The Culture Show Podcast

On this edition of The Culture Show, Jared Bowen, Callie Crossley, and Culture Show contributor Lisa Simmons, go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines, which include:President Trump’s blue Reflecting Pool makeover has become a swampy spectacle in Washington, with algae, peeling paint and blame quickly giving way to parody songs and guerrilla projections. What began as a patriotic renovation ahead of America’s 250th has become an accidental canvas for satire.Clive Davis, the legendary music executive who died this week at 94, leaves behind a towering legacy in American music. With a golden ear for talent, Davis worked with artists from Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen to Whitney Houston.More than a century after the Titanic sank, a new fight is surfacing over what should happen to artifacts recovered from the wreck. RMS Titanic Inc., the company with salvage rights, wants to auction more than 100 objects, raising questions about preservation, profit and whether pieces of one of history’s most famous maritime graves should ever be sold.Cape Cod is becoming home to Bards on the Bay, a new Wellfleet retreat for playwrights and theatrical composers founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel and Michael Maso, who led The Huntington for more than four decades.Dolly Parton has gone from “9 to 5” to I-65. The country music legend has opened her first truck stop and travel center in Cornersville, Tennessee, complete with fuel, food, showers, Dolly merchandise and a coffee shop called “Cup of Ambition.”

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. Tires Movement. Today’s performance full credits: “BIKEncerto: a concerto for solo bicycle and orchestra” Composer: Reynaliz Herrera Performed by: Reynaliz Herrera (Bicycle Percussion Soloist)& Ideas, Not Theories; Ideas, Not Theories Orchestra: Founder/Owner/Artistic Director: Reynaliz Herrera, David Flowers: Conductor, Nathaniel Kim: Concertmaster/Violin I, Hannah Rebeca Lopez Vega: Violin II, Emma Michaud: Viola, Thomas Rodman: Cello, Adam Gurczak: Double Bass, Vivek Patel: Flute, Mary O’Keefe: Oboe,, Shannon Leigh: Clarinet, Francesca Panunto: BassoonJill Medvedow returns for Big Little Books, The Culture Show’s book club series celebrating short books that can be read in one sitting but linger long after. This month’s selection is Parade: A Folktale by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Allison Markin Powell — a 96-page novella about memory, guilt, imagination and the mythic creatures we carry with us into adulthood.Jameson Johnson, founder and editor in chief of Boston Art Review, joins us to discuss the publication’s latest issue and how artists are thinking through history, America at 250 and the stories we choose to preserve. The conversation also looks at Art Radar, Boston Art Review’s map of Greater Boston’s art spaces, galleries, museums and artist-run venues.

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 beyond the familiar scenes of the American Revolution to ask how ideas of nationhood have been formed, recorded and revised across generations. Curator Reed Gochberg joins us to discuss the books, maps, images and objects that reveal America as an unfinished story. The exhibition is on view through November 14, 2026.In The Tao of Lloyd, actor and writer Dennis Trainor Jr. imagines Lloyd Dobler, the open-hearted Gen X icon from Say Anything, decades later — older, grayer and still refusing the program. The new solo show heads to the Edinburgh Fringe this August, and Trainor is raising funds to help bring the production to Edinburgh. You can also see a workshop performance June 27 at Western Avenue Studios & Lofts in Lowell, before the show runs at the Edinburgh Fringe August 6 through 30.

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 region’s most original thinkers. This month, she reflects on a commencement season marked by political controversy, disinvited speakers and debates over what graduates need to hear.Catherine T. Morris, founder and executive director of the Boston Art & Music Soul Festival, joins us to discuss MOMENTUM, a five-day festival celebrating Black art, music, culture and enterprise across Greater Boston. She is joined by Isaiah Thelwell of Greater Brockton Young Professionals, one of the partners bringing MOMENTUM to Brockton through Fuller After Dark.

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 at the Kennedy Center as its first curator of visual arts and special programming.Justin Pelletier, chief operating officer of Nashoba Valley Winery in Bolton, joins us as the farm-winery heads into its busiest season. New England’s oldest running winery has grown into a winery, orchard, distillery, brewery and restaurant operation.

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 crimes in New York City. Now Danny Reagan is back — but this time, he’s doing it Boston-style. “Blue Bloods” followed a multi-generational law-enforcement family. In "Boston Blue," Wahlberg once again steps into Reagan’s shoes — this time moving the New York detective to Wahlberg’s own hometown. He joins The Culture Show to talk about a new chapter in the “Blue Bloods” universe and about his homecoming. Finally, McGonagle’s Pub landed a spot on “The New York Times” list of America’s best restaurants, making it the first Irish pub to get this national recognition. Chef Aidan McGee joins The Culture Show to talk about how he is reimagining pub fare. Aidan McGee is the chef patron of The Dubliner and McGonagle's Pu

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 Midler’s world, and creating a career that would move through the devastation of AIDS, the machinery of Hollywood and the bruising, and thrilling business of making musicals. On June 9th, he'll be at Broadway in Worcester for "An Evening with Mark Shaiman." For tickets and more information, click here.Then artist Steve Locke joins us with his first career monograph,I Said What I Said, a new book featuring three decades of work in painting, sculpture and public art. From portraiture to public memory, Locke’s work confronts race, desire, and history — and asks what America is willing to look at.

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 “The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution.” Zara Anishanslin is a Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. As part of Countdown to 2026, we explore Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty Bowl, crafted in 1768 to honor a Massachusetts vote rejecting new British taxes. Engraved with the names of lawmakers who opposed those measures, it’s a key artifact of early resistance. Ethan Lasser, Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Conservation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, joins us for an overview. To learn more about the Sons of Liberty Bowl and the MFA’s exhibitions and programming go here.