On Wednesday, a federal jury found that Live Nation engaged in anticompetitive practices that stifle competition and harm the live music industry. The verdict marked a major victory for more than two dozen states in the antitrust trial against the live entertainment company, and has the potential to transform the concert ecosystem in the U.S.

Live Nation owns, operates or works with hundreds of venues across the country. It also manages artists, promotes concerts, books tours and owns Ticketmaster, which is one of the largest ticketing companies in the world. Throughout the trial, an attorney representing 33 states and the District of Columbia argued that Live Nation wielded too much power over the industry at the expense of fans, venues and artists. Live Nation repeatedly denied those accusations, but the jury ultimately sided with the states, declaring that the company had an unfair dominance in the industry.

Afterwards, Live Nation issued a statement saying the verdict "is not the last word on this matter" and pointed to several pending motions that the court still has to rule on. The company said it plans to appeal any "unfavorable rulings."

Several artists and organizers NPR spoke with say they don't expect to see any immediate changes in the live music industry — but they see this is a first step in the right direction.

Joey La Neve DeFrancesco is a guitarist and vocalist in the Providence, R.I. punk band Downtown Boys. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the music industry, DeFrancesco founded the United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), a grassroots union advocating for the wellbeing of artists. Since then, the group has organized campaigns focused on increasing streaming royalties, merchandising payouts and SXSW payment rates for musicians. DeFrancesco says UMAW heavily supported the antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation and was closely monitoring the trial.

"We were all ecstatic. It's been decades that artists have been fighting this company," DeFrancesco says, citing Pearl Jam's boycott of Ticketmaster in the early 1990s. "It remains to be seen what the judge is going to do with this verdict — if we're going to truly break apart this Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly. But having this scale of a win is a huge development for artists."

More than just ticket prices

The Live Nation verdict comes at a time when many working musicians say they're struggling to make ends meet. As the value of recorded music has decreased with streaming, there's an increased emphasis on touring and merch sales to make up the difference. But artists NPR spoke with say the rising costs of transportation, lodging, food and other factors required to put on shows are creating an untenable situation.

Conor Murphy is a St. Louis, Mo. based musician who spent more than a decade as the lead vocalist of the emo band Foxing and now continues to perform as Smidley. In the fall, Foxing announced it would be going on an indefinite hiatus. Murphy says there's a multitude of reasons for the break, but one of the leading factors is how financially unsustainable it's become to be a full-time musician. He says it's especially frustrating, then, to see fans spending more than ever on concert tickets. (As part of the Live Nation verdict, the jury found that Ticketmaster had overcharged fans in some states by $1.72 per ticket).

"My bands in particular, from my experience, we're not seeing the benefits of ticket prices being more expensive," he says. "We're not taking home more money at the end of tours."

Murphy's not alone Damon Krukowski is a writer, UMAW organizer and one-half of the indie-folk duo Damon & Naomi. He says he and his wife Naomi Yang recently sold out three performances in London, and still ended up in the negative.

"Three nights at our favorite club, sold out, and we lost money because expenses are so high right now," he says. "It's not the club's fault. We love that club and they're transparent about money and everything. It's not the fans' fault. But it's like, if you're charging normal money at a decent, normal club, it's not adding up right now."

Krukowski says he thinks the problem is a wider consolidation of power across the industry — that includes Live Nation, but also extends to streaming giants and recorded music companies. He says the industry looks completely different today than it did when he started playing music in Boston in the 1980s.

"We used to have such a wide variety of partners to work with as independent artists. We had venues that were independently owned. We had record stores that were independently owned," he says. "We had a network on the radio that was community and college radio stations, and we had a way of touring that didn't depend on these huge companies that are backed by enormous capital."

Impact on local scenes

All of the artists NPR spoke with say they hope the Live Nation verdict leads to lower ticket fees for fans as well as more robust competition and investment in small, local music scenes across the country. A study conducted by the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) found that 64% of independent venues, promoters and festivals were not profitable in 2024.

Stephen Parker, executive director of NIVA, tells NPR that the verdict is incredibly meaningful at a time when so many venues are struggling.

"It's not just a win for the states. It's a win for the small businesses and nonprofits that I represent," he says. "It's a win for the fans and the artists that have suffered under Live Nation for way too long."

In past statements to NPR, Live Nation has said that it promotes thousands of shows in independent venues across the country.

In Boston, Krukowski says the local landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years. Two major venues with over 3,500 capacity have been built in the city since the pandemic; one is operated by Live Nation and the other is owned by a partner of AEG Presents, which is Live Nation's biggest competitor. But small clubs and independent venues with much lower capacities have shuttered across the city.

"That means that my friends who play adventurous, independent music or improvised music have nowhere to play in Boston. So they don't," he says. "They go on tour and they don't play here."

Krukowski's not the only one who's noticed a shift. Online, some music fans on Reddit have posted about certain bands skipping Boston on tour, and touring in smaller markets instead. Krukowski says one such place booking notable lineups is Portland, Maine.

There, the Maine Music Alliance — a coalition of artists, venues, music industry workers and community members — has been leading a fight against Live Nation's proposal to build a 3,300-seat concert hall in the city. So far, the group has succeeded in getting a temporary moratorium on large venues in Portland, which was recently extended until September.

Scott Mohler is executive director and co-founder of the Maine Music Alliance. He says the verdict comes at a crucial moment for the group's ongoing battle against Live Nation.

"This is incredible legitimacy added to what I think a lot of people have thought are just a bunch of hippies and hipsters shouting about the corporation for the past year," he says. "I do think that it's going to certainly create more engagement and the council will be hearing from voices that they hadn't heard from before."

In the meantime, individual artists are doing what they can. Pop-rock singer Caroline Rose says they've been avoiding working with Live Nation as much as possible in recent years. They say the verdict is "a pretty amazing milestone" for now, but they're curious about what will actually happen next.

"We'll see how it pans out. I have a general distrust that things ever turn out in artists' favor," Rose says, laughing. "We've just been burned so many times."

In 2025, Rose released their album year of the slug exclusively on Bandcamp and in physical format. Since then, they've been focused on smaller solo tours in independent venues across the country. They say playing intimate rooms creates an incredibly rewarding, almost spiritual connection with the audience — and they say it's been refreshing to focus on those interpersonal connections rather than constantly trying to size up to the next biggest possible venue.

"By far, the most positive and nourishing experience has been working with the venue staff and the promoters that work at these independent clubs," Rose says. "It's a totally different type of show and a totally different type of experience, as opposed to when you get into the bigger rooms and you have better sound systems and maybe there's not a bathroom with no seats on the toilets anymore. But I do think it's important to pay homage to those venues and actively support them and treat them with respect."

