The Culture Show Podcast

Percussionist and composer Reynaliz Herrera returns to The Culture Show with excerpts from BIKEncerto , her four-movement concerto for solo bicycle and orchestra. Herrera turns the bicycle into a rich percussive instrument of rhythm, texture, machinery and music. The full album is also available on Bandcamp . Today  we hear excerpts from  I. Everything Movement,  III. Metallic Movement and IV. Tir...

Filmmaker Rowan Haber joins us to discuss the new documentary We Are Pat , which revisits Julia Sweeney’s famously androgynous Saturday Night Live character through a 2026 lens. Once built around the question of whether Pat was a man or a woman, the film asks what that joke meant then, what it means now and whether Pat can be reconsidered or reclaimed. We Are Pat is available on Apple TV , Prime V...

Imari Paris Jeffries, President and CEO of Embrace Boston and co-chair of Everyone250 , returns for AI: Actual Intelligence, The Culture Show’s recurring conversation with some of the region’s sharpest thinkers. This month, he brings his original, algorithm-free perspective on culture, civic life and the stories Boston is choosing to tell. The Boston Athenaeum’s exhibition Imagined Nation looks be...

Historian, lawyer and Pulitzer-prize winning author Annette Gordon-Reed joins The Culture Show to talk about her book “On Juneteenth,” which explores the holiday commemorating the day Union troops announced the end of slavery in Texas.  We mark the staying power of William Shakespeare with Regie Gibson, the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He’s a writer, performer, and...

Dr. Noelle Trent, president and CEO of the Museum of African American History in Boston and Nantucket, joins us to discuss Freedom! A Juneteenth Celebration . The museum marks the holiday with a free open house and block party on Joy Street, plus a sister celebration on Nantucket . Mary Grant, president of MassArt, returns for AI: Actual Intelligence, our recurring conversation with some of the re...

Sebastian Crane and Lawrence Gullo  join us to discuss the Salem Rainbow Stroll , a 90-minute walking tour exploring Salem’s hidden LGBTQIA+ history. The tour runs weekends through June, with proceeds benefiting the Trans Emergency Fund of Massachusetts. Director Dan Egan joins us to discuss Transforming the Beautiful Game: The Clyde Best Story , opening the Roxbury International Film Festival on...

Regie Gibson, the inaugural Poet Laureate of Massachusetts, joins us to discuss Song of Massachusetts, his new collaboration with composer Carlos Simon. Commissioned by the Boston Pops, the piece premieres at the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular on July 4. Artist and arts organizer Josef Palermo joins us to discuss his Atlantic piece, What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center . Palermo spent 10 months...

Antonia Bennett joins us ahead of her Father’s Day concert at Regattabar in Cambridge on June 21. The daughter of Tony Bennett and Sandra Grant Bennett, she grew up close to the world of American popular song before studying at Berklee and building her own career in jazz, standards and original music. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. joins us to discuss his new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Natio...

This week on The Culture Show, Jared Bowen is joined by Culture Show co-host Callie Crossley and Culture Show contributor James Sullivan, a journalist and author specializing in popular culture and Americana who is also on the faculty of Emerson College, for a look at the week’s top arts and culture headlines. In Barcelona, Gaudí’s Sagrada Família reaches a milestone 144 years in the making, with...

James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Dorie Greenspan joined The Culture Show to talk about her deep dive into Katharine Hepburn’s many brownie recipes. Greenspan, the writer behind xoxoDorie , traced the recipe’s journey from newspaper to cookbook to handwritten variations — with debates over cocoa, chocolate, oven temperature and a little movie-star mythology. Her latest book is Dorie’s Anyt...

Mariachi singer and cultural organizer Veronica Robles joins us to preview Vive Latinoamérica 2026 , the Veronica Robles Cultural Center’s annual celebration of Latin American music, dance, and visual art. The showcase takes place Sunday, June 14, from 2 to 6 p.m. at Boston Symphony Hall.  Lisa Simmons, artistic and executive director of the Roxbury International Film Festival, previews RoxFilm 20...

The Boston Gay Men’s Chorus marks Pride Month with RISE! , a concert celebrating protest, pride and the power of being seen. Music director Reuben Reynolds joins us to talk about a program that moves from Broadway anthem to protest song, from the dance floor to the front lines of history, coming to Groton Hill Music Center on June 14.  Photographer Matthew Connors has spent more than a decade docu...

