Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh has named Michael Harrison, the Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, as her new nominee for BPD police commissioner. The announcement comes less than 24 hours after her first nominee, Fort Worth Police Chief Joel Fitzgerald, withdrew from the process. Tom speaks with Mayor Pugh about the reasons behind her endorsement of Mr. Harrison, who by many accounts has had a successful tenure in New Orleans.Our analysis of the Harrison pick continues with Jayne Miller of WBAL Television, Andy Green of the Baltimore Sun, New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Kevin Litten, and law enforcement expert Matthew Horace.

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Tom and his panel of of Annapolitan Experts preview the 439th session of the MD General Assembly begins on Wednesday. The agenda will, as always, be full. Last year, lawmakers considered more than 3,000 bills. They passed nearly 900 of them in a record session that the Governor and Legislative leadership both praised as a success. Washington Post Maryland politics and government reporter Ovetta Wiggins is on the line from Prince Georges County. And joining Tom in Studio A are Josh Kurtz, the editor and co-founder of Maryland Matters, and WYPR State House reporter Rachel Baye.

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It’s Midday on Ethics with Dr. Jeffrey Kahn of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.Today we’ll explore some of the ethical issues raised by the explosive case of a Chinese researcher named He Jiankui. In late November, He announced the birth of twin girls, Lulu and Nana, who, he says, are the world’s first gene-edited humans. Most countries, including China, ban human gene editing, and scientists around the world have strongly denounced He’s shocking claims, which raise ethical questions not only for the newborns, but for future generations.We live-streamed this conversation on WYPR's Facebook page. Click here to watch the video.

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Tom welcomes the great pianist Leon Fleisher to Studio A. Fleisher, a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2007, played his first public concert at the age of eight. He’s playing his latest series of concerts this weekend with the Baltimore Symphony at the age of 90, and he continues to teach at Peabody Institute.He will play a piano concerto by Mozart, No. 12 in A Major, with the BSO tonight at 8 p.m. and Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m. at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, and Saturday night at 8 p.m. at Strathmore Hall in Bethesda. The program also includes the Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms. For information about tickets, click here.

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Legendary pianist Leon Fleisher is our guest in Studio A.

It's another edition of our monthly Midday at the Movies, with Jed Dietz, the founding director of the Maryland Film Festival and the SNF Parkway, the historic and newly renovated movie house on North Avenue. After a slump in 2017, North American movie-house ticket sales last year bounced back. Box office receipts jumped 6% to a record $11.9 billion, besting the record set in 2016. Global ticket sales topped $40 billion last year, in a world where streaming services are multiplying as quickly as movies in the Fast and Furious franchise. But a third of that increased revenue came from just 10 films. What does that portend for the future of flicks? Tom and Jed discuss recent trends in movie-making, and how the big online streamers, Netflix and Amazon, are changing the movie screen landscape and filling it with a trove of new films -- some of which are also playing in traditional movie palaces. And Tom and Jed spotlight some of the new films audiences are flocking to see.

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Midday at the Movies - Netflix, Amazon the Future of Film

It's Thursday, and Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck kicks off the new year with her review of the world premiere of playwright David Ives' three-part comedy, ----The Panties, The Partner and The Profit,---- now on stage at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Lansburgh Theater in Washington, D.C.In his fifth and final collaboration with the Shakespeare Theatre Company's retiring Artistic Director, Michael Kahn, Ives presents what he calls his ----translaptation---- of the late German playwright Carl Sternheim's epic trilogy, ----Scenes from the Heroic Life of the Middle Class.---- In each of the three titular plays, Kahn and his cast, featuring Carson Elrod and Kimberly Gilbert, explore themes of sex, money and power, leaping from Boston in the 1950s to Wall Street in 1986 to modern-day Malibu.----The Panties, The Partner and The Profit---- continues at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC until Sunday, January 6.

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Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck reviews David Ives' The Panties, The Partner and The Profit

Today, Tom's guest is journalist and an attorney Steven Brill. He’s the founder of Court TV and The American Lawyer magazine, and he teaches journalism at Yale, where he founded the Yale Journalism Initiative.His latest book is a stunning and disconcerting compendium of some of the central problems facing America: the financialization of what had been a manufacturing based economy; rampant obsession with short term profits in American business, crippling political polarity, and marginalization of the middle class. He offers trenchant analysis of why these problems exist, and he shines a light on those people and organizations who are working to address these difficult challenges. The book is a New York Times Best-seller called “Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty Year Fall -- and those Fighting to Reverse It.”

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