Copyright 2026, NPR

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Seeing a new work on the shelf written by an author you love can feel like winning the lottery. Shirley Fergenson of The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore, Md., remembers being absolutely captivated by Daniyal Mueenuddin’s 2009 short story collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

This year — 17 years later — he’s published a new work of fiction, entitled “This Is Where the Serpent Lives.”

Fergenson says when she saw it, she “practically jumped up and down. I took it home, I read it, and I fell in love with it. It's the same voice. I loved it then, and I love it still.”

“This Is Where the Serpent Lives” is a sprawling work set in Pakistan over several decades, starting in the 1950s. It’s being marketed as a novel, but Fergenson says it’s actually three short stories and a novella with interlinking characters.

“It sort of feels like ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ with a little bit of ‘The Godfather’ thrown in,” she says.

“There are rich landowners, there are servants, forbidden Love, ambition, corruption. There is moral compromise and fluid loyalty. It is a class-and-cast panorama of amazingly rich characters. Each one could have a whole story written about them. They're so full of life.”

“The main reason to read this book is the exquisite writing, but if you need a story that is one story arc that takes you from the beginning to the end, this is not your story.

There are linkages, but they're literary, and they are so beautifully told that even in the bleakest, darkest setting, every detail feels like a photograph through an artist's filter. And the final novella is so powerful that it feels like its own full novel.”

Listen to an NPR interview with the author: Daniyal Mueenuddin discusses his debut novel, 'This Is Where the Serpent Lives' : NPR

Record Store Day is Saturday. It's a special day to celebrate and support independent record stores in our communities each year. If you're a music lover, there will be loads to do and plenty to listen to.

MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with host of the Current's Morning Show, Jill Riley, about her favorite Record Store Day activities.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

The Walker Art Center on Thursday cut ties with Cardamom, the restaurant housed inside its ground floor, exactly a week after restaurant management announced staff layoffs in favor of a QR-code service model.

The restaurant is set to close within 90 days.

“We were caught by surprise by the changes at Cardamom and, after careful consideration, have decided to part ways,” Walker executive director Mary Ceruti said in an emailed statement. “The reduced-service model, which favors automated efficiencies over a human-centered approach, does not align with our core values.”

Cardamom owner DDP Restaurant Group, started by chef Daniel Del Prado, has owned and managed the restaurant since 2021. Last week, a company spokesperson cited rising costs and varying traffic levels as factors to moving away from full-service dining.

In an emailed statement Thursday, DDP Restaurant Group said Cardamom was never profitable.

“Our innovation was designed to preserve jobs and a restaurant at the Walker, just as dozens of other restaurants in Minneapolis have done to achieve financial survival,” DDP said in the statement.

A Hospitality Minnesota report released last week showed the state’s industry is “on the brink of no return” following the surge in federal immigration enforcement in recent months. Businesses are also still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and navigate pressures from tariffs and mounting regulations, according to the report.

Former Cardamom workers said at a worker press conference outside Cardamom on Thursday afternoon QR codes are not the solution.

“Hospitality is human,” said Hazel Nelson, who had worked at Cardamom for about a year.

DDP terminated 16 Cardamom employees, according to CTUL, a workers’ rights nonprofit supporting Cardamom workers in organizing. A spokesperson said most do not have another source of income.

Most of those employees declined to re-apply for Cardamom’s new role food-running and bussing and would receive severance pay, according to restaurant management.

Former employees picketed after the press conference and plan to again on Sunday to advocate for workers at other DDP Restaurant Group businesses, which include Porzana and Flora Room. They’re demanding the company give its employees at least two weeks’ notice of termination in the future, allow labor organizing without fear of retaliation and sign onto the “86 ICE” campaign to support workers amid federal immigration operations.

Abby Jimenez is a powerhouse.

Originally known for starting Nadia Cakes out of her home kitchen, these days she’s known more for her books than her bakery.

Her latest rom-com, “The Night We Met,” hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list one week after it was released.

It’s no surprise to her vast fan base. Jimenez writes witty, meet-cute romance books that also tackle real life issues like alcoholism, family trauma and caring for a loved one with dementia. And all her stories are set in or tinged by Minnesota, Jimenez’ adopted home state. What’s not to love?

Jimenez joins Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas this week, for the first time ever, to talk about the oft-maligned romance genre, how changing views of sex and marriage and masculinity are reflected in her books, why Jimenez always include a content warning before the story and why getting people to read anything these days feels like a win.

She also deftly handles a lightning round with Miller, including the romance novel she thinks should be added to the curriculum for all Minnesota college and the cupcake from Nadia Cakes she would bring to a roundtable of famous authors.

Guest:

• Abby Jimenez is a prolific romance writer. Her latest book is “The Night We Met.”

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The 2026 crop art season for the Minnesota State Fair competition has begun. This week, the fair announced new rules for the crop art competition, and the artist community is buzzing.

“There are big feelings in crop art,” says Marta Shore, a crop artist and the superintendent for the crop art competition.

Crop art is the very Minnesotan, very time-consuming artform of making mosaics from seeds and plants.

Crop Art Wednesdays (CAW), a monthly crop art gathering at Lake Monster Brewing in St. Paul met Wednesday and the new rules were top of mind.

“When the rules come out, everyone hops on, as soon as that link is live, you're checking to see what's changed, what’s new,” said crop artist Gayle Deutsch.

Many say the most significant change is that quinoa will be banned from the fair competition beginning in 2027. At the heart of crop art is a celebration of Minnesota agriculture, and because Minnesota farmers don’t grow quinoa as a crop, the seed has been banned. It’s a big loss for crop artists because, as Deutsch says, quinoa is prized by crop artists for lettering.

“It lays really nice and looks really neat, which is one of your things. You really want to make sure your piece is neat for points, for a ribbon,” Deustch said. “So, that is a little bit of a travesty, but it's okay. At least they gave us warning.”

Deutsch points to the “yellow mustard incident” of 2023, when the fair announced that the seed was banned well after many artists had already started their entries. Many artists start their work in the winter, as the pieces can take months to complete.

“I will say the drama about [quinoa] is much less than yellow mustard,” Deustch said. “People were very upset, because here you have this piece that you're starting, and now all of a sudden you can't submit it, because yellow mustard is illegal.”

The mustard seed ban was actually reversed, but artists think the quinoa ban will stick.

“They gave us a lot of advanced warning, but now I'm going to have to figure out what to do with all of this quinoa that I have,” said crop artist Sarah O’Brien, positing that there will be much more quinoa art this year while the seed is still legal. “Maybe there is going to be more quinoa than I would have thought in my in my pieces.”

Artist Kaela Reinardy says the most significant rule change for 2026 is limiting submissions per person. That number is down to five.

“I think that's a good thing, because I think I'd rather have a limit on number of pieces and have the field smaller than have people not be able to have theirs displayed,” said Reinardy.

