Midday

(This program was originally broadcast on July 3, 2025)

In this encore edition of Midday, we reprise Tom Hall's conversation earlier this summer with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Rick Atkinson.

After a 20-year career as a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor at the Washington Post, in 1989, Atkinson — the son of a US Army Officer — began writing about military history, including a three-volume series called the Liberation Trilogy, about World War II in Europe.

In 2019, he published the first of his three planned volumes about the American Revolutionary War, The British Are Coming, which chronicles the American rebellion against the British from the year before the Declaration of Independence until the year after.

The second volume of this Revolution Trilogy was published last Spring. It covers the middle years of the war for America, from the battles of Ticonderoga to Charleston between 1777 and 1780. It’s called The Fate of the Day. 

Rick Atkinson discusses this sweeping, granular exploration of the people, the politics, and the passions that animated American rebels and British loyalists alike. It is a beautifully written, meticulously researched, and gorgeously shaped account of the conflict that began the American experiment.

Rick Atkinson spoke with Tom via Zoom from Washington, DC on June 25, 2025.

(Because this program was recorded, we won't be taking any new calls or online comments)

(This conversation was originally broadcast on April 2, 2025)

In today's encore edition of Midday, we revisit Tom Hall's conversation last April with Dr. Jeanne Theoharis, a historian and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, and the author or co-author of 13 books on the American civil rights movement.

Her latest book makes the case that some of Dr. King’s most significant work in his fight for racial justice wasn’t in the Jim Crow South, as legend has it, but rather, in cities like Boston, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Dr. Theoharis argues that despite his role in passing landmark civil rights legislation and the professed support he received from white liberals in the north, King was consistently betrayed by those whites, the press and the federal government.

Her book is called King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside of the South. 

Jeanne Theoharis joined us on Zoom from New York last April.

(This program was first broadcast on April 30, 2025)

On this encore edition of Midday, we’ll listen to Tom Hall's conversation last spring with author and journalist Elaine Weiss. Her latest book tells the inspirational story of the civil rights activists who offered “citizenship classes” to African Americans throughout the south from 1955-1970.

The story centers around Septima Clark, whom Martin Luither King, Jr. called “the mother of the movement,” and three others who worked tirelessly, and at great personal cost, to develop a system of secret schools. Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, and a white activist, Myles Horton, are not household names of the civil rights movement, but this book makes the compelling case that their importance cannot be overstated.

This is Elaine Weiss’ third book of narrative history. She’s written about the Woman’s Land Army in World War I. Her book, The Woman’s Hour, about the suffragist movement, is the source material for the hit Broadway musical, SUFFS. 

This book is called Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement. 

Elaine Weiss joined us in Studio A.

Dr. Martha Jones' book is The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir.

(This interview was originally broadcast on April 23, 2025)

Best-selling writer, Amor Towles, is the author of three novels, including A Gentleman in Moscow, which was adapted for a television series on Paramount+ starring Ewan McGregor.

Towles joined Midday last April to discuss the writing of his latest work, a brilliant compilation of six short stories set in New York, and a novella set in the golden age of Hollywood that features a character from his novel, Rules of Civility. The collection, newly in paperback, is called Table for Two.

(This interview was originally broadcast on April 23, 2025)

Journalist and author Ruth Franklin joins Midday. Her biography of the writer Shirley Jackson won the National Book Critics Circle Award nine years ago.

Franklin's latest book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank, is another biography. She writes about Frank, the young Jewish girl whose diary, published years after she perished in a Nazi death camp, remains the quintessential literary account of the Holocaust. Franklin's new work is wholly original and striking, particularly in its form and structure.

Tom spoke with Ruth Franklin earlier this year on the Jewish observance of Yam Hashoah, the commemoration of the Holocaust.

Ruth Franklin grew up in Baltimore and graduated from the Park School. She is a literary critic and former editor at The New Republic, and she teaches non-fiction writing in the MFA program at Columbia University.

Today, Midday is focused on mental health maintenance. Guest host Farai Chideya explores the ongoing work of checking in with ourselves and others for optimal mental health.

Farai's guests — Kerry Graves, the executive director of the Metro Baltimore chapter of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and Dr. Ernestine Briggs-King, the vice-president of Kennedy Krieger Institute's Department of Family and Community Interventions — share practical advice on how to monitor your own mental health and how to support someone you're worried about.

For more information on brain health, be sure to listen to Your Child's Brain, WYPR's monthly podcast produced in partnership with Kennedy Krieger Institute.

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, remember that help is available. You can reach the NAMI HelpLine at 800-950-6264, text "NAMI" to 62640, or call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for immediate support.

Why do women live longer than men? Is the female brain much different than the male brain?

Cat Bohannon, a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition, joins Midday to discuss the human female body and its unique 200 million-year history. Her award-winning 2023 book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, is now out in paperback.

Scientific research long focused on the male body, but in Eve, Bohannon shifts readers' attention to the female body, its evolution and why it matters today.

(This podcast originally streamed on March 11, 2025)

Author and historian Kellie Carter Jackson explores how Black women fight against white supremacy, showcasing both their loud and quiet forms of resistance.

Award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returns after 12 years with her latest novel, chronicling the hopes and aspirations of women in "Dream Count."