WYPR: Midday with Dan Rodricks Podcast

Sweeping gun-control legislation faces a battle in the Maryland Senate while the House of Delegates launches hearings on an assault-rifle ban, limitations on ammunition and the licensing of handgun owners. We continue our post-Newtown discussions with Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and one of the nation’s leading experts on firearms. He has briefed Maryland lawmakers on his research on illegal gun sales, and best ways to keep guns away from criminals and to reduce violence.

In today’s technology driven world, most people have either tried online dating or know someone who has. According to the dating site Match.com, one in five relationships now begins on the Internet. Online dating is a $2 billion industry. But is it really making dating easier? And how is it destroying romance? Journalist Dan Slater looks into this brave new world of matchmaking in Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating.

What do sugar daddies, medical studies and pawnshops have in common? They all help some students pay for college. With tuition continuing to rise and many graduates being saddled with huge debt, students are turning to innovative ways of paying for school. Blake Ellis, financial writer for CNN Money, reports. Plus, Michael Thornton, associate program director of scholarships for the College Bound Foundation, on the more conventional ways students and families pay for higher education.

In preparation for the big event Sunday night, a survey of the top 2012 Oscar contenders with Midday contributors Linda DeLibero, associate director of film studies at the Johns Hopkins University, and filmmaker Christopher Llewellyn Reed, chair and associate professor of the Department of Film and Video at Stevenson University.

A review of top stories of the region with the reporters who covered them and some of the newsmakers behind them.

Our always-interesting environmental contributor tells us about the annual perch run and the development of oyster farming in the Chesapeake. In addition, Rona lists the kinds of environmental issues that should be of concern to parents of young children -- and those that shouldn't. Rona Kobell is a staff writer for the Chespapeake Bay Journal. She appears once monthly on Midday.

Author Charlie LeDuff examines the gritty past and present of his once-prosperous hometown in Detroit: An American Autopsy. LeDuff, a Pulitzer-winning former staff writer for The New York Times and former reporter for The Detroit News, is currently a television reporter for Detroit's Fox 2 News.

The new Netflix series “House of Cards,” starring Kevin Spacey, was the first television series to be released all at once, and all online. The show has sparked a relatively new trend called “binge-watching,” meaning a viewer can devour an entire series in one sitting at the very moment it is released. Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik discusses the trend, and online streaming and DVRs as the new normal.

We hear the story of how the valleys north of Baltimore -- those vast green vistas of paddocks, horses and four-board fence -- came to be preserved through a landmark plan by architect Ian McHarg. Filmmaker Allen Moore documents the efforts of McHarg and his collaborators to devise one of the first land-use plans to use nature as its central theme. In addition to Moore, our guests are Bill Roberts, one of the original authors of The Plan for the Valleys, and J. Carroll Holzer, long-time attorney engaged in Baltimore County land-use issues.

Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in Maryland to become the most influential black American of the 19th century, lived the last two decades of his life in Washington, D.C., became active in local politics, continued to crusade for civil rights, and married a white woman. Journalist and author John Muller tackles this part of the legendary orator’s life in "Frederick Douglass In Washington, D.C. the Lion of Anacostia."

Following a consultant’s report that forecast a grim financial future for the city, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake rolled out a plan of bold reforms that she says will bring stability to city government and make Baltimore more attractive as a place to live and do business. The plan includes proposals for trash fees, lowering the city's property tax rate, getting city employes to contribute more to their pensions and firefighters to work longer hours. Ryan O'Doherty, the mayor's chief of communications and policy, answers listeners questions.

Do you know which U.S. president witnessed the beheading of his 11-year-old son? Or what president was the source of the colloquialism “OK”? This hour, in honor of the President’s Day holiday, author Kenneth C. Davis tells us about some of the least-known presidents of all-time from James Polk, the only speaker of the House of Representatives ever to be elected president, to William McKinley, the third of four presidents to die at the hands of an assassin. Davis is the best-selling author of “Don’t Know Much About The American Presidents.”

This hour, we take a look at U.S. military leadership from WWII and Gen. George C. Marshall to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the leadership of Gen. David Petraeus. Leading us through this discussion is Thomas Ricks, a veteran journalist and former Washington Post Pentagon correspondent, who argues that today’s military leadership is far inferior to what it was in the past. Ricks is the author of the controversial new book “The Generals: American Military Command from WWII to Today.”

Karen Avrich tells about the life of activist and feminist Emma Goldman and her lover, Alexander Berkman, the anarchist Sasha said to have carried out the first terrorist act in the U.S. when he tried to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Avrich finished Sasha and Emma, the book her late father, scholar Paul Avrich, started. Original air date 01/17/13

A review of top stories of the region with the reporters who covered them and some of the newsmakers behind them.