Episodes
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September 8, 2026 - Fabiola Méndez, Mikko Nissinen on 25 years at Boston Ballet, and Jackson Cannon on Pickle Week
Emmy-nominated Puerto Rican cuatrista, composer and singer Fabiola Méndez joins Jared Bowen ahead of Berklee’s inaugural Homecoming Block Party, September 19 near Fenway. The Berklee alum, who has brought the cuatro from her own compositions to stages alongside Bad Bunny, is part of a lineup that also includes Susan Tedeschi, Tiwa Savage, Dogs in a Pile and Dreion.Boston Ballet Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen marks his 25th season with the company as it opens 2026–2027 with Fall Experience. He joins Jared Bowen to talk about a quarter-century of expanding Boston Ballet’s repertoire and international reach, upcoming performances in New York and Paris, and a $10 million gift in his honor—the largest endowment gift in the company’s history.America is in a pickle—and Jackson Cannon is putting the brine to work behind the bar. The ES Hospitality beverage director joins Jared Bowen to talk about the pickle boom and how vinegar, fermentation and pickle juice are finding their way into cocktails. His class, Dirty Talk: Brine & Pickles in Cocktails, is September 12 at Eastern Standard as part of Pickle Week, running September 8–13. -
September 7, 2026 - Patti Smith, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Robert Pinsky
Patti Smith, National Book Award–winning author of “Just Kids,” joins The Culture Show to discuss her latest memoir, “Bread of Angels.” The book traces her imaginative postwar childhood, her life with Fred “Sonic” Smith, and the years of loss and renewal that shaped her return to writing and performance. Daniel Mendelsohn—Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books where he is Editor-at-Large—discusses his new translation of Homer's “The Odyssey.” Three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky joins The Culture Show to talk about retiring from Boston University where he has been a professor since 1989. -
September 4, 2026 - Week-in-Review: Gloria Steinem, Cassandra Wilson, and Making MapQuest Great Again
Callie Crossley is joined by Lisa Simmons, Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council, and Maurice Emmanuel Parent, award-winning actor, Professor of the Practice, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University, and Producing Artistic Director at Front Porch Arts Collective. They go over some of the week’s biggest arts and culture stories, which include: Gloria Steinem, the journalist and feminist leader who helped found Ms. magazine and pushed women’s rights into the center of American public life, died this week at 92. Her career stretched from an undercover investigation of New York’s Playboy Club to decades of advocacy for reproductive freedom and political equality. Cassandra Wilson, the Grammy-winning singer who moved through jazz, blues, folk, country and R&B with equal ease, died this week at 70. Albums including Blue Light ’Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter made her one of the defining jazz singers of the 1990s. how do you make MapQuest great again? By not making Lake Ontario great again. After President Trump pushed to rename it “Lake America,” MapQuest refused to follow directions—and the old-school navigation app shot to number one. The Metropolitan Museum of Art canceled its planned John Galliano retrospective after Jewish leaders, donors and New York politicians objected to honoring the designer, whose career was derailed by racist and antisemitic outbursts. Galliano withdrew from the exhibition, and the Met agreed to cancel it. Boston Ballet received a $10 million anonymous endowment contribution, the largest in the company’s history. The money permanently funds the artistic director’s position in honor of Mikko Nissinen, now in his 25th year leading the company, and marks a major step toward Boston Ballet’s goal of building a $100 million endowment. -
September 3, 2026 - Tracy K.Smith, "The Battle for Boston," and Dorie McCullough Lawson
Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. Poet Laureate discusses her book “Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times” — an invitation to listen, reflect, and let poetry guide us through uncertainty. Don Gillis and Ray Flynn join The Culture Show to discuss Gillis’ new book “The Battle for Boston: How Mayor Ray Flynn and Community Organizers Fought Racism and Downtown Power Brokers.” On June 5th at 6:00 Don Gillis will be at a book event at the Roslindale Public Library. To learn more go here.Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough spent decades helping Americans see their past in human terms. A new collection, “History Matters”, gathers his essays and speeches on why history endures — edited by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and longtime collaborator Mike Hill. She joins us ahead of her American Ancestors Headquarters event today at 5 p.m. To learn more go here. -
September 2, 2026- Wednesday Watch Party: "Do The Right Thing"
