All Of It with Alison Stewart

Everyone appreciates a good pen. For this holiday season, why not gift some pens? To learn more about the best pens to gift for the holidays, from fountain to ballpoint, we speak with Brad Dowdy, blogger and host of The Pen Addict podcast, and we take your calls.

The singer songwriter and proud Vermonter Noah Kahan's latest album, Stick Season, is a tribute to the time of the year between fall and winter, what locals in his hometown call stick season. Coming off his nationwide tour of the album, Kahan joins us in studio for a Listening Party, and also performs some special acoustic versions of songs from the album.

A new film from an adapted screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, titled "Living," finds Bill Nighy as a 1950s civil servant who, after a fatal cancer diagnosis, endeavors to give his tedious life meaning. Nighy and Ishiguro join us to discuss the movie, which opens in theaters on December 23.

The holidays can be a wonderful time for your pets (maybe you're taking time off and will be home more); they can also be fraught (maybe you're traveling with your dog/cat to see family). An animal expert join us today to field your questions: Sarah Fraser is co-CEO of Instinct Dog Training, Inc. and co-founder of Instinct Dog Behavior & Training, where she's worked with hundreds of NYC owners and dogs with severe aggression, fear, and anxiety issues. 

Rev. Al Sharpton has spent his life saying things people did not want to hear. The new documentary "Loudmouth" chronicles his path from a teenage preacher to a racial justice firebrand on the streets of 1980s New York to becoming a presidential adviser and media elder statesman. Sharpton and director Josh Alexander joins us to discuss. "Loudmouth" closed out this year's Tribeca Film Festival, and it opens in theaters on December 9th and streams on Amazon and Apple TV in January.

Named after his most recent album, Samora Pinderhughes' Grief is an expansive, three-month solo exhibition showing in Manhattan. The show includes monthly performances and collaborative films which focus on creating communal space for grieving and healing, particularly for people of color. Pinderhughes joins us to talk about the exhibition on view until January 24 at The Kitchen.

As we continue our weekly caregiving series, we discuss how caring for others that are ill can cause strain and hardship for caregivers. Clinical psychologist Allison J. Applebaum directs the Caregivers Clinic at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She joins us to offer tips about self-care for caretakers and to take your calls.

Playwrights Horizons "Downstate," written by Bruce Norris, follows four men convicted of sex crimes sharing a group home in downstate Illinois after a man shows up to confront his childhood abuser. Norris joins us alongside director Pam MacKinnon and actor K. Todd Freeman who plays Dee, a sex offender, to talk about the play. "Downstate" has been extended and is currently showing through December 22.

In the 1990s, an Israeli graduate student conducted research into a massacre of Palestinian civilians in 1948, the year of Israel's establishment as a nation. That research led the student to be discredited, and labeled a traitor. A new documentary from Israeli producer Alon Schwartz, "Tantura," revisits that research, the violence it documented, and the efforts to gloss over some of the darker parts of Israel's fight for independence.

This year is the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria. In the first major U.S. museum survey of Puerto Rican art in nearly 50 years, the Whitney is bringing together dozens of pieces by artists whose work responds to the aftermath of the disaster, and provides cultural context for what life was like before the storm hit in 2017. "no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria," is on view until April 23, and the show's curator Marcela Guerrero, alongside artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Sofía Córdova, join to discuss the exhibition.