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The 25-hour Moby Dick Marathon sails on in New Bedford
Every winter, thousands of fans descend on the New Bedford Whaling Museum to hear the novel out loud.
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April 17, 2026 - Week in Review: Hampshire College closing, AI storefronts, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
On this edition of The Culture Show, Jared Bowen, Lisa Simmons, and James Sullivan go over the week’s top arts and culture headlines. Lisa Simmons is the Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council. James Sullivan is a journalist and author specializing in popular culture and Americana. He’s also on the Emerson faculty.Hampshire College, the experimental Amherst campus built around independent thinking and academic rebellion, will close after the fall semester under the weight of declining enrollment and financial strain. Its loss is hitting alumni hard, including filmmaker Ken Burns, who called Hampshire’s model of experimentation profoundly transformative. Meta is reportedly exploring whether AI can do more than complete tasks — whether it can replicate executive presence itself. The company is said to be building a digital version of Mark Zuckerberg that could advise employees across the organization, raising questions about whether this is a new kind of access or a new kind of control. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2026 stretches across genres and generations, from Iron Maiden and Wu-Tang Clan to Sade and Oasis. It is a lineup that rewards longevity, settles a few old arguments, and reopens the question of who gets to define rock history. The Brady Bunch house has entered yet another phase of its afterlife. After HGTV rebuilt the interior to match the sitcom’s remembered world, the home now exists somewhere between landmark, attraction, and pop-culture shrine to the grooviest decade in television décor. At the MFA, Art in Bloom turns 50 this year, pairing works from the collection with floral arrangements inspired by them. The annual event brings together floral designers, garden clubs, and museum volunteers for one of the museum’s most colorful spring traditions. -
April 16, 2026 - Keefer Glenshaw, Mary Grant, and a Secret Boston Patriot's Day special
Keefer Glenshaw joins The Culture Show ahead of Intention / Desire, a collaborative 24-hour performance that begins at sunset on April 25 and runs through sunset on April 26 at the Berklee Loft in Boston. Glenshaw, a musician, performance artist, electric cellist, and founder of the rock band The Romance, talks about pushing performance to its limits and inviting audiences directly into the work. MassArt president Mary Grant returns for our recurring feature “AI: Actual Intelligence,” where we hear from some of the region’s most original thinkers. This month, she joins us to talk about the school’s new co-op program and whether an art school can also become a pathway to work.Ahead of Patriots’ Day, Kiernan P. Schmitt joins us to go beyond the Freedom Trail and into the lesser-known corners of Greater Boston where the Revolution still leaves visible marks on the landscape. Schmitt is the author of Secret Boston: An Unusual Guide and co-host of the travel podcast Out of Office. -
April 15, 2026 - Sharks Come Cruisin', Worcester to the Stars at Museum of Worcester, and the Boston Theater Marathon
Providence-based six-piece Sharks Come Cruisin’ joined The Culture Show with their sea-shanty-driven sound, drawing on maritime music, group singing, and an instrument lineup that includes guitar, bass, banjo, fiddle, accordion, and melodica. The band also hosts the regular PVD Shanty Sing at The Parlour in Providence on May 8 and has a duo set at Aidan’s Pub in Bristol on May 10. A century after Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts, Vanessa Bumpus, exhibition coordinator at the Museum of Worcester, joined us to discuss Worcester to the Stars: The Goddard Rocket Centennial. On view through August 1, the exhibition traces Worcester’s place in the history of American rocketry through artifacts and images from Clark University, NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, and other collections. Then we turned to the other Boston marathon: the Boston Theater Marathon XXVIII, a full-day relay of 50 new ten-minute plays staged by New England theater companies at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre on May 3. Nathan Alan Davis, Director of the MFA Playwriting Program and Associate Professor of the Practice of Playwriting at Boston University, joined us to talk about the event’s staying power and its broader role as a gathering point for the region’s theater community, with proceeds benefiting the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund. -
April 14, 2026 - Bob Odenkirk and Derek Kolstad on "Normal," "Thanks for Typing," and "Say It Loud" at the ICA
Actor Bob Odenkirk and writer Derek Kolstad reunite after the Nobody films for Normal, a twisted neo-Western about a bank robbery that shatters the facade of a seemingly quiet small town. They join us ahead of the film’s theatrical release this Friday, April 17. To learn more, go here.At Harvard’s Houghton Library, Thanks for Typing brings long-overlooked women’s labor out of the margins and into the center of literary and artistic history. Christine Jacobson, Associate Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library and co-curator of the exhibition, joins us to discuss the typists behind drafts, dictation, revisions, and retyped pages — including work connected to writers like Henry James and Emily Dickinson. To learn more, go here.Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now at the ICA traces nearly fifty years of art, activism, and community through the history of the African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program. Meghan Clare Considine, ICA’s Curatorial Assistant and featured artist Bryan McFarlane join us to discuss the larger story the exhibition tells about Black cultural life in Boston and what it means to see that history inside the museum now. To learn more, go here. -
April 13, 2026 - Timothy Snyder, Boston Youth Poet Laureate Ailin Sha, and Bill Barclay
Historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder joins The Culture Show to discuss how democracies weaken, how authoritarianism rises, and what freedom actually requires. Snyder, the inaugural Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, will be honored on April 26 at the Literary Lights Gala. Boston Youth Poet Laureate Ailin Sha joins us as our National Poetry Month celebration continues. Originally from Beijing and now a first-year student at Harvard College, Sha writes about migration, language, and belonging — themes that have helped shape both her poetry and her public work across the city. As the Boston Symphony Orchestra heads into a major leadership transition, writer, composer, and director Bill Barclay argues that the conversation about classical music audiences is overdue for a reset. He joins us to talk about why he believes the future audience for live classical music is younger than many people think — and about several upcoming performances: the BSO’s Explorer Concert on Beethoven’s Fifth on April 14, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players’ All-Stravinsky program on April 24, and Boston Baroque’s Idomeneo on April 24 and 26.