The crop art competition has exploded in popularity in recent years, said superintendent Shore, and there’s only so much display space in the Agriculture Horticulture Building

“I do like it being in Ag-Hort because, again, that link to crop, the celebrating crops, celebrating agriculture,” said Shore. But, “if someone would like to donate $10 million to build us a crop art building, we would love it.”

Other rule changes include updates to entry categories, deadline dates, sizing and more. Chia seeds have also been banned for 2027, and Shore suspects there maybe more sizing rule changes implemented next year.

Shore, who began in this position in 2024, said the shift is to recommit to the roots of the artform.

“We really want it to be about crops that can be grown in Minnesota,” she said.

Ten years after Minneapolis icon Prince’s death, the city of Minneapolis and Paisley Park are planning a celebration of his legacy — along with a few thousand fans.

City leaders announced plans Thursday for a block party and Prince sing-along on June 6. Musical director Sanford Moore will conduct a Minneapolis-based choir of 100 vocalists, plus any Prince fans who want to join in on his biggest hits. Organizers said they’re anticipating up to 15,000 people at the event.

L. Londell McMillan was Prince’s attorney and manager. He announced the event at a press conference in front of a towering 110-foot mural of the music legend, steps away from his home venue at First Avenue.

“Although Prince in the physical is passed, he lives,” McMillan said. “He remains with us. You hear it everywhere you go.”

Organizers said the sing-along idea is a callback to the day Prince died in April 2016, when fans took to the streets outside First Avenue and for a spontaneous sing-along after the news broke.

The event will mark what would have been Prince’s 68th birthday on June 7. Organizers said to come ready to sing – and bring their best purple and sequins.

“If Prince taught us anything, it's that subtlety is overrated,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said.

The sing-along is part of the annual Prince celebration weekend, with events in downtown Minneapolis and at Paisley Park.

From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above.

Want to be an Art Hound? Submit here.

A classic story returns to the stage

Juanita Vang is co-executive director at the Southeast Asian Diaspora (SEAD) Project in Minneapolis. She performed in the original production of Ehkhudah Zar’s play “Muyehpen” in 2023, and she’s excited that Exposed Brick is mounting a new, traveling production of the play.

Written in English and billed as one of the first — if not the first — tellings of the classic Karen story in English, Muyehpen will be performed at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul this Friday at 7 p.m. and at the Paramount Theatre in Austin at 6 p.m. April 25.

The theater notes that, while all ages are welcome, the play contains references to sexual assault.

Juanita says: I love seeing how oral traditions through the centuries are able to come to life and are able to be documented in a way where we can show the rest of the world.

Now that it's actually being documented, hopefully, it builds a more beautiful world of diversity and understanding that we all come from different places, but we also have shared lived human experiences, and hopefully, that instills empathy and love in the world.

— Juanita Vang

Abstract art show: where sound and color meet

Amanda Clark owns of Siiviis Gallery in Duluth. She’s shining a light on an exhibition opening at Lizzards Art Gallery on Friday. “Chromesthesia: The Sound of Color” features abstract works by 20 artists represented by Lizzards. There’s an opening artist reception 4-7 p.m. Friday, and the show will be up through late June.

Amanda is looking forward to seeing the sheer variety of work in this show, as artists convey on canvas the sounds they hear.

Amanda says: They hand-selected artists that are very different from one one another, and it kind of pushes their boundaries of what they normally might do in their artistic endeavors or their artistic style.

And so I think this show is kind of pushing that thread of, how can I still keep my same artistic values and artistic techniques, but then create something that's a little bit less conceptual.

— Amanda Clark

Flamenco at a turning point

Jessica Fiala is a company member of Ragamala Dance Company, and she teaches tap classes at Ballare Teatro. She’s looking forward to seeing Zorongo Flamenco Dance Theatre’s show “Amanecer” April 24–26 at the Luminary Arts Center in Minneapolis.

Jessica says: Zorango Flamenco was founded in 1982 by Susanna De Palma, so over more than 40 years now, she's been carving out a place for Zorongo as this anchor arts organization in the Twin Cities that also fosters an international artistic dialogue.

But for this production, she's handing over the creative reins to longtime company member Deborah Elias. And so I'm particularly excited about this production because it marks a turning point in the company's history.

“Amanecer” means “Dawn,” so it's both celebrating everything that has brought them to this point, with Susanna continuing as a mentor and advisor for the production, but it's also marking the dawn of a new chapter for Zorongo.

— Jessica Fiala

It was ten years ago that Gaelynn Lea rose to fame by winning the NPR Music Tiny Desk contest. Her memory of getting the call is the first chapter of her new book “It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect.” Lea was born with the rare genetic disease Osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bones disease. Her memoir traces her upbringing in Duluth and how she’s navigated her disability in all different facets of life.

Lea spoke to MPR News host Kelly Gordon about her memoir.

The following was edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

What was the moment where you decided you needed to tell your full story?

After a show, one of the people in the audience came up and was like, “I really think you should write a memoir.” And that just planted the seed. And then the more I thought about it, you know, I do a lot of public speaking about disability in addition to doing concerts. And I'm always surprised by how much people say they learn, because I just don't think we learn enough about disability in traditional schools.

What can people with and without disabilities takeaway from this book?

I hope that people with disabilities will see parts of their own story in the book. Pretty much everything that I decided to keep in the final draft are things that I think you will have experienced yourself if you’re disabled, on some level, maybe a different version of the same idea, because they're pretty universal concepts.

If you’re not disabled, my goal is twofold. First, I want people to realize that having a disability does not mean that your life is automatically going to be not fulfilling or not satisfying or creative, but that it does require support of the community, of the government, of health care — like it does require those things, because it's such a big barrier if you don't have support in if in this society.

My goal is, once you’re done reading it, you have a better understanding of people with disabilities are just regular people who do really need that support. And what can you do to be a part of the solution and move it forward. I really hope that it inspires people to think about their own lives in the way that maybe they can help move things forward.

The title alludes to the concept of perfectionism. And talk about your introduction to fiddle music that allowed you to let go of the perfectionism you internalized playing classical orchestral music. Do you have to actively work to keep that joy and not let perfection get in the way?

I must say, I think it's a continual struggle. I think of playing music is sort of like a form of meditation. You never just get to say, “oh, I've mastered that, and I never have to think about it again.”

And so for me, music on a good day, music is something that it connects you to this higher energy. I think it feels like a divine energy personally. And so when you get caught up in the perfection mind set, that is sort of like you getting too self focused. And so I really try to zoom out when I see myself doing that. Music is just so much bigger than I think we give it credit for.

How did the creative process of writing a book differ or stay the same, from writing music or playing music?

Well, I must say, it took a lot of discipline, more than I was used to. And so it was a pretty intense journey. It's always super hard to sit down and write. I don't know what that is. I'd rather like pay my taxes. But then once I was doing it, I did start to feel a lot of the same creative buzz that I feel when I write music or when I perform.

