Larkin McPhee joins us to discuss I’ll See You in My Dreams: A Sister’s Memoir, about her younger brother Charles McPhee, the nationally syndicated radio host known as “The Dream Doctor,” and his battle with ALS. Years after his death, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker turned to writing to bring her brother back to life on the page. McPhee appears at a free book talk at the Nantucket Atheneum on Friday, August 28 at 6 p.m.

Independent curator Pedro Alonzo, a regular Culture Show contributor, returns for “AI: Actual Intelligence” with dispatches from a recent trip to Oaxaca. 

Tony Award nominee Melissa Errico has built a career bringing dramatic intelligence to the Great American Songbook. Now she turns to one of its most commanding interpreters: Barbra Streisand. Errico joins us to discuss The Streisand Effect, her homage to Streisand’s voice, wit and fearlessness, created with pianist and music director Billy Stritch. They bring the show to Provincetown Town Hall on Sunday, August 23 at 8:30 p.m. Errico also discusses her new album, I Can Dream, Can’t I? Illusions & Conversations from the Great American Songbook.

Boston Chief of Arts and Culture Joseph Zeal-Henry joins us to talk about what the city’s next cultural chapter might look like — from affordable rehearsal space and a new cultural infrastructure plan to the future of the Boston Center for the Arts. We’ll also look at LEXICON, the new 23-foot installation at the Boston Public Library that brings art, engineering and public space together.

MassArt president Mary Grant returns for “AI: Actual Intelligence.” This month, we consider Norman Rockwell and the American story at 250 through the Norman Rockwell Museum’s sweeping new exhibition, American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell. Plus, new research suggests that even 10 minutes of drawing can help calm the nervous system.

Executive Chef of Union Oyster House Rico DiFronzo joins us to mark the 200th anniversary of Boston’s oldest continuously operating restaurant, taking us through the hallowed history of the beloved Blackstone Block establishment and offering some pearls of wisdom as to the art of the shuck. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo joins us to discuss his new novel, Under the Falls, about a rock star returning to the struggling upstate New York town he fled as a teenager — and confronting the resentment, loyalties and unfinished business he left behind. Russo appears tonight at 6 p.m. with Tom Perrotta at the Cambridge Public Library, in an event presented by Harvard Book Store. The event is sold out, but a standby line will be available.

James Beard Award-winning chef Barbara Lynch built one of Boston’s most influential restaurant groups before closing her remaining restaurants in 2024. Now she’s working on a much more intimate scale. Lynch joins us after hosting a pair of 12-person dinners at her Manchester-by-the-Sea studio, part of a new venture that includes private dinners, recipe subscriptions and culinary travel.

And for our recurring series “AI: Actual Intelligence,” Imari Paris Jeffries, president and CEO of Embrace Boston and co-chair of Everyone 250, returns with news about keeping the energy of the World Cup alive after the tournament's end, as well as former Celtic Jaylen Brown's promise to maintain his connections to Boston area nonprofits that help the community.

Paula Cole joins us to mark 30 years of her landmark album This Fire. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter reflects on songs including “I Don’t Want to Wait” and “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?,” and on returning to the album three decades later. Her This Fire: 30 tour brings the Rockport-raised artist back to Massachusetts for a September 18 show at The Wilbur.

Boston Globe TV and pop culture critic Chris Vognar looks at the changing face of the celebrity interview. As traditional late night loses its hold on audiences, shows including Hot Ones, SubwayTakes and Chicken Shop Date are finding new ways to get famous people talking. We discuss Vognar’s latest piece on how YouTube is reinventing the talk-show format.

Contemporary Climate Gallery founder James LaMarca joins us ahead of Working Coast – Below the Line, a Fort Point exhibition featuring three emerging Boston-area artists exploring New England’s working waterfront through painting and sculpture. The show runs August 26–30 at the FPAC Art Space at the Envoy Hotel.

Jared Bowen is joined by Culture Show contributor Lisa Simmons, Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival, and GBH’s Jeremy Siegel, host of In Common, for a look at some of the week’s biggest arts and culture stories.

Valerie Fridland, sociolinguist and professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, joins us to talk about her new book, Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents—from how accents develop and change to what our speech can reveal about identity, belonging and the assumptions we make about one another.

Philip Kennicott, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic for The Washington Post, discusses the paper’s ambitious project, The 25 most influential works of American culture, tracing 250 years through everything from Thomas Paine and Jackson Pollock to blue jeans, Thriller and Doom.

