Midday

Why is it that 40% of Baltimore residents lack broadband access to the internet? In a city where red-lining in housing has a long history, has red-lining moved from the street to the internet?

We begin with Dr. John Horrigan. He’s the author of a new report for the Abell Foundation that describes the impact of Baltimore’s Digital Divide on low-income city residents. Dr. Horrigan is a senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute.

Then, Chrissie Powell and Andrew Coy join the conversation. Powell is the Baltimore site director of Byte Back, Inc., a tech-inclusion nonprofit that offers free technical skills classes for adult learners. Coy is the executive director of the Digital Harbor Foundation, which teaches coding and other computer and tech skills to K-12 students. They are both leaders of the Baltimore Digital Equity Coalition, which includes about 50 groups that are working together to reduce our city’s Digital Divide.

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Even as the death count from the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States continues to climb, many local and state leaders across the nation, including here in Maryland, have pointed to gradual reductions in coronavirus hospitalizations to justify their decisions to begin lifting two-month-old quarantine restrictions. Over the Memorial Day weekend, some areas of the country saw a surge in mass public gatherings at reopened shops, on beaches and in public parks, where six feet of separation and masks seemed to be the exception, not the rule.

But public health experts warn that the coronavirus threat is far from over, and that in order to prevent a surge of new infections, a rigorous program of testing and contact tracing will be essential. What is contact tracing? And how do you launch a national and international contact tracing program?

Tom's guest today is someone who’s helping to do just that. Dr. Crystal Watson is a Senior Associate at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. Dr Watson recently co-authored a report with public health experts at the non-profit Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, entitled A National Plan to Enable Comprehensive COVID-19 Case Finding and Contact Tracing in the U.S.

Dr. Crystal Watson joins Tom on the phone from her Baltimore office.

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At 4:33 this afternoon, if the weather and all systems are go, a SpaceX-built Falcon 9 rocket, carrying two NASA astronauts in a crew capsule called “Dragon," will lift off from Launchpad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and soar toward a rendezvous with the International Space Station. The mission, dubbed "Demo 2," will be the first time a privately-built rocket will carry humans into space from US soil, and the first US-built manned spacecraft in a decade. NASA Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, both veterans of multiple missions aboard the now-retired Shuttle Orbiters, will dock the CrewDragon with the International Space Station and remain aboard the ISS for at least several weeks.

What will this launch mean for NASA’s bid to send humans back to the Moon by 2024 and to Mars in the coming years, and for the future of commercial space exploration?

Tom's first guest is reporter Mike Wall. He has covered the space program for Space.com since 2010, and he's is the author of Out There, a 2018 book about the search for alien life. He joins us via Skype from his home in San Francisco.

Then, we get some historical perspectives on the SpaceX launch from esteemed space policy analyst, John M. Logsdon. He’s a Professor Emeritus of political science at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. In 1987, he founded the Elliott School's Space Policy Institute. Professor Logsdon is also a former member of the NASA Advisory Council and its Exploration Committee. He is the award-winning author of three books about politics and the space program: John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (2010); After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program (2015); and Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier (2019). He has also edited the recently published The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration (2018), a collection of original documents tracing the evolution of the U.S. space effort. John Logsdon joins Tom via Skype from his home in Washington, D.C.

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Tom's guest today is the acclaimed journalist and author, David Ignatius. For forty years, Ignatius has been a highly respected reporter on foreign affairs. He joined the staff of the Washington Post in 1986 and he began writing his twice-weekly column in 1998.

Ignatius has also written 11 spy novels, the latest of which benefits mightily from his years of covering the CIA. It’s a contemporary novel that transpires between 2016-2018 in locales all over the world. Its protagonist, Michael Dunne, has a score to settle, and as we follow Dunne around the globe, we are brought into a world where technology is used to spread disinformation in ways one might not have ever imagined were possible.

Reality is as scary as this novel is exciting. Cyber criminals continue to perfect a variety of ways to trick people into believing that which isn’t true, fundamentally destabilizing society and causing upheaval in markets and deep division in politics.

As we witnessed in the 2016 Presidential election, the threat of technology being used by bad actors is real, which makes this book all the more resonant with what’s going on in the real world.

The book is called The Paladin. David Ignatius joins us via Skype from his home in Washington...

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On this special edition of Midday, six reflections on the April 27, 2015 Uprising, and how the community at the epicenter of that unrest - Sandtown-Winchester - has fared since 25-year-old Freddie Gray died from injuries he sustained while in police custody. At the heart of the protests and the rioting that erupted after Gray's funeral: anger and frustration with a system steeped in racism, inequity and apathy; and a police force that operated with seeming impunity.

