The Fabulous 413

This weekend is Pride in Hampshire County! Yes, a whole month before the rest of the country! But Northampton Pride gets its start under much smaller and more dangerous circumstances. Dr. Jane Fleischman was there at the first few marches, back when it was the Gay and Lesbian Liberation March. Although she primarily digs into sexuality of folx later in life with her practice Speaking Of, LLC and h...

It is more than just our mornings that become eclectic this Monday. We bring another installment of "Meet the Mayor", this time heading up I-91 to Easthampton to chat with Nicole LaChapelle . A lot has happened in that city as of late, so we talk about it and her love of local music. Mr. Universe, Salman Hameed , comes with us to the re-opening of the Seymour Planetarium at Springfield Museums thi...

With all of the stress of the week, we figured we would not only double but triple down on the relaxing today. We head to West Springfield for the Wine Thunderdome once again. It's Sardenga versus Tuscany as Michael Quinlan of Table & Vine brings us two Vermentinos to try out. Just ahead of their show at the Academy of Music, Langhorne Slim and John Craigie join us in studio. Each has a new al...

If you had no plans for this weekend, no worries, we've got you covered. There's so much happening in the 413 this weekend that we wish there were more hours in the day. A lot of those happenings involve hip-hop, where a legend in the genre is making an appearance in Easthampton this weekend. Large Professor performs at Daily Operation on Saturday and we chat with chef/owner David Schrier about ho...

We hope you like language because we're getting deep into it today. The Word Nerd, Emily Brewster, senior editor at Merriam-Webster here in Springfield pulls back the curtain to show the bones of how definitions actually work. Former poet laureate, and current professor at UMass, Karen Skolfield celebrates National Poetry Month with us by sharing some of her experiences and a bit of her work as we...

We got up to music, and farms, and moons today, oh my! Damany Gordon of Genuine Culture LLC in Holyoke is heralding a night of classic hip-hop in Springfield at White Lion Brewing this upcoming weekend. It honors the collective Native Tongues and we tap into why that group is so important and influential. We hear from Chelsea Gazillo of the American Farmland Trust about the Bay State's efforts to...

Today was all about being both collegiate and past tense. First, Umass had a Bach Festival this weekend! As a part of the festivities, the Asian and Asian American Studies Arts and Culture Center brought three prominent composers and performers to campus to perform new works: Hyeyung Sol Yoon , Texu Kim , and Vijay Iyer . We talk with them about issues relating to western canon and how moving on f...

When you live close enough to someone who's won multiple Nobel prizes and the Gandhi/King/Ikeda prize from Morehouse College, you have to get them in studio with you. You just have to do that. That is how we end up talking with Dr. Ira Helfand about the threat of nuclear war and all the things we can do to stop it, including the mission of the Back from the Brink Campaign . And that was such heavy...

It is the 20th day of April, which is celebrated by many it turns out. But being in one of the few states with legal access to jazz cabbage is not without its nuances too. Payton Shubrick of 6 Bricks dispensary in Springfield, one of only 3 black woman owned in the whole state, chats with us to dig into some of the issues with equity and equality in the industry. (She also shares our fascination w...

We're hoping to fit in with the cool kids today. Some of those cool kids are running on airport runways. We talk to Julie Kumble of Treehouse Foundation and Holly Lurgio of the Northampton Airport about the Runway 5k happening on April 23rd, where they'll be raising funds by letting people run where the airplanes roam (but not while the airplanes roam). We find out how Treehouse is changing the la...

Some stories are best told by the people who have actually lived them. But we can accompany those stories with pizza, because food is wonderful. Pizza Quest volume 3 hits the Berkshires as we make a stop, sadly without our amateur pizziaolo, to Betty's Pizza Shack in Lenox. Then, as it is still April and therefore still National Poetry Month, local poet and social worker Lauren Singer joins us wit...

We get to go both forward and backward in time today, which is fitting for a Monday somehow. Mr. Universe, Salman Hameed tells us about the ESA's new probe JUICE ( already taking selfies in space ), its mission to the moons of Jupiter, and the lengths we do to make sure the probe looks but doesn't touch. Then we digress quite a bit about pizza and semantics with Jarrett J. Krosoczka . He's got a n...