Jane Eaglen, Grammy-winning soprano, New England Conservatory faculty member and president of the Boston Wagner Society, returns for “AI: Actual Intelligence” following the Society’s 2026 American Wagner Festival to talk Wagner, singing and the latest stories from the world of classical music.

Judy Collins joins us ahead of her “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: Farewell Tour”stop at Tanglewood on August 30, co-starring Mary Chapin Carpenter and Rosanne Cash, with special guest Amanda Shires. Collins discusses “Both Sides Now,” interpreting other writers’ songs and writing her own material.

Mahesh Daas, president of the Boston Architectural College, returns for “AI: Actual Intelligence” to talk about how cities can adapt to increasingly extreme summer heat—from shade and trees to water, street design and lessons from places that have lived with punishing temperatures for centuries.

The 116th annual Fisherman’s Feast returns to Boston’s North End August 13–16. Domenic Strazzullo, president of the Madonna del Soccorso Society, which organizes the Feast, and The Boston Guido, one of this year’s Best Meatball Competition judges, join Jared to preview four days of processions, food, the famed Flight of the Angel and Best Meatball Competition.

For decades, E. Jean Carroll dispensed advice as a journalist, television personality and Elle columnist. Then she took Donald Trump to court—and won twice. Director Ivy Meeropol joins us to discuss Ask E. Jean, her new documentary looking beyond the courtroom at Carroll’s unconventional life, career and refusal to be silenced. Ask E. Jean screens August 11 at 6 p.m. at Water’s Edge Cinema in Provincetown, followed by a Q&A with Meeropol, and August 27 as part of the Nantucket Film Festival’s NFF NOW Summer Doc Series.

Revere’s century-old McKinley School is being transformed into an unusual civic hub, bringing preschool classrooms, city offices and a regional 911 dispatch center under one roof. CambridgeSeven principal Justin Crane discusses the challenges of adapting the historic McKinley School for radically different uses—and designing it to serve its community for decades to come.

The new musical The Jack of Hearts Club travels back to Provincetown in 1963, where the regulars at a local gay bar gather for one last summer celebration as relationships and lives face change. Creator Jon Richardson, who wrote the book, music and lyrics, joins us to discuss his musical love letter to Provincetown. The Jack of Hearts Club runs at Provincetown Theater through September 6.

Federal arts funding cuts are hitting New England organizations in jobs, programs and dollars. Emily Ruddock, executive director of MASSCreative, joins Jared to discuss a new regional survey of 125 arts and cultural organizations, which reports $13.5 million in lost or unavailable funding and more than 700 jobs affected.

Swedish-born modernist Carl Sprinchorn found inspiration in the Maine woods, painting the lumberjacks, hunters and laborers who lived and worked there. Devon Zimmerman, curator at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, discusses the major new exhibition Carl Sprinchorn: All the World is a Painting, which reconsiders the artist through the lenses of immigration, sexuality, masculinity and American modernism.

BIG LITTLE BOOKS returns with a twist. Jill Medvedow and cocktail icon Jackson Cannon join Jared to discuss John Maxwell Hamilton’s The French 75, a spirited history of the iconic cocktail, from its World War I origins through a century of legend and reinvention. Cannon, beverage director for ES Hospitality, brings the cocktail history out of the book and into the glass. On August 20 Jackson Cannon will be throwing a Garden Party Dinner at Standard Italian. To learn more go here.

This week on The Culture Show, Jared Bowen is joined by Culture Show co-host Callie Crossley and Culture Show contributor James Sullivan, a journalist and author specializing in popular culture and Americana who is also on the faculty of Emerson College, for a look at the week’s top arts and culture headlines.

Ariana Grande plans to step back from public life after her Eternal Sunshine tour, following years of scrutiny over her body and health. Can a celebrity ever truly reclaim her privacy?

A new MASSCreative survey finds New England arts groups lost $11.4 million in federal funding, affecting 486 jobs and forcing cuts to programs and public services.

Live Nation-owned Veeps has laid off nearly all staff at BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver and Goldmine, shrinking the music press that helps emerging artists find an audience.

Fans buying albums from Charli xcx, Olivia Rodrigo and others are finding missing passages, early mixes and absent guest stars—the result of physical copies going into production before the music is finished.

John Cage’s As Slow as Possible changed a chord for the first time in two and a half years. The 639-year performance at a German church is scheduled to end in 2640.