We begin with a focus on how community-police relations have evolved since 2015: Tom talks with Ashiah Parker, CEO of the Sandtown-based community development group, No Boundaries Coalition, and Sean Yoes, Baltimore Editor of the Afro American Newspaper and author of the book Baltimore After Freddie Gray: Real Stories from One of America’s Great Imperiled Cities.

Then, a look at the rich cultural history of Pennsylvania Avenue, which runs from Penn North, the epicenter of the 2015 unrest, down to MLK Jr. Blvd. Tom's guests are Brion Gill, executive director of the new Pennsylvania Avenue Black Arts and Entertainment District and Jim Hamlin, owner of The Avenue Bakery. Finally, Tom talks with Todd Marcus, jazz musician and executive director of the Intersection of Change, and Daria Baylis, coordinator for IOC’s Jubilee Arts training and cultural programs.

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A poll that was commissioned by WYPR, The Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore indicate that all three city wide races in Baltimore are close, with perhaps as many as one in five voters yet to make up their minds. WYPR City Hall reporter, Emily Sullivan and Tom look behind the numbers.

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Bakari Sellers made history in 2006, when at the age of 22, he was elected to the South Carolina legislature, becoming the youngest elected African American official in the country.

Growing up in the rural south, Sellers father, Cleveland Sellers, was a civil rights activist who worked with Martin Luther King and other civil rights icons.

In his new memoir, My Vanishing Country, Bakari Sellers writes that he sees his life as an extension of his father’s journey, writing compellingly about the particular challenges of small town Black communities that are far from the glare of urban centers.

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Today, the final installment in our pre-primary series of Conversations with the Candidates. Tom's guest is Thiru Vignarajah, a veteran city and federal prosecutor and one of a crowded field of Democratic contenders in the June 2nd primary election for Baltimore mayor.

A WYPR/Baltimore Sun/University of Baltimore poll released yesterday places Mr. Vignarajah just outside the group of three leading candidates in the race, but the poll also indicated that crime reduction is the top priority for a majority of likely voters. Will Baltimore choose a prosecutor to lead the City in the fight against violence and a global pandemic?

Mr. Vignarajah has spent most of his legal career in public service. He attended Yale University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. He went on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, and then served as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore, working under then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein. Vignarajah later moved to the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, where he headed the Major Investigations Unit. In 2014, he was appointed Deputy Attorney General for Maryland under Attorney-General Brian Frosh, a position he left to work on the transition team for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. In 2017, Vignarajah ran an unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign for Baltimore City State's Attorney. Currently a litigation partner at the law firm DLA Piper in Baltimore, he is one of 23 Democratic and 7 Republican registered candidates vying to be their party’s nominee for Baltimore mayor in the June 2 primary.

Thiru Vignarajah is 43 years old. He lives in Baltimore's Federal Hill neighborhood. He joins Tom via Skype phone from his campaign office in Baltimore.

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Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic two months ago, more than 43,500 Marylanders have been sickened by the coronovirus. It has killed more than 2000 Marylanders, 270 of them residents of Baltimore County. And while the rate of hospitalizations in the state has finally begun to decline, as of today there are still 1,375 people receiving intensive care for COVID-19, many of them at medical facilities here in Baltimore.

Now, a story from the front lines of the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, from Marian Grant. She is a palliative care nurse practitioner at the University of Maryland Medical Center, and a policy consultant on health care issues with a PhD in nursing. And for the last several weeks, she has been working with COVID 19 patients, and their families, in the UMMC's Intensive Care Unit.

She joins Tom via Skype phone from her home in Reistertown.

Read Marian Grant's opinion piece in today's Baltimore Sun Op Ed section, here.

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Today, a look at the road ahead for the millions of Americans who’ve lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the past three months, as COVID-19 has taken the lives of more than 90,000 Americans and sickened over a million and a half others, it has also ravaged the US economy. Nationwide business shutdowns have produced levels of unemployment and business failure that haven’t been seen in the US since the Great Depression of the 1930s -- a crisis that prompted Congress to pass a series of multi-trillion-dollar financial relief measures. Now, as the nation’s economy gradually begins to re-open, what are the job prospects for the legions of unemployed, both here in Baltimore and across America?

Tom's guests today run two of the region’s most innovative workforce development and technology training companies.

Jacob Hsu is the CEO of Catalyte. His 20-year old company uses A-I systems to identify, train, and employ people as software developers, regardless of their educational backgrounds. Mr. Hsu recently announced that Catalyte is partnering with other companies and government agencies to create a national employment exchange, called RetrainAmerica, that will help workers find jobs in the nation’s technology, cybersecurity, logistics and health care sectors.

Jason Green is the co-founder and Senior Vice President of SkillSmart, a workforce development company that since 2013 has been using innovative data-driven software to help businesses find and train skilled workers. Mr. Green previously held positions in local and federal government, most recently serving as Associate Counsel to President Barack Obama, advising the president and senior staff on legal, economic and domestic policy matters.

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