The Culture Show Podcast

On this edition of The Culture Show, Jared Bowen, Callie Crossley, and James Parker, staff writer at The Atlantic, go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines: Twenty years after Hannah Montana premiered, Disney is marking the anniversary with a new special celebrating the show and the fandom that never let go.  After 50 years of turning American politics and celebrity into live comedy, Satu...

John Adams’s Nixon in China turned a geopolitical spectacle into something stranger, sharper, and more human. Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson join the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall to reprise Pat and Richard Nixon in scenes from the opera, with performances March 26 through 28. To learn more go here . The documentary “ André Is an Idiot ” begins with a terrible mistake — putting off...

Mahesh Daas, president of Boston Architectural College, joins The Culture Show to discuss resilient architecture and what California’s wildfire recovery can teach the rest of us about building safer homes. Legendary guitarist Reeves Gabrels, known for his work with David Bowie and The Cure, joins choreographer My’Kal Stromile to discuss "The Leisurely Installation of a New Window," part of Boston...

Filmmaker Ken Burns joins The Culture Show to discuss “Henry David Thoreau,” the new three-part PBS documentary series that he executive produced, and to reflect on America at 250. The conversation  explores the larger questions of identity, democracy, and national meaning that have long run through Burns’ work. Henry David Thoreau premiers on March 30th on PBS. To learn more go here. As America a...

Republicans are advancing the SAVE Act, a bill that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Supporters frame it as election security, while critics warn it could block millions of eligible voters—raising new questions about access and  democracy. Imari Paris Jeffries, President and CEO of Embrace Boston and co-chair of Everyone 250, joins The Culture Show to talk about the SAV...

On this edition of The Culture Show, Jared Bowen, Callie Crossley, and Cristina Quinn  go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines, which include: ABC pulled a completed season of “The Bachelorette” just days before premiere after a leaked video showed star Taylor Frankie Paul assaulting her partner, collapsing what was meant to be a franchise reset. BTS returns with its first full-group alb...

In “The Antiquities,” playwright Jordan Harrison imagines a future looking back at humanity through the objects and technologies we leave behind. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company, the play unfolds as a series of scenes across time that explore progress, memory, and how quickly our inventions become artifacts. Jordan Harris joins the culture show to talk about this work. To learn more about the...

This month’s Wednesday Watch Party revisits Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic “Taxi Driver,”  a film that remains one of the most unsettling portraits of loneliness, alienation, and urban disillusionment in American cinema. Jared Bowen is joined by Callie Crossley and Mark Anastasio, Artistic Director of The Coolidge Corner Theatre, to ask whether Travis Bickle’s post-Vietnam America still holds up t...

Artist and musician Cliff Notez and  singer-songwriter and composer Gabriella Simpkins join “The Culture Show” for a preview of the We Black Folk Showcase, coming to Arts at the Armory in Somerville on Friday, March 20. Created by Cliff Notez, We Black Folk is a Boston movement opening up the idea of folk through song, roots music, poetry, and story. To learn more about the upcoming showcase go he...

Culture Show co-host Callie Crossley and Culture Show contributor Lisa Simmons, the Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council, join Jared Bowen for an Oscars recap. Writer Lynette D’Amico joins The Culture Show to discuss “Men I Hate: A Memoir in Essays,” a searching new book about marriage, gender, and identity. Drawing...

Boston Lyric Opera is reimagining Mahler’s "Song of the Earth as a fully theatrical experience, conceived and directed by Anne Bogart. Bogart joins The Culture Show with BLO General Manager and CEO Brad Vernatter to talk about this meditation on mortality, beauty, and farewell — and about the reopening of the company’s Opera + Community Studios in Fort Point, where the production runs March 20 thr...

On this edition of The Culture Show , Jared Bowen, Callie Crossley, and Cristina Quinn  go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines, which include: The Boston Symphony Orchestra says it will part ways with music director Andris Nelsons after the 2026–27 season, ending a 13-season run. His tenure brought Grammy-winning recordings, international recognition, and a major role in shaping the orc...

