Midday

Former President Donald Trump has been voted out of the White House and removed from Twitter, which has considerably reduced his presence in the public psyche.

That is about to change. On Sunday afternoon, he will give the culminating speech at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, and he will do so as a still-dominant figure in Republican politics.

The “Trumpublican” faction of the Party remains loyal to Mr. Trump, and unmoved by evidence of his role in the insurrection, and unconcerned about investigations into the former President on several fronts.

A national Quinnipiac University poll conducted this month has 76% of self-identified Republicans saying they believe there was "widespread fraud in the 2020 election."

CPAC opened this morning with speeches from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, two of several Republican Presidential probables like Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo who will also speak this weekend, and who are anxious to carry the mantle of Trump voters, if Mr. Trump decides not to run in 2024...

Tom's guests today are Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Pulitzer Prize winners with The Washington Post and the authors of a bestselling book that sits high atop the panoply of books about the dysfunction and chaos of the Trump Administration. It’s called A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America. It was published early last year, and it has just been released in paperback, updated with new reporting.

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker join us on Zoom…

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

Tom Hall's guest for the hour today is the president of the Baltimore City Council, Nick Mosby.

He leads a progressive council at a perilous time for our city, as we confront a public health crisis, an economic downturn, and a continued epidemic of serious and deadly crimes.

President Mosby has been a vocal critic of Governor Larry Hogan, accusing the state government of “a deliberate pattern of inequity” in its distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.

Mosby has promised to improve the oversight of city contracts by the Board of Estimates, and he has changed the structure and make-up of council committees. The Council has passed one bill so far, restricting restaurant delivery fees, that has been signed into law.

Today, as part of Midday's regular series of check-ins with leaders of local government, a conversation about the City Council president’s legislative priorities, and his vision for our city.

Nick Mosby joins Tom Hall today on Zoom.

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

On today's Midday, a conversation with the award-winning author and ethicist, Harriet A. Washington, about the human costs of unethical medical research.

In the current national debate about vaccine hesitancy among people in communities of color, people point to distrust of medical research that is premised on the experience in two famous cases: one is Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who died of cancer in the 1950s, and whose extraordinary cells were harvested for research by doctors at Johns Hopkins without her consent. Those cells are still used for research today. The second is the case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which men who were infected with the disease were left untreated.

The unethical and deadly behavior of researchers in the Tuskegee Study was revealed in 1972. And for more than a decade, Johns Hopkins has honored the legacy of Henrietta Lacks, and used her story to study its implications for informed consent in medicine. Harriet Washington's award-winning 2007 book, Medical Apartheid, documents these and other medical abuses that have been visited on people of color for centuries.

So, does that mean that research without the fully informed consent of participants a vestige of the past, and that current practice has what is necessary to safeguard against any future abuse?...

Harriet Washington answers that questions with a resounding, “No.”
In her latest book, Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent (published by Columbia Global Reports), Washington states flatly that “We have frequently abandoned informed consent and today remain guilty of burgeoning medical experimentation without consent of any type.” She goes on to say that “Informed consent, or even simple consent, have been withheld consistently in research with African Americans.”

Harriet Washington joins us on Zoom…

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

Last night, President Biden addressed the nation as we passed the grim milestone of 500,000 deaths from illness related to COVID 19. A candle lighting ceremony at the White House commemorated the loved ones who have been lost. Flags will fly at half-mast for the next five days.

Because of the pandemic, most of the deceased were denied the honor of a memorial service or funeral that included extended family and friends. The pandemic has changed many things, including how we grieve.

The pandemic has perhaps also forced our attention on the need to anticipate and navigate end of life issues in a way we weren’t focused pre-COVID. The conversations about how to plan for the end of our lives, and the lives of those we love are conversations that many of us are reluctant to have.

We talk a lot about the wonders and joy birth. Books that celebrate the critical and life-changing step into parenthood abound. Birth is, of course, a fundamental dimension of the human experience. But so is death. And our timidity and queasiness to talk about it are understandable.

But we can have agency when it comes to decisions surrounding our final passage. Tom's first guests today have written a book about those decisions. Dr. Dan Morhaim is an emergency medicine physician who served in the MD legislature for 24 years. Shelley Morhaim is a filmmaker, and a therapeutic music practitioner for hospice and hospital patients. Their new book is called Preparing for a Better End: Expert Lessons on Death and Dying for You and Your Loved Ones.