Co-host Callie Crossley and Maurice Emmanuel Parent, award-winning actor, educator and Producing Artistic Director of The Front Porch Arts Collective , join us to recap the Tony Awards and what Broadway’s biggest night revealed about the state of the industry. Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, CEO of IBA, joins us to discuss La CASA: The Center for Arts, Self-determination and Activism , the largest Latino...

This week on The Culture Show , Callie Crossley is joined by Culture Show contributor Lisa Simmons and GBH global correspondent and news host Jeremy Siegel for a look at the week’s top arts and culture headlines.  YouTubers are turning online followings into theatrical ticket sales, with internet-born horror films like Backrooms and Obsession making the case for a new route to the multiplex. Young...

After her mother’s death, writer Alysia Abbott was raised by her father—poet Steve Abbott—in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury during the height of counterculture. Her memoir “Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father” captures that vivid, unconventional childhood and the complexities of growing up amid both liberation and loss. Now adapted into a feature film produced by Sofia Coppola, Abbott joins us to ref...

Actor Bob Odenkirk and writer Derek Kolstad reunite after the Nobody films for Normal , a twisted neo-Western about a bank robbery that shatters the facade of a seemingly quiet small town.  Geoff Bennett , co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS NewsHour , joins The Culture Show to discuss his new book, Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy from Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms . Ben...

Patti Smith, National Book Award–winning author of “Just Kids,” joins The Culture Show to discuss her latest memoir, “Bread of Angels.” The book traces her imaginative postwar childhood, her life with Fred “Sonic” Smith, and the years of loss and renewal that shaped her return to writing and performance.  Daniel Mendelsohn—Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, and frequent...

Ethan Hawke has built one of the most varied careers in contemporary film, spanning Hollywood classics like Dead Poets Society and Training Day , as well as independent films such as Before Sunrise and Boyhood . He’s also an accomplished novelist, screenwriter, producer, and filmmaker. He joined us ahead of receiving the 2025 Coolidge Corner Theatre Award. Few people know more about art theft than...

Bobbi Brown built a beauty empire on simplicity and self-expression. She joins The Culture Show to talk about her new book  “Still Bobbi,” where  she lays bare her lessons for  reinvention, resilience, and redefining beauty on her own terms. From there, actor, singer and entrepreneur Donnie Wahlberg. Familiar to millions as “Blue Bloods’” Detective Danny Reagan, he spent fourteen seasons solving c...

Artist Derrick Adams joins us to discuss Derrick Adams: View Master , his first major museum survey, now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The exhibition brings together more than 100 works from the past 25 years — paintings, sculpture, collage, video, performance and public projects — celebrating Black life, leisure and everyday joy. To learn more go here . Tony Award nominee Melissa...

Today on The Culture Show, we're joined by Marc Shaiman, the award-winning composer and lyricist whose work runs from When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle to Hairspray, Smash and Mary Poppins Returns, joins us with his new memoir, Never Mind the Happy. Before the Tonys, the Oscars and the Broadway openings, he was a teenager haunting community theaters, a young musician swept into Bette M...

Today on The Culture Show, Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School, joins us to discuss her  New York Times essay, “ Nothing Beats Polarization Like Civics Education ” She is the author of Our Declaration and the forthcoming Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat — and the American Re...

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart was recently honored with the Third Lantern Award at Old North Church, recognizing his role in using music to connect civic life and shared memory. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, he joins The Culture Show to reflect on the power of orchestral music at historic moments.  Zara Anishanslin joins The Culture Show to talk through her latest book “Th...

For this month’s Watch Party, Jared Bowen is joined by Callie Crossley, host of GBH’s Under the Radar with Callie Crossley , and Joyce Kulhawik, Emmy Award-winning arts and entertainment critic and president of the Boston Theater Critics Association, to revisit All the President’s Men . Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 political thriller stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Washington Post reporters Bo...

Imari Paris Jeffries, president and CEO of Embrace Boston, joins us to preview tonight’s Embrace Honors Harry Hom Dow event, honoring the first Chinese American admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. Retired FBI agent Geoffrey Kelly joins The Culture Show to discuss “Thirteen Perfect Fugitives: The True Story of the Mob, Murder, and the World’s Largest Art Heist.” After 22 years chasing leads through...