The ending of the book came to me really suddenly, as like a download kind of thing, and that's exactly how songwriting feels. So it was really interesting to see that writing a book did have these moments that paralleled songwriting.

Dozens of Tuskegee Airmen went missing in action during World War II. Most of them have not been found. Who were these men and what happened to them? In her book, “Forgotten Souls,” NPR investigative correspondent Cheryl W. Thompson tells their stories.

This episode was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy and edited by Justine Yan. The original interview was produced by Ryan Benk and Ed McNulty. Mastering by Jimmy Keeley.

We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at TheSundayStory@npr.org.

Listen to Up First on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Agatha Smithson is that rare person who lacks the gene for self-doubt. Brash and brutally dismissive of anyone who disagrees with her, Agatha is the main character and unreliable narrator of Nancy Foley's deviously plotted debut novel, “I Am Agatha.”

If you're one of those readers who prizes likeability above all else in your fictional characters, you may be inclined to give “I Am Agatha” a pass. But that would be a mistake. This is a strange, fresh story about artistic ambition and personal autonomy willingly abridged for love. And, all too unusually, the love affair here is between two women in their 60s.

Agatha's character is inspired by the real-life minimalist painter Agnes Martin, known for her canvases covered in graphs and stripes. Martin lived for years in New Mexico near Georgia O'Keeffe.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Martin was a solitary person, although she had significant relationships with women. Foley, who grew up in New Mexico, says that her novel was inspired by rumors of such a relationship between a friend of her grandmother's and Martin.

“I Am Agatha” takes place mostly in the 1970s, with flashbacks to Agatha's rough youth in Canada and allusions to a hard time in New York, including a stint at Bellevue. New Mexico offers Agatha a new start and an austere landscape that jibes with her art and own personality. Here's Agatha, in her typical brusque, pared-down manner of speaking, describing the view from the adobe house she built herself high upon a mesa:

My house looks west out over a canyon that although far from any ocean whatsoever yet resembles one in scope and light. This ocean canyon heaves waves of shale and basalt, quartz and silt. Cloud shadows flit across its rock floor like ghost boats.

There is no other place on Earth like Mesa Portales. I have traveled to many places, so mine is not an uninformed opinion. The truth is that there is a hierarchy. Some places are objectively better, just as some people are objectively better than others.

The "objectively better" person Agatha wants to bring to live with her on Mesa Portales is her longtime secret love, a woman named Alice who's now declining into dementia. But, there are two obstacles to Agatha's caretaking plan: The first is Alice's adult son, Frank Jr., who plans to move his mother into a care facility in Taos.

At one point, Agatha and Frank argue over this plan and Frank Jr. drops some bombshell news. Agatha tells us: "I'm startled but won't let him take my own breath away from me and puff himself up with it." It's hard not to root for a character who knows how to sling words around like that.

The other obstacle seems more immovable: It's Alice's daughter, Lorna, who's buried in the backyard of Alice's house. Years ago, Lorna was murdered by her abusive husband, and Alice likes to sit every day by her daughter's grave, which is planted with violets and lilacs.

I'm not giving much away when I point out that Agatha's practical, if grotesque, solution to this dilemma is revealed in the cover art of “I Am Agatha;” metaphorically, that book jacket hits readers over the head with a shovel.

This novel becomes even more deliciously weird as a pattern emerges: That is, whenever Agatha talks with Frank Jr. or other characters about Alice's welfare, Alice is never present. She's always taking a walk or a nap or just unavailable.

It becomes impossible to ignore that Agatha is estranged from a lot of people. She makes brief enigmatic references to a falling out with O'Keefe, and an academic colleague, and a parasitic graduate student who's writing her thesis on Agatha's art. As a narrator, Agatha turns out to be no more forthcoming to us readers than she's been to any of these characters — former friends she now regards as antagonists.

In its ingeniously duplicitous narrative structure, “I Am Agatha” is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith's magnificent Ripley novels. Not that Agatha is an amoral con artist like Tom Ripley, but she will do anything to safeguard Alice, her fading love. "We are all of us hunted animals from the moment we are born," says Agatha, contemplating old age and death. None of us will outrun Mortality, but watching brilliant and wily Agatha try is captivating.

Copyright 2026, NPR, Fresh Air

Fifty years ago this month, 1,500 people flooded a new art gallery in downtown Minneapolis. It was 1976, and the air was filled with cigarette smoke and chatter from the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. People who were in attendance say the atmosphere was buzzing, because something was different about this space: Every piece of artwork on display was made by a woman.

“It was so many people that they had to take turns coming in and out of the space,” artist Patricia Olson recalls. “It spilled out into the alleyway and out into the street.”

This was the opening of the WARM: A Women’s Collective Art Space, a feminist gallery, in the Wyman Building.

“Everybody at the next gallery meeting just kind of sat back and said, ‘What the heck was that?’” Olson says. “It was overwhelming, and we felt that we had arrived.”

A WARM front

WARM stands for the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, a feminist art collective that artists Susan Fiene and Lynne Lockie had launched three years earlier.

On April 10, an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the gallery opened at the Kickernick Gallery, which is just across the alley from where the original WARM gallery once stood. “LEGACY: The Women of WARM Gallery” features the work of 73 of WARM’s original 90 members, from tiny sculpture to massive paintings and a virtual reality experience.

“During the winter of 1973-74, we created a phone tree to locate other women artists,” Fiene recalls in the exhibition catalog. “WARM needed structure for the gallery project. We hammered out the constitution on my dining room table.”

Members created WARM as a platform for women artists when galleries and museums were barely showing work by women at all. They created a mission statement: “To establish women's artistic and cultural experience as a valuable and integral part of society.”

WARM would go on to become one of the most prominent women’s art collectives in the country, drawing the attention of the groundbreaking feminist artists Judy Chicago, Betye Saar, Alice Neel and Miriam Schapiro, the latter of whom attended the 1976 gallery opening and reported that “it is the most elegant of the five such collective art galleries in the United States and that it is very professional.”

The “Legacy” exhibition has provided an experience for the members of WARM, as well as the hundreds of students and artists they mentored, to reflect.

“It never occurred to me when I was a young woman, making things at my dining room table and then in my basement, while I was raising three little kids, that I could actually become an artist,” says artist Harriet Bart. “Through WARM, I learned it was possible through cooperation and hard work.”

Mona Lisa and other stories

Bart and Hazel Belvo are old friends as well as artists whose work has been collected by leading art institutions, from the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

They sit next to each other, with a stack of old photos and other WARM ephemera, in Belvo's airy home studio up on a hillside in Golden Valley. Bart opens a pamphlet with the “Mona Lisa” on its cover and reads.

“‘If the ‘Mona Lisa’ had been painted by a woman, the world would probably never have seen it,’ which I think is really true,” Bart said. “So, if you believe a creative talent must not be wasted just because it belongs to a woman, help make sure it doesn't happen. Become a member of the most controversial art gallery in the Twin Cities.”