Dan and Shelley Morhaim join us today on Zoom.

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

As President Biden noted in his national address last night, we are struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible – that half a million of our fellow Americans – and another two million more people around the globe -- have lost their lives to the COVID-19 virus over the short span of a year. We have also lost, in many cases, the traditional ways of grieving these tragic deaths.

Tom's next guest is Dr. Dorothy Holinger. She is a psychotherapist in private practice, and a staff psychologist at two Harvard Medical School teaching colleges in Boston: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Department of Neurology and the Mass General Brigham Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry. She is the author of a new book called The Anatomy of Grief.

In it, she draws on science, patient narratives, the arts, and her own personal experience with loss to examine the parameters of grief, the range of physical and psychological changes grief can induce, and the tools we can use to heal after a wrenching personal loss.

Dr. Holinger joins us on Zoom.

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

Tom's next guest is Cara Ober, the founder, editor-in-chief and publisher of BMoreArt, an online and biannual print journal devoted to the local art scene. She joins us on Zoom.

Ms. Ober, who is also an artist and curator, was one of eight 2019 recipients of the Maine-based Rabkin Foundation Arts Writer Award, the largest grant of its kind, given annually to visual arts journalists deemed "essential" to the arts in their respective communities. BMoreArt was also selected by the Rabkin Foundation last September as one of nine arts journals around the country to receive grants to help mitigate the adverse economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The coronavirus has put a damper on many arts events, but there are some things going on in the visual arts community here in Baltimore that merit notice, and Ms. Ober spotlights a few of them today. Here are links to the ongoing or upcoming gallery shows she mentions on Midday today:

Notable Gallery Shows in Baltimore:

1. Springsteen Gallery: Ozone Atmosphere: Works by Monsieur Zohore and Sandy Williams III, up through February 27. Springsteen is located in Highlandtown and is a nationally affiliated gallery member of the New Art Dealers Alliance. The gallery exhibits significant emerging artists poised for national careers. (BmoreArt will be reviewing the show this week)

Read more about Monsieur Zohore.
Read more about Springsteen Gallery.

2. CPM (Critical Path Method): New art gallery in Bolton Hill run by Vlad Smolkin, former director of the Peter Blum Gallery in New York, exhibiting global and Baltimore-affiliated artists, with an emphasis on prints.

BMoreArt Review of their first exhibition: Clifford Owens

Their second exhibit is up now: Drypoint Prints by Louise Bourgeois and Pooneh Maghazehe. Visit by appointment up through March 12, 2021

3. Catalyst Contemporary: Upcoming show of paintings by Sejong Cho, a scientist and surealist painter, at this newish gallery located downstairs from the C. Grimaldis Gallery on Charles Street. Run by Full Circle Fine Arts (a photo printing and art gallery services enterprise), Catalyst Contemporary is focused on emerging contemporary painting and sculpture. Current and Upcoming Exhibits

More on Sejong's work. More on Catalyst Contemporary

4. C. Grimaldis Gallery: Carol Brown Goldberg, Entanglement. Organic visions of the cosmos.
This is Baltimore's most established contemporary art gallery. Director Costas Grimaldis has been advocating for artists -- Baltimore-based talents such as Charlie Ahn, and international ones, including Elaine DeKooning and Grace Hartigan -- for close to 30 years.

BmoreArt Connect+Collect Zoom Discussion with Goldberg and C. Grimaldis Gallery.

5. Creative Alliance: Bright featuring ten Black American artists in the main gallery, up through March 20. The artworks in BRIGHT provide new contexts to Black life and serve as a brave choice by these artists to push back against mainstream portrayals of Black bodies. The exhibition includes art by Ambrose, Marie Charlotte Amegah, Destiny Belgrave, Michael A. Booker, Schroeder Cherry, Andrew Gray, David Ibata, Jabari C. Jefferson, Megan Lewis, and Arin Mitchell. Curated by Thomas James.

If you are looking to purchase art by Baltimore-based artists and want to shop online:

1. Resort Baltimore (gallery online shop)

2. ICA Baltimore Flat File Program

You can find more information about ongoing exhibitions across the region at the BmoreArt Calendar.