In his New Yorker essay “ What The Pitt Taught Me About Being a Doctor ,” Dhruv Khullar reflects on how the HBO drama captures the human strain of practicing medicine inside a broken health-care system. He joins The Culture Show to discuss why the show resonates — and what it reveals to him about his own work as a doctor. Dhruv Khullar, a contributing writer at “The New Yorker,” is a practicing ph...

Chef and restaurateur Paul Wahlberg joins The Culture Show   to talk about family, Dorchester roots, and the new Wahlburgers “Brothers’ Combo, ” a limited-time menu featuring signature burgers from Paul, Mark, and Donnie. He’ll also appear at a March 16 pop-up celebration at the original Wahlburgers restaurant in Hingham , with proceeds supporting the Boys & Girls Club of Dorchester. The Vinfe...

Shaina Taub made Broadway history as the first woman to win Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Original Score on her own, for the musical SUFFS . The show follows the suffragists’ hard-fought campaign for the 19th Amendment, bringing figures like Alice Paul, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell to life onstage. Now, SUFFS comes to Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre from March 17 through March 29,...

Comedian and author Mark Malkoff joins The Culture Show to discuss his new book “Love Johnny Carson: One Obsessive Fan’s Journey to Find the Genius Behind the Legend.”  Drawing on hundreds of interviews with comedians, writers, and others connected to The Tonight Show , the book revisits Carson’s career, comic instincts, and the influence he continues to have on late-night television. The Tony Awa...

On this edition of The Culture Show , Jared Bowen, Callie Crossley, and Joyce Kulhawik, go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines. First up, Composer Philip Glass canceled the Kennedy Center debut of his new symphony “Lincoln,”  saying the institution’s current leadership conflicts with the work’s message. Now the BSO will give the piece its first performance this summer at Tanglewood. And...

The Tony Award–winning play “Stereophonic” drops audiences into a 1970s recording studio, where a rising rock band pushes toward greatness — and the breaking point. Now on national tour and heading to Boston, the play captures the obsession, tension, and creative friction behind making an album that could define careers. We speak with cast members Jack Barrett,  who plays Grover,  and actor Steven...

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart is being 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. Keith Lockhart will accept the award on April 16th at Old North Church. To learn...

Toni Morrison transformed American literature, reshaping narrative form and placing Black life at the center of her fiction with language both lyrical and unflinching. In her new book “ On Morrison ,” award-winning novelist and critic Namwali Serpell reexamines Morrison not just as a cultural icon, but as a daring literary architect whose innovations in time, voice, and structure changed what nove...

Astronaut Cady Coleman spent nearly six months aboard the International Space Station, contributing to scientific research while orbiting Earth more than 2,500 times. A chemist, Air Force officer, and NASA veteran, she helped expand the role of women in spaceflight during a pivotal era of exploration. In her book Sharing Space , she reflects on what life in orbit taught her about curiosity, collab...

In the late 1860s, Susan Dimock defied barriers that kept women out of medicine, earning her degree in Zurich after being rejected by Harvard Medical School and returning to Boston as a pioneering surgeon. Before her life was cut short in a shipwreck at 28, she helped reshape medical care for women and founded one of the nation’s first professional nursing training programs. Historian Susan Wilson...

Dennis Lehane, known for writing literary crime novels such as “Mystic River,” “Gone, Baby, Gone,” and “Shutter Island,” joins The Culture Show to talk about his latest collaboration with Apple TV+, the  crime series “Smoke.”  Created by Dennis Lehane, the nine-episode drama – inspired by true events – follows an arson investigator who teams up with a police detective to stop two serial arsonists....

First up, Sally Mann. In 2015 renowned photographer Sally Mann published her memoir “Hold Still,” an inquiry into family history, the American South and the nature of creativity. Now, comes her book  “Art Work: On the Creative Life.”  It is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s irreverent. And it’s refreshingly practical as she guides the reader through her experience and process of being an artist.  From th...

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,”...