Bart and Belvo remember how, in the 1970s, even local galleries and museums were not representing women. Bart ticks off data from exhibitions at the Walker Art Center: “These are solo shows: 1979 — five men, two women. 1980 — seven men, one woman. 1981— six men, one woman,” Bart says. “Then the group shows: in 1979 there were 75 men, 15 women; 1980, 67 men and 12 women; and in 1981, 171 men and 68 women.”

“Numbers speak,” Belvo says.

WARM, Belvo and Bart say, wanted to change those numbers. They point to the Walker Art Center exhibitions of late: In the past year, there have many blockbuster solo art exhibitions by women, including Dyani White Hawk’s “Love Language” and Christine Sun Kim’s “All Day All Night”

“This is a really important movement, a very important time in the history of women and art, and in particular in our area,” Bart says. “Those of us who know the story are fading away.”

‘Most unnatural and most fabulous’: Warming to the art of consensus

A few days later, and a few days before the exhibition opening, Bart joined other WARM members Patricia Olson and Vesna Kittelson at the Kickernick Gallery, surrounded by the artwork of the feminist collective: Quimetta Perle’s textile featuring Georgia politician Stacey Abrams; Marty Nash’s bold, abstract acrylic painting; Joyce Lyon’s pond surface in oil stick; and Vicki Lee Johnston’s mysterious nestlike sculpture made of steel and sheep hair.

They reminisce about the exhibitions, the grant writing and gallery sitting that was part of a member’s duties, and the visiting guest speakers of the feminist celebrity kind — such as art historian Linda Nochlin, who had penned the seminal feminist essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” just two years before WARM formed.

Members also created the triennial publication, the WARM Journal, which featured the work of local poets and writers.

“One of the problems back in the mid-70s was that women's work was not being written about. When it was written about, it was not written about in any sort of way that made sense from our point of view as artists,” Olson says.

“If you don't understand a woman's life, you don't understand the work that women are making,” Bart adds.

There were also monthly member meetings, which many say became foundational to their future careers.

“Those Saturday meetings were endless, and we sat in our directors chairs in the circle, and we worked on any given topic or subject that needed to be dealt with to reach consensus,” Bart says. “I learned a lot about trust and listening: Instead of just listening to my own voice, listening to the other voices and how we could do things together that we couldn’t do alone.”

“We did not want to have a hierarchical organization,” Olson adds. “There were absolutely no guidelines for putting together an organization like this. We were feeling it out, which was both exciting and wonderful, and it was consternating at the same time.”

Kittelson had recently arrived in the U.S. from what was then communist Yugoslavia when she joined WARM. She says these meetings were eye-opening.

“The process was fascinating, unknown to me, and the first signs of my comprehension of democracy,” Kittelson says. “It was natural here, but to me, it was most unnatural and most fabulous.”

‘Where would I be without them?’

For the next 15 years, the gallery was run collectively by its 90 members. It closed in 1991. Members point to a few causes: The rent increase at the Wyman Building and the progress WARM had made. Many members went on to exhibit their work across the country and teach at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the University of Minnesota, St. Catherine University and more.

“Many of these people stayed in touch,” Olson says. “They became colleagues in other projects. They formed deep friendships and deep aesthetic connections with each other.”

Even with the gallery closure, WARM continued to mount exhibitions and ran a mentorship program through 2018. That same year, archivist and artist Heather Carroll, a mentee of WARM, curated an exhibition at St. Catherine University, “Roots and Fruits: Exploring the History and Impact of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota.”

“I am definitely a fruit of WARM. Where would I be without them? They've been my teachers, my mentors, my friends,” Carroll says. She has also been compiling an ongoing WARM oral history project for the Minnesota Historical Society, which she will present May 28 at the Kickernick.

“I'm looking back to look forward. What can we learn from the women of WARM and the way they did things and bring it into the now so that we can do better?” Carroll says.

Some WARM members have died since the gallery closed in 1991, while others left Minnesota long ago. Many, however, continue their art practices — like Bart, who recently moved into an art studio in the Kickernick building. Much of the art in the “Legacy” exhibition was made by WARM artists in the past few years.

A 50-year crescendo

On April 12, dozens of WARM members came from across the state and country to attend an opening reception at the Kickernick, which also had a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.

“I'm feeling exhilarated,” Patricia Olson says. “It probably rivals the 1,500 that showed up at the original opening 50 years ago.”

“It's like a crescendo, a 50-year crescendo,” Belvo says.

Member Quimetta Perle traveled to Minneapolis from the East Coast, where she’s still making art.

“I've gotten to see a lot of my friends and colleagues from 50 years ago,” Perle says. For Perle, WARM was “a gallery in which I could show absolutely anything I wanted without any censorship whatsoever, and that was so important and so thrilling.”

Member Dani Roach recalls how difficult it was to balance a career working in libraries and her artistic pursuits when she became a member in the 1980s.

“A number of the other artists had full-time jobs too, and you saw that it could work, that you could squeeze some time to make your work, to sit at the gallery, to go to meetings,” Roach says. “I look back on those years — I have no idea how I did it, and I'm so glad I did it.”

‘We could do this too’

Painter Nicole Drilling studies a frame covered in glass doorknobs with the text “Easy” within, a piece by WARM member Susan Bacik.

“Look at all these people here. They touched so many lives and made so many things possible through the power of coming together and deciding their own fate,” says Drilling, tears in her eyes. “This is very inspiring.”

Drilling was an MCAD student and a mentee of MCAD professors Patricia Olson and Elizabeth Erickson, who passed away in 2024. Drilling doesn’t see this kind of support system for women artists today.

“These women were like, ‘We're not getting shown anywhere. The only way we do it is if we do it ourselves, and we do it together,’” Drilling says. “These times absolutely call for that. The show is very timely for taking a moment to recognize that we could do this too.”

Author and MPR host and newscaster Emily Bright’s newest collection of poems took 20 years to make. It paints pictures of spring and asks the question: What seeds are we planting for the future?

The most recent poem in the collection was written as a response to the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis. Bright said although this collection ranges over the course of many years, a thread emerged.

“It goes from New England where I grew up, there's some poems set in Ghana, where I lived briefly, and a lot in the Midwest,” she said. “And a lot of these poems were about connections across divides, with other people, our connections with the environment.”

Bright said she hopes others will share her poems.

“There's no greater compliment,” she said. “If it makes you stop and look at the world around you and appreciate it, I can't ask for better than that.”

The book is out Tuesday. Cover art is by Minnesota artist Evan Abrahamson and published by Duluth-based Holy Cow! Press. Bright will be doing multiple readings of her book throughout the state. You can find those times here.

The first reading is at Next Chapter Books in St. Paul at 6 p.m on April 14.

