Midday

Carole King was a 19-year-old songwriter from Brooklyn when she wrote "Take Good Care of My Baby" for the pop singer Bobby Vee. In 1961, the song would become one of nineteen Top-Ten hits Carole King would go on to write for other artists over four decades.

Ten years after that hit, King recorded an iconic album as a performer that garnered multiple hits for herself. Tapestry was an international sensation. It won four Grammy awards, and established Carole King as a force in pop music whose impact and influence are boundless.

Welcome to Midday. Tom's guest for the hour is journalist and author, Jane Eisner, who has written a scrupulously detailed and illuminating new biography of one of most influential American singer-songwriters of the 20th century.

The book is called Carole King: She Made the Earth Move.

Recent reporting shed light on a forgotten graveyard in Prince George’s County, part of a dark chapter in Maryland history.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the cemetery was the final resting place for young people held at the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children—a detention center for Black youth.

The property is now home to a number of state buildings, including the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center.

State Sen. Will Smith, a Democrat from Montgomery County, was part of a delegation of lawmakers who visited the site recently. He joins Midday to talk about what he saw.

A proposal by the Trump administration to severely limit the number of legal refugees, people who have been vetted and who have followed the rules to enter the country properly, would be a huge setback for thousands of people hoping to escape difficult conditions in their home countries.

Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have continued their crackdowns on immigrants living in the United States without legal status.

For insights into the latest immigration news Midday is joined by Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the President & CEO of Global Refuge, a refugee resettlement organization based here in Baltimore.

Each year, Baltimore’s 14 largest nonprofit institutions, places like Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland Medical Center, contribute an annual payment to the city referred to as PILOTs, or Payment in Lieu of Taxes.

Because nonprofit entities are not subject to taxes, these nonprofits make voluntary payments which have, for the last several decades, been negotiated with the city every 10 years.

Last week, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced that the city had negotiated a new PILOT agreement for five years that will gradually increase the annual payments to $12 million a year by the end of the agreement.

But some say the increase is still not enough considering the huge wealth these institutions steward. And questions have been raised by critics who say this new agreement was not reached transparently.

Baltimore City Councilwoman Phylicia Porter Midday to discuss the agreement and what it means for the city. Porter sought to create a PILOT taskforce to study what an agreement could look like. The Mayor signed a deal before the bill creating the task force was put to the council for a vote.

Katie Pumphrey became the first person to complete the 24-mile swim from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 2024. She previously swum around the Island of Manhattan and three times across the English Channel.

Her love of the open water inspires her visual artistry. A new exhibit at the Creative Alliance through October 11 is called “Swimming Pool."

In a Midday exclusive, Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D., Md 02) discusses the government shutdown, and the bill he's introduced to help the state's federal workers weather the shutdown's financial storm.

On today's Midday Healthwatch, Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency room physician and health columnist for the Washington Post, counters government claims of Tylenol-autism links, and discusses recent changes in federal vaccine policies.

More information, including tickets, are available at: newnextfilmfest.com.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott joins Midday to discuss a new agreement between the city and large educational and medical nonprofits to make payments in lieu of taxes. Does the deal satisfy advocates who say institutions like Johns Hopkins University are not paying their fair share? The agreement comes as members of the City Council attempted to assemble a task force to recommend what anchor institutions should pay.

Plus, a discussion of a controversial package of zoning laws intended to boost the availability of affordable housing. In an unusual move, two of the bills in the package have been sent back to the committee that had already approved them.

Kim Wehle joins Midday to look ahead to the upcoming docket of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wehle is a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, the author of four books, an in-demand public speaker and commentator, and the host of a popular Substack she calls The Little Law School with Professor Kim Wehle, where she unpacks legal headlines and offers timely perspectives on politics and the law.