Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse defies the economy with a progressive agenda and a new free school.
On a late summer evening, a dozen students in their 20s and 30s take seats around an oversized picnic table and on rows of bleachers inside the Baltimore Museum of Art's geodesic dome. John Duda, one of the founders of Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse collective, prepares to lead tonight's class, "Urban Development as Counterinsurgency," but he can't start. The students keep arriving.
"The...
No, my husband is not my son—he just looks like he is.
The first time I was mistaken for my husband's mother, it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. I was 43, Mike was 42, and we were stranded at the Atlanta airport trying to make a connection to Savannah on a stormy night. Flights had been cancelled, passengers bumped, and hotel rooms all booked up when a U.S. Air pilot offered to help us secure a room for the night at an airport hotel. We gladly...
How Fiddler on the Roof and shock jock Johnny Walker shaped NPR's most singular storyteller.
Fiddler on the Roof changed Ira Glass's life. Growing up in Lochearn, the self-described "theater dork" attended nearly every production of the hit musical that made it to Baltimore. "My mom used to take my sisters and me to the musicals at Painters Mill Music Fair, or the Mechanic," recalls Glass. "Because there are so many Jews in Baltimore, some production of Fiddler on the Roof would come...
At just 25 years old, Tony Cushing has taken over the bar his father made an institution.
Ana Marie Cushing has a photo of her son, Tony, that never fails to amuse her. He's perhaps just four years old, behind the bar at the Cat's Eye Pub in Fells Point—the bar and live music venue that the Cushing family has owned for 34 years—waving a soda dispenser at the camera. "I was probably saying, 'Tony, you shouldn't be doing that,'" she recalls. "And he has this determined look on his face...
Ray Lewis is going to retire a Raven. You can exhale now.
Even Ray Lewis's displays of affection are physical.
As he roams from station to station at his youth fitness clinic on a Saturday morning in June, he's constantly reaching out—patting one boy's back, rubbing another's head, gently tugging a little girl's ear. As the children scamper from one activity to another, Lewis reaches down and scoops up 8-year-old Nyeema Harrison with the same cat-like...
WTMD reflects the profound changes happening at college and public radio stations.
If you went to college before the mid-1980s, you probably remember your campus radio station as a student-run affair—most likely long on individuality and short on professionalism. There might have been a weekly blues show as well as a weekly polka show, with lots of obscure rock bands sprinkled in between.
Unless you memorized its crazy-quilt schedule, you never knew what kind of music would...
A unique blog and two caring students help a history teacher cope with MS.
Kate Hooks pulls her maroon Honda into a handicapped space in front of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute on a chilly early November morning. She adjusts her rearview mirror to get a good view of her mouth and brushes some lip gloss on before she starts the day.
Before she's done putting the cap back on the gloss, she feels an abrupt jolt and notices her trunk being opened by a short, smiley...
Vince Vaise, Chief of Interpretation at Fort McHenry
“To research for living history, I read a lot of original letters in the archives at Fort McHenry. There was one letter that stuck out in my mind from a citizen of Baltimore. He was sitting on his rooftop watching the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. I could almost imagine myself, on the roof of my own house, looking at the battle and knowing that if the Americans lose, the British are...
The gangsters who once ruled the streets are now helping to stop the shooting in Baltimore.
At dusk in the 3100 block of McElderry Street in East Baltimore, Dante Barksdale grabs a bullhorn. In baggie shorts and work boots, a hoodie pulled over his shaved head, Barksdale, whose very name is widely associated with inner city violence (courtesy of the HBO series The Wire), strides into the intersection of McElderry and North Robinson streets, stopping traffic. Forty-eight hours earlier, a...
Eight new Charm City residents reflect on their first year in Baltimore.
It's widely known that people born in Baltimore have a hard time leaving. But what about people who just got here?
In 2007, some 8,400 out-of-state residents packed up and relocated to Baltimore, according to IRS migration data. They nested in our city's various neighborhoods and acclimated to its colorful and sometimes curious customs. For eight new Baltimoreans, the first year presented both...
