Sheilah Kast

While many kids fill their summer days running, playing and swimming, there are thousands of kids in Maryland who find themselves distracted by their hunger.  For the most part, the kids who are hungry in the summer are the ones who received free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch during the school year.

While in school some kids can get three meals a day, but this summer, for the first time, only two meals a day. What are the barriers to feeding these children and how does summer nutrition loss affect a student’s achievement when school starts?

  Kathleen Brockway’s new book has a grand title, Baltimore’s Deaf Heritage, but it feels like family album. Brockway has done both: given us an overview of a deaf community organizing and fighting for new rights as well as an intimate profile of families who led that community.

More than $50 billion were sent from the United States to people in other countries in 2012, according to the World Bank. In Maryland, there are dozens of money transfer companies operating, with thousands of different places you can transfer money abroad. But, the cost of doing so, which has been falling in recent years, might reverse course soon and start going up. With Sheilah Kast to talk about it is Paul Dwyer, co-founder and CEO of Viamericas, a national money transfer company headquartered in Bethesda.

If you give a toddler everything she wants, she’ll develop a bad case of the Terrible Two’s, into the Terrible Three’s and Four’s.   She’ll become a spoiled brat, and she’ll probably spend her whole life demanding her own way.  Everybody knows that, right? University of Maryland, Baltimore County associate professor Bambi Chapin’s anthropological research in Southeast Asia shows it isn't necessarily true.

Fifty years ago the U.S. Supreme Court established a right to a lawyer in criminal cases if the defendant can’t afford one. That was the decision Gideon v. Wainwright. But, should the state provide a lawyer in certain civil cases? How would such a system work? And, who would pay for it? Those are questions that a task force in Maryland has been grappling with since last fall. It comprises judges, legislators, and lawyers and is staffed by Pamela Ortiz, Executive Director of the Maryland Access to Justice Commission. She joins Sheilah Kast to talk about it.

On July 4th, we mark our country’s declaration of independence from Britain in 1776. It was another 11 years before we’d draft the framework of laws that guide our country today: During a humid summer in Philadelphia 1787, 55 delegates from a dozen states gathered to write our constitution. Some of those men tower in our memories to this day. Virginia’s delegation, for example, included James Madison, George Mason, and George Washington. And, Maryland? Historian David O. Stewart writes in his book “The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution”, that Maryland did not send her most distinguished citizens to the convention. Sheilah Kast spoke with him about it in August 2007.

Some research says that the rate of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder among children in violent neighborhoods is twice that of returning Iraq veterans. 

Last September, Maryland’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, ruled that if you’re arrested, you have a right to an attorney at an initial bail hearing and if you can’t afford one, the state must provide one. The District Court of Maryland is trying to lure lawyers across the state to meet the new need with their “Appointed Attorneys Program”. Joining Sheilah to talk about it is Chief Judge John Morrissey of the District Court of Maryland. 

One-hundred and fifty years ago this week, Confederate General Robert E. Lee was hatching a plan he hoped would gain him the enemy’s capital, Washington, D.C.  Lee had dispatched Lt. Gen. Jubal Early and 15,000 rebel soldiers up through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to cross the Potomac into Maryland on the Fourth of July. Five days later, July 9, 1864, at Monocacy Junction, a few miles southeast of Frederick, Confederate and Union forces clashed in perhaps the least known important confrontation of the Civil War.  It’s sometimes called “The Battle that Saved Washington.”

Johns Hopkins anthropologist Anand Pandian has written a dual memoir with his 95-year-old grandfather, describing a life shaped by the great wars and movements of the 20th century in South Asia and across the globe. It's called "Ayya’s Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India." Anand Pandian joins Sheilah in the studio to tell us about it.