June 26, 2026 - Week in Review: The Reflecting Pool, Clive Davis, and Dolly Parton's truck stop
About The Episode
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.”
