John Waters

February 5, 2013

1015 Paca St. 633 Sarah Ann St. Dozens of addresses all over Baltimore were once home to Maryland's African-American Civil War veterans. Many of them had been Eastern Shore slaves. Today, we'll hear about a Maryland State Archives project to document their lives, and we'll hear what their experience was like during the war--and after.

Low-doc, no-doc, and other risky loans helped cause the housing collapse. A new federal consumer agency has adopted a rule aimed at squeezing this kind of lending out of the market. Will it keep banks from making mortgage loans to people who can't afford them? We ask a University of Maryland business school teaching fellow with decades of experience working for lenders, assessing risk.

This conversation first aired December 5, 2011.

April 27th & 28th, 2012, on The Signal…

Ugandan multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Kinobe has toured the world, but he comes from a country where there’s no word for ‘music’ in the vocabulary.  We talk with Kinobe about the beauty of that paradox, and we hear the ancient sounds of the kora, the ndongo, and the akogo.

John Waters unveils his annual special-screening pick for the 2012 Maryland Film Festival, and Signal film critic Josh Slates drops in with an overview of the festival’s upcoming cinematic highlights.

A vaccine against HIV-AIDS may sound like a medical dream…but researchers in Baltimore say they have one in sight. We talk to Dr. Robert Gallo, founder of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

The legacy of September 11 in America has been perhaps most visible at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. We’ll hear from a Maryland woman who spent just about every Friday performing music for the wounded soldiers until the hospital was closed last summer.

As Maryland prepares to go on its pollution diet, certain jurisdictions are looking into fees to help pay for the cost of reducing stormwater runoff. But critics say it’s not the right time for a regressive tax. We talk with an Anne Arundel councilman who’s proposing a measure there.  Then - WYPR managing editor for news Sunni Khalid on what he learned about how Marylanders deal with death and remembrance after spending weeks reporting the series “Last Rites.” And - where have all the critics gone?