Episodes
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August 4, 2026 - Paul Giamatti and John Turturro on Rhinoceros, Cookie Queens, and Jazz Urbane Cafe
Paul Giamatti and John Turturro discuss the American Repertory Theater’s production of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.Directed by Diane Paulus, the darkly comic play follows a town whose residents surrender their humanity and join the herd. The production runs August 14 through September 27 at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge. To learn more go here.Director Alysa Nahmias discusses Cookie Queens, a new documentary following four Girl Scouts, ages five to twelve, through the ambition, competition and family commitment of cookie season. The film examines what girls learn while navigating an $800 million business and opens in theaters nationwide on August 7.Composer and educator Bill Banfield takes us inside Jazz Urbane Cafe, a new 200-seat music venue and restaurant in Nubian Square. Banfield explains how Jazz Urbane grew from a performing collective and record label into a permanent home for Boston musicians to share the stage with nationally recognized artists. -
August 3, 2026 - TV Goes to the Movies at the Brattle, Boston's sporty public art, and Dear Evan Hansen
The Brattle Theatre’s TV Goes to the Movies series explores how filmmakers have portrayed television news, corporate power and journalistic ambition. Boston Globe critic Chris Vognar previews a lineup that includes Network, Broadcast News, The Insider, Nightcrawler and Anchorman. The series runs August 5 through September 2.Culture Show contributor Julia Swanson shares public spaces where art, play and community can keep Boston’s World Cup energy going after the games. Swanson created The Art Walk Project, a collection of self-guided tours exploring murals, sculptures and installations across Greater Boston and beyond.Duxbury native Mickey White discusses Harbour Lights Theatre and its effort to bring New York theatre professionals together with Massachusetts artists. The actor, producer and artistic director launches the company’s mainstage work with Dear Evan Hansen, directed by Adam Pascal and running August 6 through 9 at the Carr Amphitheater in Hingham. -
July 31, 2026 - BTS snubs the Grammys, sad girl summer, and Zendaya's ancient earrings
This week on The Culture Show, Jared Bowen is joined by Co-host Callie Crossley and Culture Show Culture Show contributor Joyce Kulhawik. Joyce Kulhawik is an Emmy-award winning arts and entertainment reporter and President of the Boston Theatre Critics Association.The topics they discuss include: BTS pulled its comeback album, Arirang, from the Grammy race to protest the new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category. The group argues that separating Asian pop from the general field marginalizes the artists it claims to recognize. New releases from Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, Ariana Grande and Charli xcx trade carefree summer anthems for songs about heartbreak, anxiety and political dread. Four Winds Craft Guild posted a tongue-in-cheek ban on influencers, only to watch the sign go viral. The ensuing dispute drew responses from creators, residents and critics far beyond the island. Barbara Lynch, the acclaimed Boston chef, will host two private dinners in Manchester-by-the-Sea as she develops a new venture. The events mark Lynch’s first major step back into dining after her restaurant group closed amid allegations of workplace abuse, which she has denied. Artist Robert Lazzarini and curator John Ravenal will debut History Maker at the MassArt Art Museum this fall. The exhibition, originally selected for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, reworks familiar American symbols including flags, George Washington and a toppled eagle. -
July 30, 2026 - Angela Peri and Lisa Lobel on casting Widow's Bay, Mary Grant, and Bones of the Statue of Liberty
Angela Peri and Lisa Lobel discuss finding the New England faces who populate Apple TV’s horror comedy Widow’s Bay. Their work on the series earned them their first Emmy nominations for Outstanding Casting for a Comedy Series.MassArt President Mary Grant returns for “AI: Actual Intelligence,” our recurring series featuring original, algorithm-free ideas from some of the region’s most interesting thinkers. This month, Grant discusses the continued scrutiny of the Smithsonian museum, the resurgence of “grandma hobbies,” and more.Mary’s Summer Reading + Watchlist: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi Bread of Angels by Patti Smith How to Get to Heaven from Belfast on Netflix Remarkably Bright Creatures on Netflix Curator David Bettencourt introduces Bones of the Statue of Liberty, an exhibition at Belcourt of Newport featuring lamps, pedestal railings and a massive elevator cog removed during the monument’s 1984–1986 restoration. The objects reveal the engineering beneath the statue’s copper exterior and the generations of work required to keep it standing, shining and accessible. -
July 29, 2026 - Wednesday Watch Party - Terminator 2: Judgement Day
For this month’s Wednesday Watch Party, Jared Bowen is joined by Culture Show co-host Callie Crossley, host of GBH’s Under the Radar with Callie Crossley, and Joyce Kulhawik, the Emmy Award-winning arts and entertainment reporter and president of the Boston Theater Critics Association, to revisit James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Thirty-five years after its release, the film’s imagined 2029 is now just three years away. The conversation considers how its vision of artificial intelligence looks from 2026, whether the sequel surpassed the original, and how the digital breakthrough that helped define the film compares with the AI now reshaping Hollywood. -
July 28, 2026 - Emily Wilson on The Odyssey, Kevin Nealon, and Laurie Anderson
