Midday

Today, another in our occasional series, Midday on Higher Education, in which we sit down with the presidents of colleges and universities throughout the state. Tom Hall's guest today is the president of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Samuel Hoi.Mr. Hoi took the reins at MICA in 2014. One of the country’s leading art schools, MICA teaches art and entrepreneurship. And as one of Baltimore’s anchor institutions, it has a unique capacity to contribute to our city’s creative economy.

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Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins Tom on our Friday edition this week with a review of the new Artscentric production of Little Shop of Horrors, a re-imagining of the hit 1982 musical by Howard Ashman (book and lyrics) and Alan Menken (music), which spawned a 1986 hit movie starring Rick Moranis. Both the musical and film were based on the 1960 cult classic by B-movie director Roger Corman, The Little Shop of Horrors.Artscentric's Little Shop of Horrors continues at The Motor House through Aug. 17th.Little Shop tells the story of a nerdy flower-shop worker named Seymour who gets some unexpected help romancing his co-worker, Audrey, from a carnivorous plant from outer space he calls Audrey II. The campy, soul and R----B-laced musical production by Artcentric - the 16-year old Baltimore troupe that calls itself a ----color-conscious---- arts organization - is directed by Kevin S. McAllister (the group's artistic director), with musical direction by Cedric D. Lyles and choreography by Shalyce N. Hemby. The cast includes Ricardo Balgrove as Seymour, Kayla Halo Wheeler as Audrey, and Jhermaine Drakeford as the voice of Audrey II.

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Guest host Nathan Sterner unpacks local news with WYPR’s John Lee, and author Dale Beran explains the role the internet plays in advancing extremism. Plus, a new series by the Baltimore Business Journal about transportation woes in Baltimore .

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Tom's guest is Baltimore City Council President Brandon Scott. He’s proposing significant changes to the way the city operates, allowing 16-year-olds to vote in city elections, and bringing an equity framework to all that city government does.

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Tom's guest today is Emmy Jo Favilla. She's the senior manager of “brand voice” at BuzzFeed in New York (she'll explain what that job entails), and formerly its senior commerce editor. For several years before that, she was BuzzFeed’s global copy chief. As such, she created the BuzzFeed Style Guide, which, when it went public in 2014, was heralded by one reviewer as “the style guide for the internet.” (Notice the lower-case ----i---- in ----internet.----) Favilla's years as a style guru led to her first book, published in 2017. It’s called A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age. It's an instructive and hilarious guide through the perils and pleasures of the modern English language. We first dove into Emmy Favilla’s book when she was a guest on Midday last November. And she joins Tom again today from Argot Studios in Manhattan.

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Tom and Dr. Sheri Parks, MICA's Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, talk about the image of Baltimore in the national media and how that squares with the image those of us who live here have of our city. Political leaders and many people on social media have been in a position of defending Baltimore from verbal assaults by President Trump, but that defense has been mounted in full knowledge that our city faces problems that were long in the making, and very slow in the solving.

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Today, a conversation one of the towering figure in American literature, and narrator of the African American experience, Toni Morrison. We learned this morning that the great writer, Toni Morrison, died yesterday at the age of 88. The author of 11 powerful novels, she was the first African American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She also won the Pulitzer Prize, and in 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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With so much of Baltimore's suffering in the news over the past week, we turn to community leaders to discuss a future beyond violence. City Councilmembers Kristerfer Burnett and Zeke Cohen join Tom to discuss the Baltimore City Trauma-Responsive Care Act.The bill, which was introduced in late July, would create a task force to harness all relevant city programs to benefit youth traumatized by violence and dysfunction. The measure would also establish systems for measuring which programs and practices are best at mitigating and preventing trauma to children and families.Also joining us in studio are Frederick Douglass High School senior Bryonna Harris, who helped the council members draft the legislation and gave testimony at City Hall about the trauma she and her classmates face in Baltimore City. And Letrice Gant, co-founder of Baltimore Ceasefire 365, discusses the outcome of this past Ceasefire Weekend events, and the impact the Cease Fire movement is having on the culture of the city.

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A fascinating exhibition of portrait photographs selected from the archives of the Maryland Historical Society was recently assembled in a show called “Reflections: A Brief History of Looking at Ourselves.”The exhibition, which opened June 19th and runs through July 1, 2020, highlights themes of identity and place, and showcases portrait work from unsung and in some cases unidentified photographers -- as with the photograph featured to the left -- that are represented in the Historical Society's photo and prints collections. The photographs on exhibit encompass nearly the entire 180-year history of photography, from 1840s daguerreotypes to present-day digital photographs and “selfies.”Joining Tom to describe how the exhibition came together and to share some of the stories behind the photographs are Joe Tropea, the film and photographs curator at the Maryland Historical Society, and Elena Volkova, assistant professor of Art ---- Visual Communication Design at Stevenson University. She’s also co-host (with Joseph Giordano) of the photojournalism podcast, Ten Frames per Second.

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Today on the Midday News Wrap, we recap the second round of Democratic presidential debates. On Tuesday and Wednesday, 20 Democratic contenders took the stage in Detroit, Michigan to make their case for the party's presidential nomination. Then, we discuss the continuing attacks by President Trump on the city of Baltimore and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings. The president took his assault a step further at a rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Thursday, denigrating several U.S. ----inner cities---- run by Democratic mayors.Who were the stand-out candidates at the debate? Which candidates will the Democrats choose to run against Trump? What is the president's purpose in demeaning American cities and citizens? Will the call for oversight outlast the President's grab for the headlines? On today's Midday News Wrap, Tom considers those questions with two distinguished guests:NPR National Security editor Franco Ordonez joins us on the line from the NPR studios in Washington.Julie Bykowicz reports on money and politics for the Wall Street Journal, and she joins us in studio.

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