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Mary Coughlan – aka “Ireland’s Billie Holiday”, adored by Nick Cave, Shane MacGowan and Elvis Costello - is on tour again in 2026. This warm, funny and circuitous conversation looks back from her home in Wicklow at the first shows she ever saw and played and various milestones along the road, among them …

… singing Two Little Orphans (aged 5) at a Christmas party: “The adrenaline rush! Applause and lemonade!”

… escaping down ladders from school to see Rory Gallagher in Galway and the nuns waiting when she returned

… seeing Donovan on the Aran Islands in 1969, a trip from the mainland by currach

… meeting Mike Stoller and re-recording Peggy Lee’s savaged Mirrors album: “more relevant now than ever”

… Elton John (dressed as a hornet) at Watford Stadium and the embroidered floral skirt she’d made to watch him

… her love of cabaret and old 78s and the songs she and Erik Visser chose to launch her career

… her transformative slot on the Late Late Show in 1984: “I played to four people the night before; a week later they were queuing round the block”

… Frank Sinatra’s mysterious autocue and sitting next to Roger Moore in his audience (“very orange”)

… “I adored St Dominic’s Preview and 15 years later Van Morrison was in my dressing-room”

… her cure for insomnia

… why Joe Strummer meant so much to her

… and her 200-song live repertoire – from Meet Me Where They Play The Blues and Don’t Smoke In Bed to Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Order Mary Coughlan tickets here: https://www.marycoughlan.ie/upcoming-shows

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What is the purpose of the Arts? Can music, literature and visual art change our lives physically and socially, as well as personally? Adam Rutherford explores the power of the arts and how it might be defined and explained.

Engaging with the arts is one of our most powerful tools for unlocking health and happiness argues Daisy Fancourt. She is is Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London and Director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health. In her new book, Art Cure, she shows how songs support the development of children's brains; how dance can build neural pathways; how theatre and exhibitions can decrease pain, stress and depression and how the arts can improve the functioning of every major organ system in the body. Drawing on the latest research research in a range of scientific fields, she traces a connection between the arts and human flourishing.

Earliest Stories: Stories, Novellas, Humoresques, 1880-1882 is a collection of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov's work while he was still a student of medicine. In his juvenilia we see flashes of insight alongside comedy, compassion and a developing narrative voice. Rosamund Bartlett, translator, biographer and cultural historian writes about how stories have long been dismissed, but written as his family faced financial crisis, reveal much about the threads that connect together in his life and work.

BBC Radio 3 presenter Tom Service explores how music transports and defines us in his new book. In A History of the World in 50 Pieces, he examines how classical music reflects our changing politics, society and technological advances - and how composers, musicians and listeners have shaped history. From Bach to Beethoven via the Happy birthday song, he explores the power of music to connect and and challenge us.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Laura Truffaut, daughter of the great French New Wave film-maker Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky, discussing her father’s films and her memories of his film shoots.

Berkeley Art Museum & Pacifc Film Archive is presenting a retrospective of nine films of Francois Truffaut, beginning with his first film, “The 400 Blows” and continuing to his final film, “Confidentially Yours,” from January 17 to February 28th, all introduced by Laura Truffaut.

Francois Truffaut began his career as a critic for the influential French film magazine, “Cahiers du Cinema”, but within four years, following his article in the publication discussing his auteur theory of film criticism, he moved on to his first film, “The 400 Blows,” which blew everyone away at the Cannes Film Festival. Twenty-one films followed, until his untimely death from a brain tumor at the age of 52. Along the way he made several masterpieces, including Jules et Jim, Day for Night, Small Change, The Wild Child, and The Soft Skin, to name a handful which will be at BAMPFA.

The post Laura Truffaut: The Films of Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) appeared first on KPFA.

Sadia Shepard reads her story “Kim’s Game,” from the January 19, 2026, issue of the magazine. Shepard is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Her first book, “The Girl from Foreign," was published in 2008.

What if the right isn’t wrong - or, at least, totally wrong, about education? That seems to be the conclusion of James Traub, a liberal educationalist, who has spent the last year visiting the civics programs of American high schools. Neither the 1619 Project nor Trump’s 1776 Report seems to be the message of Traub’s account of these travels, The Cradle of Citizenship. Schools can help save our democracy, Traub concludes, by equipping American students to think their way through the complexities of their nation’s history. The point of a good education, he concludes, is to foster thinking rather than moral outrage or virtue seeking. More Homer in the classroom, and less social media. Those are James Traub’s old school principles for our new century.

On Point news analyst Jack Beatty on the opportunity cost of interventionist foreign policy on social betterment programs in the U.S.

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(00:00) – Clíona Ní Ríordáin and Patrick Cotter discussion
(11:01) – Eilean Ni Chuilleanáin interview
(01:02:57) – Southword poem, Roadkill in Offaly by Simon Costello

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork City in 1942. She was a founder member of Cyphers, the literary journal (1975). Her first collection, Acts and Monuments, won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. The Gallery Press has published her nine collections of poems including The Sun-fish which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and The Mother House (2019) winner of the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Her Collected Poems (2020) won the Pigott Poetry Prize. Her 2023 collection The Map of the World won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow and Professor of English (Emeritus) at Trinity College Dublin. She served as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2016-2019 and, in 2025, was elected a Saoi, the highest honour of Aosdána.

This week's Southword poem is 'Roadkill in Offaly' by Simon Costello, which was one of the poems in the selection which won the inaugural Southword Editors' Poetry Award and appears in issue 46. You can buy single issues, subscribe, or find out how to submit to Southword here.

We’re getting our heads around the invasion of Venezuela and what feels like a rough new rule book for the so-called world order. Cue Greg Grandin, the hemispheric historian who wrote that big book America, América just in time last summer.

Greg Grandin.

The big theme in Grandin’s book is the very dicey business of sovereignty historically between North and South America. And Donald Trump has been teasing at that instability of borders and labels ever since he renamed the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf Of America.” He’s teasing us again this week when he says Cuba could be next, even Colombia on the list for invasion or regime change.

The post Age of Hemispheric Empires appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

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