Midday

Today it's Midday at the Museum. Tom's guests are the new executive directors of two of Baltimore’s most cherished institutions. A little later, Tom speaks with Dr. Sol Davis, who has recently taken the reins of The Jewish Museum of Maryland.

But we begin with Terri Lee Freeman. Before coming to Baltimore, she served for six years as the director of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. In February, she became the new executive director of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture here in Baltimore.

Terri Lee Freeman joins us on Zoom…

The Lewis is hosting its first in-person event this Saturday, in honor of Mother’ Day.

The museum will host two screenings of a film by Brenda Hayes called Back Burner Dreams: A Women’s Passion Project. It’s the story of three women who put their own dreams and priorities on hold for years, and how they re-kindle those dreams later in life. There will be screenings at 12:30 and 2:30, each followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker. For more information, click here.

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

Every year, the City of Baltimore sells liens on properties in an effort to collect past-due property taxes and other charges. This year’s sale is scheduled to take place in two weeks.

Yesterday, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced that the city will remove some homes from its annual tax sale so that people, particularly first-time homeowners, aren’t put in danger of losing their homes in the middle of a pandemic. WYPR’s City Hall Reporter Emily Sullivan joins us with the details…

The Baltimore City Bureau of Revenue Collections will provide help to homeowners who have liens on their homes. For assistance, call 410 396 3556.

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

About 105 million adults in the United States have been fully vaccinated against COVID 19. New England states have the highest percentage of those who are inoculated. MD ranks 15th in the country, with 2.1 million people fully vaccinated so far. Finding a vaccine is no longer a problem. Convincing everyone to get a vaccine is now the focus of public health officials and experts.

Today on Midday, it’s the Midday Healthwatch with Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and former Baltimore City Health Commissioner. Dr. Wen teaches at the George Washington University School of Public Health. She’s also a columnist for the Washington Post, a medical analyst for CNN, and the author of the forthcoming book, Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health.

Dr. Leana Wen joins us on Skype…

We also take your questions and comments…

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

They’re baaaaack….live concerts, that is.

The great ‘cellist Amit Peled — heard in the opening of this segment playing Ennio Morricone's Love Theme from his score for Cinema Paradiso — is the founder and music director of a chamber orchestra called the Mount Vernon Virtuosi. A week from tomorrow, he will conduct the group and play as a soloist in a concert that marks the return to live events for the Candlelight Concert Society in Columbia. The 2pm concert will be held outdoors, at the Chrysallis in Merriweather Park's Symphony Woods, in Columbia, Maryland. Some COVID protocols will be in place: you'll have to wear your mask, you can’t bring your dog, and you have to sit with folks in your pod. But after more than a year of hearing concerts on Zoom, music lovers are delighted that in-person concerts are slowly making their way back to area stages. For ticket and location info, click here.

Amit Peled joins us today on Zoom, just for this interview…

Music heard on today's program (Amit Peled, soloist):

Ennio Morricone: Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso (Amit Peled soloist, with the Asheville Symphony Orchestra, Darko Boutorac, conducting.)

J.S. Bach: Cello Suite No.1 in G Major: Sarabande

Johannes Brahms: Cello Sonata No. 2 in F Major: Allegro Vivace

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

Today on Midday, it’s Midday with the Mayor, with Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley. He was born in South Africa, grew up in Australia, and after a successful career as a restaurateur in Annapolis became the Mayor of the state’s capital city in December, 2017. A Democrat, he has announced that he will stand for re-election in November of this year.

He joins Tom today to discuss the many challenges Annapolis has faced during his tenure, from the June 28, 2018 mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the persistent environmental threats to the waterfront city now intensifying because of climate change and the rising Chesapeake Bay.

