The Culture Show Podcast

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...

The Tobin Bridge could become a public artwork about the forces shaping the coast around it. Ryan Edwards, a principal at MASARY Studios, joins us to discuss Eco-Rhythms — also called Accumulating Rhythms — a proposed lighting installation that would respond to tides and other ecological patterns along the Mystic River. To learn more, go here.  Boston’s music history is hitting the road. Matt Bowk...

Peter Wolf came to Boston to study painting, but quickly became part of the city’s musical bloodstream — performing with The Hallucinations, spinning records at WBCN and fronting The J. Geils Band. As MassArt honors him with an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree, Wolf joins us to talk about art, music — and Waiting on the Moon, his memoir of late nights and unforgettable run-ins with Muddy Waters...

A sweeping  drama on MASTERPIECE brings one of Britain’s most famous literary families back to the screen. In “The Forsytes,” actors Stephen Moyer and Jack Davenport play brothers Jolyon and James Forsyte, members of a wealthy Victorian dynasty whose fortunes can’t shield them from rivalry, ambition, and betrayal. To learn more go here . Jill Medvedow, Director Emerita of the Institute of Contempo...

On this edition of The Culture Show, GBH’s Global Correspondent and News Host Jeremy Siegel, Lisa Simmons, and Joyce Kulhawik go over the latest arts and culture headlines on our week-in-review. Lisa Simmons is  Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council. Joyce Kulhawik is an Emmy-award winning arts and entertainment repo...

Matt Smith has spent 30 years at Club Passim, the tiny Harvard Square room with an enormous folk history. We talk with him about starting as a volunteer, booking artists, and helping shape one of the country’s great listening rooms. To learn more about Passim, go here . WBCN wasn’t just Boston’s rock station. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, it became a platform for anti-war politics, civil right...

Sam Smallidge has one of the more unusual jobs in Boston: he oversees Converse’s archive in Charlestown. We talk with him about building the company’s collection from a spreadsheet and a folder into more than 10,000 items — and how shoes, ads, prototypes, catalogs and company history help tell the story of one of the most recognizable brands in the world.  New England Conservatory’s Preparatory Sc...

Tracy K. Smith,  former U.S. Poet Laureate discusses her book “Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times” — an invitation to listen, reflect, and let poetry guide us through uncertainty.  Don Gillis and Ray Flynn join The Culture Show to discuss Gillis’ new book “ The Battle for Boston: How Mayor Ray Flynn and Community Organizers Fought Racism and Downtown Power Brokers .” On June 5th at 6:00 Don Gilli...

James Sullivan,  a journalist, author and longtime contributor to the Boston Globe, joins The Culture Show to talk about his book Which Side Are You On?: 20th Century American History in 100 Protest Songs . From there Aisha Muharrar joins The Culture Show to talk about her debut novel “Loved One.” She’s an Emmy Award–winning writer and producer who has worked on “Hacks,” “Parks” and “Recreation,”...

On this edition of The Culture Show, Culture Show co-host Callie Crossley, GBH’s Global Correspondent and News Host Jeremy Siegel and James Sullivan, journalist,  author and Emerson faculty member go over the latest arts and culture headlines on our week in review We reflect on Ted Turner’s legacy. The Media mogul who built CNN, TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network, died this week at 87. The Tony nominati...

Scott Avett and Seth Avett of The Avett Brothers join us to discuss “Swept Away,” the musical built around their songs. After a 2024 Broadway run, the show is now in Boston at SpeakEasy Stage Company, where it turns the Avetts’ music into a harrowing sea story about a New Bedford whaling crew, a shipwreck and an impossible moral choice. To learn more about “Swept Away” at SpeakEasy Stage Company,...

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stephen Greenblatt joins The Culture Show , to talk about his latest book, “ Dark Renaissance:The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival .”  It traces the meteoric rise and violent end of Christopher Marlowe—playwright, poet, spy, and heretic—whose genius endures today.   From there, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore ...

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart joins The Culture Show with a preview of the Pops’ spring season, running May 8 through June 6 at Symphony Hall. The season includes appearances by Ray Chen, Jon Batiste, Leslie Odom Jr., St. Vincent and more, along with film nights, Pride Night and Gospel Night. To learn more, go here .  Tony Award–winning director Diane Paulus, Artistic Director of the Americ...

Bestselling author George Saunders joins The Culture Show to talk about his novel “Vigil.”  Set over a single night, the book follows Jill “Doll” Blaine, a long-deceased guardian figure who keeps watch over a dying oil executive, returning Saunders to the moral and metaphysical terrain familiar from “Lincoln in the Bardo.”   Actress Claire Foy joins The Culture Show to talk about her film, “H Is f...