It was wicked warm out today. But just because it's warming up, doesn't mean we can't get comfy with it. The heat makes us think of white wine. In the Berkshires we have our very first set of white wines in the thunderdome, courtesy of Nejaime's Wine Cellars in Lenox. Our hosts Joe Nejaime and Xavier Letteron even threw an extra wrench into this showdown, for which we were entirely game. Our studi...

We're preserving and creating community today. We find out about a decades strong jazz jam session in Amherst being revitalized through the interest of more young people attending. Reporter Ben James takes us to The Drake to see what's going down. A group of 5th and 6th graders at Fort River School are just now learning how to change the world through their civic engagement class. They walk us thr...

It's fun when you discover things a little closer to home than you first thought. It's true of language and turns out it's true of grain too. Word Nerd Emily Brewster chats with us about prefixed words whose opposites pre-date their root word. We are quite gruntled to know there's a running list of them. Then we skip across the river to take a look at what was for quite some time the only malting...

Let's take a look at houses. We dig into housing equity from more sides than one with H. John Fisher, fair housing manager for Way Finders in Springfield. Their 17th annual Fair Housing and Civil Rights Conference which will continue through the 13th, so we ask about some of the problems we can easily see, which of course leads to conversations about the ones we can't. Then we segue into poetry wi...

Mondays need a little beauty in them, and as we find ourselves right in the middle of National Poetry Month, it seems fitting to bring in a little lyricism to allay our daily doldrums. So we talk to one of the poet laureates of Easthampton, Jason Montgomery . Although he and his partner Alex Woolner will soon be stepping down from the position, that didn't stop us from talking about their various...

It's Good Friday! Good as in we have a pile of wicked good things we get into. First, in a confrontation months in the making, we invite NEPM's own Elizabeth Román to live taste test UK vs USA Cadbury Creme Eggs. Is there a difference that you can really notice? And just in time for passover, we head to Provisions to have two kosher wines enter the thunderdome! Benson Hyde and Bruce Amis let us sa...

We bring extra springtime in the studio today, now that it's warm! We welcome Ashley Randle , the first female-identifying commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR). She tells about some of the department's plans, raising cows, and farming across the baystate both rural and urban. Then we get into the not-so-Jewish past of Springfield with editor and podcaster M...

We all need a bit of reprieve from Tuesday's kerfuffle. So we dig into some books instead! NYT bestselling author, opera composer, and Kennedy Center education artist in residence , Mo Willems shows us his latest art exhibit, Wrecked Shapes. And we celebrate the 20th anniversary of perhaps his best known character: Pigeon. Then we head to Hatfield, where the largest collection of cookbooks resides...

Hampshire College Astronomer Dr. Salman Hameed on the James Webb's deep dive into the TRAPPIST-1 system. Is there a planet there that could host life as we know it? Plus the unveiling of the Artemis I crew. And Hannah Moushabeck on her new book Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine with special guests her father, Michel , and her uncle, Gabriel . All three of these Moushabecks have a lifelong de...

Surprise! Former President Donald Trump was indicted yesterday, much to everyone's surprise. Western New England University Law Professor, Jen Taub , give us her take on the news. Tasting the King and Queen of Northern Italian wines in The Wine Thunderdome with the Wine Snobs from State Street Fruit Store, Deli, Wines and Spirits in Northampton. Jennifer Lee, from the Narragansett Tribe, on the In...

A conversation with Congressman Jim McGovern in the wake of the Nashville shooting. Will a Republican controlled Congress take any steps? And why was Richard Gere hugging the congressman on the steps of The Capitol? Then a tour of a new exhibit as Mass MoCA called " to see oneself at a distance, " with artists Suneil Sanzgiri and Tu Le. And an informal poll: Red Sox or Yankees? It's Opening Day fo...

Comedian Jimmy Tingle and the FCCMP

Monte & Kaliis talk with Phil Korman from CISA and with Bob Lowry from Bueno y Sano about the history of that now iconic Western Mass Burrito shop. They even get a DoorDash delivery and a briefing about how DoorDash is impacting the restaurants and the communities the restaurants serve. And then a conversation with Lev BenEzra, executive director of The Amherst Survival Center about their upco...