Mayor Gavin Buckley joins us on Zoom…

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

Yesterday was the final day of arguments for the current term of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court will meet on several non-argument days and in conference before releasing their decisions sometime this summer.In his latest book, Ian Millhiser argues that the current conservative majority on the Court has the potential to radically alter American law and public policy. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all appointed to the bench by Donald Trump, are the first justices to be given lifetime appointments by a President who lost the popular vote, and who were confirmed by a group of Senators who represent less than half of the country.Millhiser argues that the ramifications of this conservative majority are hugely significant. He describes a litany of laws that the court has changed, including legislation around voting rights, campaign finance, health care, religious liberty, Presidential power, and the environment, and he observes that compared to the Congresses of yesteryear, the modern Congress is now almost 80% less likely to enact legislation that would override a High Court decision.

Millhiser covers the Court as a senior correspondent at Vox. The book is called The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court is Reshaping America.

Ian Millhiser joins Tom on Zoom from his home in Arlington, VA.

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

It’s Day 100 for the Biden Administration.

Last night, the President made his pitch for going big with a package of legislative fixes for everything from our crumbling infrastructure to poverty and unemployment. He did not shy away from addressing how to pay for his multi-trillion-dollar proposals, following-up on a campaign pledge to raise taxes on people who make more than $400,000 a year, saying that they and American corporations have not been paying their fair share. He couched his proposals in the context of proving that American-style democracy works — domestically, and as we compete with autocracies like China.

The President will visit with former President Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, today, as he begins a ramped-up travel schedule to sell his ambitious plans. Vice President Kamala Harris is visiting the M&T Bank Stadium mass vaccination site today in downtown Baltimore.

The President spoke to a reduced group of members of Congress and other dignitaries, chosen by lottery and limited in size because of COVID. His 70-minute address covered a lot of ground.

Joining Tom with analysis is Pierre Thomas, Chief Justice Correspondent for ABC News. He connects with us on Zoom…

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

Optimism is in the air. Yesterday, the CDC issued new guidance about mask wearing outside, and other perks for people who have been fully vaccinated against the Coronavirus. The Baltimore City Health Dept is reviewing the CDC guidance, and they may adjust their mask ordinance. But most experts say that unless you are in a crowd of strangers, if you’ve had a vaccine, you don’t need a mask, outside.

Supply of the vaccine has finally caught up with demand. The challenge facing us now is no longer finding enough vaccine. It’s finding enough people who want to take it.

If enough of us do take it, herd immunity will be achieved, and we will be back to normal. Or at least so the theory goes.

How will we know when the pandemic is, really and truly, over? When do pandemics end?

Tom's first guests today are two medical historians from The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who have studied the COVID 19 pandemic in the context of other viruses, like the 1918 flu, polio, smallpox and HIV-AIDS.

Dr. Graham Mooney and Dr. Jeremy Greene join us on Zoom…

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

Last Sunday, C. Fraser Smith, one of Baltimore’s most respected journalists, passed away after suffering a stroke on April 11th. Fraser had been WYPR’s Senior News Analyst and a fan favorite of listeners to WYPR, and readers of the Baltimore Sun and the Daily Record.

Here’s a Fraser essay broadcast on WYPR in November 2015. And here's a link to Fraser's last guest appearance on Midday, on July 16, 2020, when he spoke with Tom Hall about his memoir, The Daily Miracle: A Memoir of Newspapering.

Tom wanted to spend some time today remembering Fraser with two people who worked very closely with him, here at WYPR and at the Baltimore Sun.

Sunni Khalid was the news director at WYPR from 2003-2012. He is currently a freelance journalist who is working on a couple of books and living in the Bay Area…Joel McCord is WYPR’s current News Director, where he works with our news team and Danyell Irby, WYPR’s Executive Director of News…

Sunni Khalid joins us on Zoom; Joel McCord joins us on our digital line.

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

Tom's next guests are featured in a new documentary about an extraordinary Jewish theologian and activist. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was a mentor, friend and colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and one of the most influential religious scholars and public intellectuals of the 20th century.

The new documentary, by filmmaker Martin Doblmeier, will air on PBS May 5.

Tomorrow afternoon, the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies here in Baltimore will host a virtual symposium to talk about Heschel’s influence and legacy.To talk about that legacy now, Tom welcomes back to Midday the two speakers at that symposium, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch and Benjamin Sax, the Jewish Scholar at the ICJS.

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