Listen to the conversation and hear some of Bright’s poetry by clicking the player above.

One of the most iconic scenes in 20th-century American cinema unfolds in the movie “Fargo,” where a villain loads a human foot into a wood chipper as a pregnant cop arrives to arrest him.

Actor Peter Stormare played the villain, Gaear Grimsrud, and will be on hand Tuesday night for the film's 30th anniversary screening at the Fargo Theater.

“I can't wait, and I've never seen the movie,” he said. “So now I can see the movie and see what made it so good.”

That’s right: Stormare has seen clips from the movie but never seen “Fargo” all the way through.

“That's a good thing about human beings. We don't like to look at ourselves, and we don't like to listen to ourselves on tape,” he said.

Stormare and the Coen brothers

Stormare landed the role of Gaear Grimsrud after acting at The Public Theater in New York City alongside Frances McDormand, he said. McDormand is married to Joel Coen, who directed “Fargo” with his brother, Ethan.

Stormare said the brothers wanted to cast him as Grimsrud after seeing his performance in New York.

“They asked me, also, ‘Can you get a beard?’ [Grimsrud] had a beard that was also blonde. So they dyed my hair and my beard blonde, platinum blonde. And I met them in Soho, and they started laughing and said, ‘You look like Kenny Rogers on methamphetamine.’”

Stormare complained that his look was causing too many people to stop and stare at him, and he asked to ditch either the beard or the hairstyle.

“And they said, ‘No, you're right. Just have the hair.’”

Grimsrud is a violent man whose presence is menacing, as he is a man of few words.

“That was what made him special, because he didn't speak much,” Stormare said. “But when he spoke, he sort of spoke in his own language.”

To perform Grimsrud, Stormare said he channeled Clint Eastwood’s performances from movies like “Dirty Harry” and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

“His daring approach to acting, no one had done before. He was a groundbreaking trendsetter, for me, who knew that silence speaks louder than words,” Stormare said.

Stormare’s character may have been mostly silent, but the rest of the cast had lots to say in the film — and their accents scream Minnesotan.

Minnesota accents and other stereotypes

Ethan and Joel Coen grew up in the Twin Cities, and the accents and speech patterns of their characters had to match their vision.

The end result was exaggerated accents, with characters frequently exclaiming “Oh geez,” “You betcha” and “Oh ya” along with other stereotypical Minnesota-isms.

To nail down the accent, the Coen brothers reached out to a friend of theirs who was a reporter in Minnesota, according to Todd Melby, author of “A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere,” a book about the making of “Fargo.”

Melby also works as an editor for MPR News.

“Joel and Ethan said to him, ‘Our next project takes place in Minnesota. So we want to find someone who's got that accent. Do you think you could do interviews with people, and that way, we would have several people to choose from who are real Minnesotans, who sound like they're from Minnesota?’” said Melby.

Melby said the Coen brothers also played up the weather. Characters wade through deep snow, and the sun rarely appears.

“It wasn't just that people were insulted because of the accent; their weather was also insulted. Like, it made the weather look really, really bad,” Melby said.

He adds that the Minnesota stereotypes in “Fargo” rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. But the film had an undeniable impact on the state.

“‘Fargo’ put Minnesota on the map nationally. Before that, Minnesota culture — the snow, the accents — had never been portrayed on the big screen,” he said.

Now, 30 years later, the region has embraced the film. The Fargo Theatre has a wooden statue of Marge Gunderson, and tourists can check out the famous wood chipper featured at the end of the film. The Fargo-Moorhead visitors center has both the original and a replica, which tourists take advantage of for photo ops.

“Some people put their babies in the chipper as a joke. Other people, if they have a tiny little dog, will put their tiny little dog in the chipper. They also have a fake leg you can put in,” Melby said.

Tuesday night, though, the hottest place in town will be inside the Fargo Theatre.

Emily Beck, the theater’s executive director, said the venue had to close during the pandemic. Attendance hasn’t gotten to what it used to be. She hopes that this showing of the movie will help rebuild interest in the theater, which is celebrating its own 100th anniversary.

“I hope that this brings some people in, maybe for their first cinematic experience, but primarily people who haven't been to a movie theater for a while,” Beck said. “And I hope they sit down, have a fantastic time and they're reminded of how precious and unique that experience is.”

The movie begins at 7 p.m. with a Q&A session with Stormare shortly after. It’ll be the first in the Fargo Theatre’s new centennial film series, which will screen a film from each decade since the theatre opened.

A new film featured at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival is celebrating Indigenous dance.

Meskwaki filmmaker Oogie Push is also making her feature directorial debut at the 45th Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival with “Why We Dance” — a documentary rooted in the Twin Cities that pushes back against the way Indigenous stories have long been told on screen.

"It's a love letter to each character," Push said. "It's a love letter to the land. It's a love letter to our dancing. It's a love letter to our ancestors."

“Why We Dance” had its world premiere at MSPIFF on Sunday night. It will screen again on April 18. A panel with Indigenous filmmakers from Minnesota whose work is also featured in the festival will follow.

“Why We Dance” follows Indigenous people from across the United States, Hawaii and Mexico who share a deep connection to their culture through dance. The film opens on the wind-swept prairie of the Rosebud Reservation, following fancy dancer Canku OneStar across his homelands.

The film also visits O'ahu and Honolulu, where Pualeilani Paia Kamahoahoa and Paisley Paiea Kamahoahoa of the Kingdom of Hawai'i speak candidly about the challenge of practicing their cultural traditions authentically — beyond the cultural tourism that shapes how visitors to the islands experience Indigenous life.

The film also follows Mary Anne and Sergio Quiroz of Indigenous Roots Cultural Center in St. Paul and their travels to Mataxhi, Mexico. The film introduces Loa Miles Simoes, a Meskwaki tribal member adopted into a non-Native family and raised in Hawai'i, whose journey back to her homeland is central to the film's emotional arc.

Deep roots

The stories each have deep roots.

One has to do with how the Meskwaki people purchased their land back in Iowa. In 1923, the U.S. Department of the Interior sent a letter to more than 500 Native American tribes demanding an end to traditional religion, cultural celebrations and social gatherings, including social dances like pow wows.

The threat was not abstract — tribes faced the potential withholding of medical services and trade opportunities, and even the seizure of more land. Many were forced to speak their native languages and practice their ceremonies in secret.

The Meskwaki resisted. What had already been celebrated as a traditional harvest gathering — a multi-week celebration of corn, horse races, games and dance — had by the 1920s evolved into something with broader reach, drawing visitors from across the region as pow wow culture spread across the United States and Canada. When the tribal pow wow committee recognized the onlookers gathering to watch the celebration, they began charging admission.

"That's how we bought our land back," Push said.

The film began as something far more modest.

