curator, and founding editor and publisher editor of BmoreArt, a must-read journal and website that chronicles the arts and culture scene in the Baltimore area.

The next print edition of this essential arts journal becomes available on November 18, and you can check out BmoreArt anytime on-line…

Cara Ober joins us on our digital line.

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