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

Tom's Newsmaker guest today is Baltimore City's Inspector-General, Isabel Mercedes Cumming. She was appointed in 2018. Since then, her office, which was established as an oversight authority to investigate allegations of misconduct by City employees and contractors, has grown from four to 17 employees, and the number of complaints received on the OIG hot line has increased exponentially.

The Office of Inspector-General recently released its Annual Report for 2020. One of the most controversial of its recent investigations was a 7-month probe into travel by Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. When questions were raised about Mosby’s travel, much of which was paid for by entities outside of city government, Ms. Mosby requested an investigation by the OIG.

The results of that investigation revealed substantial ambiguity in the rules that are explicated in the City Administrative Manual, and that led Mayor Brandon Scott to call for a study of those rules to see how they might be clarified.

Isabel Mercedes Cumming joins us on Zoom…

___________________________________

To report waste, fraud or abuse:
Contact the OIG's FRAUD HOTLINE at 800-417-0430.

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

Tom's guest is the award-winning author Chang-rae Lee. He is the author of six novels. His first, Native Speaker, earned the 1996 Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award for First Fiction. The Surrendered, which he published in 2008, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A subsequent novel, On Such a Full Sea, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of the 2015 Heartland Fiction Prize...

The Korean-American writer's latest novel is a stunning, wild tale whose protagonist is a 20-year-old, somewhat aimless college student from New Jersey named Tiller Bardmon. The book is a collection of Tiller’s reflections on the relationships he has with a charismatic businessman, and later, a young mother and her son. It’s called My Year Abroad.

Chang-rae Lee is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University in California. He joins us today on Zoom...

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

(Originally aired January 22, 2021)

We begin today with an interview from the Midday archive. It’s a conversation Tom had last month with a scholar from Loyola University Chicago about anger. If you haven't read her fascinating chronicle of emotional history, it might not have occurred to you that anger, or any emotion, could have a history.

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, Anger is number six, behind pride, greed, lust, envy, and gluttony. Sloth is the only sin, according to Pope Gregory and Thomas Aquinas, that is listed after anger on their famous hit parade.

So, maybe anger isn’t so bad in the general scheme of things? And how might its ranking have changed over the millennia? Dr. Barbara Rosenwein, a historian and professor emerita at Loyola University Chicago, has thought a great deal about these questions. In her latest book, Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion, Dr. Rosenwein observes that anger doesn’t come pre-loaded into the human psyche. It must be learned. Buddhists try to avoid anger altogether. The ancient Roman Stoics said we should actively resist it, because if we don’t, we lose our capacity for rational judgment...

Anger’s history changed as society changed. Back in the days of feudalism, peasants weren’t allowed to get angry, at least publicly. Anger is much discussed in the bible. It is, in some instances, a metaphor for power, and it is the basis for a lucrative industry teaching people how to manage their anger.

Particularly over the last four years, as the nation experienced a brutish president who relied on insults and personal attacks in place of reasoned argument, it seems that much public discourse all to easily devolves into a blizzard of angry epithets. That president was impeached for inciting an angry mob to storm the Capital, and video tape of that horrific event clearly shows the raw anger that animated many of the rioters.

Anger might be an understandable response in a lot of situations, but is it productive? Is it, in some cases, a necessary prerequisite to action? Or is anger simply a fog-inducing reflex that clouds our judgement to no productive end? Is anger a vice or a virtue?

Dr. Rosenwein joined us on Zoom from Illinois.

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

Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins Tom Hall again today with her reviews of two new virtual productions now streaming for ticketed audiences.

The first is The Catastrophist, a COVID-19-inspired drama by Lauren Gunderson that's based on the life and work of esteemed virologist Nathan Wolfe, who is also the playwright's real-life husband. The world premiere is a virtual co-production by Round House Theater and Marin Theater Company, directed by Jasson Minadakis and starring William DeMeritt in the title role.

Judy's second review spotlights Simply Sondheim, a COVID-safe restaging of Signature Theatre's 2015 revue of more than 30 songs from the musicals of the renowned, 90-year-old Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim. The comprehensive revue, which runs from '50s oldies like “Saturday Night” to mid-2000s hits like “Road Show,” features a dozen performers - including Norm Lewis belting out "Being Alive" - under the guidance of director-choreographer Matthew Gardiner. Signature's new filmed production is streaming now through March 26.

Check the theater links for ticketing info.

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