Push's cousin, Jarod Pushetonequa, approached Push about shooting footage of pow wow dancers for his performance company. Push connected him with Ryan Stopera, a Minneapolis-based filmmaker, and the team began shooting around the Twin Cities: at Minnehaha Falls, Crosby Lake Farm and eventually Dreamland, a black box theater that became the project's first real home.

Push first came on the project as an interviewer. When the original director stepped away, Stopera — acting as the film’s producer and director of photography — asked if she wanted to step in. What followed was a close creative partnership — with editor Ryan McGuire also central to the process — that Stopera says was defined less by disagreement than by the effort to keep Push's own voice where it belonged.

"The only pushback with Oogie and I was her humility in not wanting to center herself, and I encouraged her strongly to do so," Stopera said, "because her story and her voice is so powerful."

The thread of dance

Push herself appears as a character, tracing the history of the Meskwaki Settlement and the pivotal role the pow wow played in buying it back. Over 76 minutes, a supporting cast of dancers, family members and community organizers add texture and depth. Each one is a thread in a larger tapestry about why dance matters culturally and politically.

"I really believe that if you are with the right people, magic happens," Push said. "You just create this synergy and create something beautiful."

The film draws on deeply personal territory for Push. Her uncles are interviewed in it, and her grandfather created the Eagle Dance that appears on screen. Push is also developing a separate collection of Meskwaki cultural documentaries, including a full-length film on the history of the pow wow.

Stopera says learning that history of how the Meskwaki purchased their land back has been one of the most galvanizing parts of the project for him.

"The joyful resilience and defiance of the no dancing letter, the economic ingenuity of the tribe just down the line is really inspiring and motivating," said Stopera.

"We just kept following the relationships and the stories that all connected together," said Stopera.

Both Push and Stopera were deliberate about the film's emotional register.

"A lot of fellow doc filmmakers and I are critiquing how much trauma is used to gain attention in the field," Stopera said. "We know that there's so much more depth to the stories, specifically of BIPOC communities, that need not center trauma."

Push agreed, saying that the film focuses more on cultural resilience.

"It's more about our joy and our love for dancing and how it makes us feel and how it connects us to everything. I just love that people will be able to see our people, our homelands, our joy, and see that no matter where we come from, we're all the same."

Push said she hopes audiences carry something with them when they leave the theater.

"I hope that ‘Why We Dance’ adds a blessing to the audience's life, to their day, that they carry it with them when they leave the theater and they're reminded of their own connection to this land, regardless of where they came from, and connection to their ancestors and how we're all interconnected."

Still Showing: Indigenous & Aboriginal Films at MSPIFF 45

• Why We Dance — Sat 4/18, 4:15 p.m., The Main 1

• The Condor Daughter — Tue 4/14, 2:00pm, The Main 5, Fri 4/17, 9:30 p.m., The Main 5

• Mārama — Tue 4/14, 9:50 p.m., The Main 1

• The Boom (short) — Tue 4/14, 7:05 p.m., The Main 1 & Sat 4/18, 4:15 p.m., Film North

• Aki — Wed 4/15, 2:30 p.m., The Main 2

• Comparsa — Fri 4/17, 2:15pm, The Main 2 & Sun 4/19, 11:20 a.m., The Main 2

• Source to Sea: A Winter Migration — Sat 4/18, 7:00 p.m., The Main 2 & Sun 4/19, 12:00pm, Edina

• Medicine Ball — Sat 4/18, 2:00 p.m., The Main 2

• Legend of Fry-Roti: Rise of the Dough (short) — Sun 4/19, 1:55 p.m., The Main 2

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announced its 2026 class of inductees on Monday night, a list of eight performers that includes an R&B legend, a heavy metal band and a drummer-turned-frontman whose music dominated mainstream pop-rock in the 1980s.

In recent years, the Rock Hall has expanded its definition of rock icons to include artists from a wider range of genres and backgrounds. The basic rules for induction have remained the same, though:

Artists become eligible for nomination 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording (in other words, artists whose debuts came out in 2001 are newly eligible this year). There are four different categories of inductees:

• Performers whose music and cultural impact has changed the course of rock and roll.

• Influential musicians whose innovative styles have propelled cultural change, which this year includes key innovative voices in African and Latin music.

• A "musical excellence" award designated for writers, producers and session musicians who have played a key role in rock history.

• The Ahmet Ertegun award, honoring industry professionals who are not performers but have made a significant impact on the business of music.

The official induction ceremony will take place on Nov. 14 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. It will be streamed on ABC and Disney+ in December.

Performer Category

Phil Collins
Even though he was inducted into the Rock Hall as a member of Genesis in 2010, it was Collins' solo career, especially a string of hits in the 1980s, that helped turn him into one of the most commercially successful artists of that decade. The drummer-turned-singer is widely known for popularizing the "gated snare" recording technique — which cut off the lingering reverb from the drums — and resulted in an explosive sound that became a signature sound of the era. Collins' career spans over five decades and has earned him a long list of accolades, including an Academy Award for best original song in 2000 for "You'll Be In My Heart" from Disney's Tarzan.

Billy Idol
The British rocker Billy Idol enters the Rock Hall on his second nomination. Known for hits like "Dancing with Myself," "Rebel Yell" and "White Wedding," the bleach-blonde singer's punk rock attitude continues to reach fans around the world more than four decades since the release of his debut solo album.

Iron Maiden
Heavy metal fans rejoice! Iron Maiden is finally being inducted into the Rock Hall on its third nomination. Since the 1980s, the band has been redefining heavy rock with anthemic storytelling, full-throttle instrumentation and spooky iconography. Different iterations of the band's mascot, Eddie, have appeared on Iron Maiden's album covers and merch for decades, becoming a key fixture of a particular strain of teen rebellion.

Joy Division/New Order
After three nominations, Joy Division and New Order are entering the Rock Hall under a joint induction, recognizing the link between the groups. Both bands featured guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris, who were forced to reimagine their sound after the death of singer and songwriter Ian Curtis in 1980. Joy Division's moody post-punk sound, which featured the baritone vocals of Curtis, gave way to New Order's more electronic, dance-driven rhythms, which proved massively popular in the 1980s.

Oasis
Today is gonna be the day that Oasis gets into the Rock Hall. (Well, November 14 will be the actual day.) The Britpop group, led by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, has had a resurgence since their highly-anticipated reunion tour last year (which briefly broke Ticketmaster and had fans on both sides of the Atlantic crying their hearts out).

Sade
The English band named for lead vocalist Sade Adu changed the sonic landscape of the 1980s and '90s with its blend of jazz, soul and R&B. The velvety, intimate quality of Sade's music echoes across generations of artists, from Drake to Adele, and has now earned the group Rock Hall inductee status.