Callie Crossley leads this month's Wednesday Watch Party with GBH’s Jeremy Siegel, host of In Common, and Culture Show contributor Lisa Simmons, Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council. We're revisiting Spike Lee’s landmark 1989 film Do the Right Thing. Set in Bed-Stuy on the hottest day of the summer, the film is funny, combative, exuberant and ultimately devastating, using blazing color, a restless camera and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to explore race, policing, neighborhood change, ownership and belonging. Nearly 40 years later, we consider what the film understands about the way prejudice builds through insults, resentments and competing claims to the same place — and why so much of what Lee put on screen remains recognizable today. -
September 1, 2026 - Bobbi Brown, Donnie Wahlberg, and Chef Aidan McGee
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 P -
August 31, 2026 - Inside MASTERPIECE'S "The Forsytes," Fabiola Méndez, and John Sayles' "Crucible"
A sweeping drama on MASTERPIECE brings one of Britain’s most famous literary families back to the screen. In “The Forsytes,” actors Stephen Moyer and Jack Davenport play brothers Jolyon and James Forsyte, members of a wealthy Victorian dynasty whose fortunes can’t shield them from rivalry, ambition, and betrayal. To learn more go here.Then Fabiola Méndez is bringing the Puerto Rican cuatro to new audiences and bigger stages., The singer, composer, and bandleader joins Jared Bowen to discuss shaping a musical voice that has taken her from folk-rooted performance to the global stage alongside Bad Bunny. And Filmmaker and novelist John Sayles is back with “Crucible,” a new historical novel set in Henry Ford’s early-20th-century Detroit, where labor, power, and indu -
August 28, 2026 - Week in Review: Remembering Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Yayoi Kusama
Joyce Kulhawik joins Lisa Simmons, Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival, and Culture Show producer Kate Dellis for a look at some of the week’s biggest arts and culture stories, which included: Dolly Parton died this week at 80, leaving behind thousands of songs, 11 Grammys, more than 100 million records sold—and a philanthropic legacy that put hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children around the world. Tim Curry, the actor who turned Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show into one of cinema’s great cult characters, died this week at 80. His career also included indelible turns in Clue and It. Yayoi Kusama, whose polka dots, pumpkins and Infinity Mirror Rooms became some of contemporary art’s most recognizable images, died this month at 97 after a career spanning more than seven decades. After Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians unanimously authorized a strike, the players and management reached a new three-year contract that gives musicians greater influence over artistic planning and the choice of the orchestra’s next music director. Meta agreed to a $17.1 billion settlement over allegations that its platforms harmed young people. The deal could bring new restrictions for teenage users and as much as $516 million to Massachusetts for youth programs and mental-health services. -
August 27, 2026 - Christopher Rothko, Ask E. Jean, and "Broken American Dream" with Daniel Paquette
Christopher Rothko joins us to discuss his donation of his father’s 1934 Gloucester Harbor painting to the Cape Ann Museum and what the early work reveals about Mark Rothko before abstraction defined his career. He and his sister, Kate Rothko Prizel, will also appear at the museum’s Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the SeaSymposium September 17 and 18.Filmmaker Ivy Meeropol joins us to discuss Ask E. Jean, her new documentary tracing E. Jean Carroll’s unconventional life, public voice and legal battle with Donald Trump. The film screens August 27 as part of the Nantucket Film Festival’s summer documentary series.Washington Post reporter Danielle Paquette went to a forest outside Warsaw, where Europeans spent 28 hours role-playing life in a fictional Ohio trailer park. Her story, “What I Learned About the American Dream From Europeans Pretending to Live in Ohio,” explores what the experience revealed about America’s mythology abroad. -
August 26, 2026 - Remembering Dolly Parton with Paula Cole, Conversations with an Executioner, and corsets in Worcester
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Paula Cole joins The Culture Show to remember Dolly Parton, an artist she long admired and later collaborated with on “Heart Door.” Cole reflects on Parton’s songwriting, influence and the experience of making music with her. Cole’s new archival project, Sonic Memoir: Demos 1989–1998, arrives September 10. On September 18, she brings This Fire: 30 to the Wilbur, performing This Fire in full for its 30th anniversary.Polish resistance fighter Kazimierz Moczarski spent 255 days imprisoned with Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi officer who oversaw the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Translator Sean Gasper Bye joins us to discuss Conversations with an Executioner, now available in its complete English translation for the first time. He’ll be at JustBook-ish in Dorchester September 1.Worcester was once a corset capital, producing a garment that constricted women physically even as the industry helped liberate them in the workforce. Anne Marie Murphy joins us to discuss A Proper Fit: Women at Work in a City of Corsets and the women who designed, invented and built businesses around the garment.