Emily Wilson, professor and chair of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses how her acclaimed translation of The Odyssey helped shape Christopher Nolan’s approach to Homer’s hero. Nolan singled out Wilson’s opening line—“Tell me about a complicated man”—as a key reference point for the film. Wilson considers what the blockbuster preserves or leaves behind as it brings the ancient epic to the screen, and why her translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad have transformed the way modern readers encounter Homer. Her forthcoming book is Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature.Kevin Nealon looks back on helping define a memorable era of Saturday Night Live, his eight seasons on Weeds and the unpredictable celebrity conversations of Hiking with Kevin. He also discusses returning to stand-up with his latest special, Loose in the Crotch, ahead of his August 1 performance at the Wilbur.Laurie Anderson, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient who carried New York’s experimental downtown into the pop charts, concert halls and major museums around the world, discusses a Berkshire summer that spans the full range of her groundbreaking career in music, performance, film, storytelling and technology. She has added new work to her long-term MASS MoCA installation and makes her Tanglewood debut with Amelia and What War Is This? on August 13, the Lou Reed Drone on August 16 and The Republic of Love that evening. -
July 27, 2026 - Kerri Maher on Summer of Love, Hany Farid, and Fazendo a América at the MFA
Kerri Maher discusses her new novel, Summer of Love, which moves between 1967 San Francisco and the present, tracing how the freedoms, ambitions and upheavals of one generation shape the next. Digital forensics pioneer Hany Farid has spent his career determining whether photographs and videos are real. He joins Bowen to discuss how AI can fabricate events that never happened, cast doubt on genuine evidence and make even an expert question his own eyes. Farid is the Donald Knuth Professor of Computation and Just Communities and a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, as well as co-founder and chief science officer of GetReal Security.Fazendo a América: Rosângela Rennó and Histories of Memory and Migration in Brazil explores migration between Brazil and the United States through photographs shaped by loss, displacement and reinvention—and asks what is preserved, obscured or erased from personal and political history. Kristen Gresh, the MFA’s Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs and curator of the exhibition joins us before it closes August 2. -
July 24, 2026 - Week in Review: The Odyssey, the FIFA World Cup Finals, and Jimothy
This week on The Culture Show, Co-host CAllie Crossley is joined by Culture Show Culture Show contributors Joyce Kulhawik and Lisa Simmons. Joyce Kulhawik is an Emmy-award winning arts and entertainment reporter and President of the Boston Theatre Critics Association. You can find her reviews on Joyce’s Choices. Lisa Simmons is Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council.Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — The film earned a record $52 million for IMAX during its opening weekend as audiences traveled to the limited number of theaters equipped to show it in 70mm. The release has also lifted sales of Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s epic past one million copies in the U.S.The World Cup’s biggest images — The final drew a record U.S. audience of nearly 63 million viewers, while Donald Trump’s appearance in Spain’s trophy celebration set off competing edits from FIFA and the White House. A newly resurfaced 2007 photograph also shows Lionel Messi bathing an infant Lamine Yamal during a UNICEF charity shoot.The Louvre reopens the Apollo Gallery — Nine months after thieves stole $102 million in crown jewels, the museum has reopened the gallery without its display cases or surviving treasures. Visitors can now see the gilded room and the window the thieves used to enter.Jimothy takes over the internet — Seattle’s unusually shaped raccoon now has a Roku video game, a bobblehead and an appearance on the White House social media feed. -
July 23, 2026 - George Saunders, Claire Foy, and Steve Sweeney's "Townie"
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 for Hawk”, adapted from Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir. Known for performances defined by restraint and emotional precision, Foy reflects on inhabiting grief, solitude, and endurance in a story that unfolds through the training of a goshawk.Boston comedian and actor Steve Sweeney joins The Culture Show to talk about his film “Townie,” which is drawn directly from his Charlestown upbringing. Known for comedy rooted in working-class Catholic culture, Sweeney uses the neighborhood as a lens on loyalty, memory, and what it means to stay put as a place — and a city — changes. -
July 22, 2026 - Chef Aidan McGee, Gonzalo Grau, and 100 years of Regina Pizzeria
What Boston learned from its World Cup party: The matches were in Foxborough, but the celebration filled Boston’s pubs, hotels and streets. Aidan McGee, chef and partner at The Dubliner and McGonagle’s Pub, reflects on the Tartan Army, extended closing hours and how Boston can keep its newly activated party gene alive. Gonzalo Grau returns to Boston: Venezuelan-born pianist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Gonzalo Grau brings together Venezuelan rhythms, Latin jazz, flamenco and classical music. Grau and Plural perform a free concert July 25 at Long Live Roxbury, followed by a July 30 appearance with Alex Alvear and the Ecuadorian Council. Both shows support the Massachusetts United for Venezuela Fund. Regina Pizzeria celebrates 100 years: From the lines outside its original North End location to slices served across the region, Regina Pizzeria has become part of Boston’s culinary identity. Corporate chef Mark Murphy joins us to discuss its charred, chewy crust, century-old traditions and the challenge of preserving a hometown institution as it grows.