Luther Vandross
After starting his career as a background vocalist for stars including David Bowie, Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder and many more, Luther Vandross became an R&B and soul legend under his own name, thanks to the sheer power of his voice beginning in the 1980s. (He was also a producer for A-listers like Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross.) With over a dozen studio albums, his influence has reached across generations to stars including Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and most recently, Kendrick Lamar, who named one of the biggest hits of 2025 after him. Vandross will be inducted after his first Rock Hall nomination.

Wu-Tang Clan
You can see the Rock Hall's effort to expand the definition of rock icons in past years particularly strongly when it comes to the hip-hop acts it inducts. At least one act from the genre — including the Notorious B.I.G., Missy Elliott, A Tribe Called Quest and Jay-Z — each year since 2020. Considering Wu-Tang Clan's collective and individual output, which spans more than 30 years and expanded the East Coast's mark on the genre with references to vintage kung-fu movies and dark humor, it's no wonder the Rock Hall is finally giving the Staten Island crew its long-deserved flowers.

Early Influence Award

Celia Cruz
The Cuban singer, widely known as The Queen of Salsa, becomes the first primarily Spanish-language artist to be inducted into the Rock Hall. After rising through the ranks of Havana's music scene in the 1950s, Cruz left her home country in exile and eventually landed in New York City, where she became one of the most prominent voices of the legendary salsa label, Fania Records.

Fela Kuti
At the end of the 1960s and into the '70s, the Nigerian singer and political activist helped create the Afrobeat genre by combining West African highlife with elements of jazz and funk. Known for his electrifying, unconventional live performances, the multi-instrumentalist is the Rock Hall's first African pop star.

Queen Latifah
Queen Latifah was only 19 years old when she released her debut album, All Hail the Queen, in 1989. Female empowerment has been at the forefront of her music and image since the beginning of her career. With songs like "Ladies First" and "U.N.I.T.Y.," Queen Latifah changed the landscape of male-dominated rap; alongside her music career, she has found arguably greater success as an actor.

MC Lyte
Another teenage pioneer in the world of hip-hop, the Brooklyn-raised rapper gained popularity with socially-conscious lyricism that tackled issues including street violence and drug addiction.

Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons played with The Byrds and helped spearhead the band's seminal country rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which came out in 1968 — but he was technically considered a "sideman" and not a full member of the band. That's why Parsons was not inducted alongside his bandmates when The Byrds entered the Rock Hall in 1991. Now, the Americana visionary — who recorded a pair of celebrated and influential solo albums that featured duets with Emmylou Harris and also played with the Flying Burrito Brothers and the International Submarine Band — gets his due for melding folk, Southern twang and rock and roll before his death at the age of 26, in 1973.

Musical Excellence Award

Linda Creed
In the 1970s, Linda Creed wrote and produced love songs that would come to define the sound of Philadelphia soul, including the Stylistics' hits "Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)" and "You Are Everything," both of which were later covered by Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye. After being diagnosed with cancer at age 26, Creed wrote the song "The Greatest Love of All." Whitney Houston's rendition of the song would go on to top Billboard's Hot 100 chart shortly after Creed's death in 1986.

Arif Mardin
Arif Mardin's producer credits span more than four decades and dozens of legendary collaborations, including with Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, John Prine and Norah Jones. Born in Turkey, Mardin started working at Atlantic Records in the early 1960s and eventually became an executive and one of the label's most reliable hitmakers.

Jimmy Miller
Jimmy Miller signed a recording contract as a singer before finding his true calling behind the console, particularly for his work with the Rolling Stones across five albums: Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St. and Goats Head Soup. Known for encouraging and harnessing a group's raw, live energy in recording sessions, the producer left an indelible mark on the sound of rock and roll in the 1960s and '70s.

Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin co-founded Def Jam Recordings while studying film and television at New York University. He went on to turn the label into a powerhouse of 1980s and '90s hip-hop, producing and releasing albums by acts including LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and Public Enemy. He later founded the label American Recordings and served as co-president of Columbia Records. Since the founding of American Recordings, and particularly in his work with Johnny Cash, Rubin has become known for his skill in musical subtraction — paring down a recording to its essential elements.

Ahmet Ertegun Award

Ed Sullivan
He began his career as a sports journalist, but in 1948, Sullivan became the host of a television program — originally called Toast of the Town and later renamed The Ed Sullivan Show — that was welcomed into millions of people's living rooms every week. Sullivan's show widely introduced Americans to countless musicians, including Elvis Presley, The Jackson 5, The Supremes and, maybe most famously, The Beatles, whose first appearance on his show, in February 1964, was, at the time, one of the most-watched programs in history.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Musician Melvin Gibbs has built a career over decades nimbly crossing genres. As a young man, he considered becoming a DJ but picked up the bass instead.

“I like the physicality of the instrument,” he said. “The fact that it moves in you and makes you move.”

He broke onto the scene in 1980s Brooklyn, N.Y., as a member of the band Defunkt. He played experimental rock with Rollins Band in the 1990s. And for decades, he’s toured with his jazz trio, Harriet Tubman.

That’s just a sample of the dozens of projects Gibbs has been involved in over the years. These days, he splits his time between Minneapolis and Brooklyn.

And he has a new book out April 14, “How Black Music Took Over the World” — part memoir, part history, part scientific look at how rhythmic building blocks developed within the African diaspora have spread across the world.

“The melodic information that people are interested in changes over time, but the rhythmic information has not changed since the beginning,” Gibbs said.

He spoke with MPR News host Clay Masters about the book.

Press play above to listen to their conversation, or read a transcript below, edited for time and clarity.

You wrote early on… if you use the definition of Black that’s traditionally been used in the United States, a standard that's based on the idea that ‘one drop of Black blood makes you Black,’ you'd have to say that the majority of music popular on our planet today is Black music.

All the music that we hear is rooted in the music that Black Americans make, from the simplest thing to the rhythms you hear on the radio, like if you listen in ‘K-Pop Demon Hunters’…. the rhythm came from Black Americans.

What we think of as American music, at the root, what makes it unique … is the fact that, you know, Africans in America had to come up with a new way of making music.

Can you talk a little bit about what you get into in this book?

I mean, it's kind of my life story, which has a purpose of framing the other two buckets, which is this thing that I call the geometry of rhythm, the very particular rhythms that Black Americans developed. And the other bucket is Black music and Black culture, and culture in general as an evolutionary process, and how that evolution forms us as people and forms the things that we do.

So you, at one point, are writing about when you were a young man and looking through different records in a collection. And you said that the music was, ‘like nothing I had heard before, but also like everything I had heard before.’

I guess I was 14, 15, and I hadn't really had any serious exposure to traditional African music. You know, you have African dance class music, but it's not the deep traditional stuff.

So my mentor played some music for me, and the rhythms were just kind of like James Brown, but not because everything kind of leaned differently, but I can definitely hear that what was in it that related to what I the music that I liked at that time.

Some readers might expect a straightforward history of music, but that's not what this book is, right? You get a mix of memoir, history and even math, as you alluded to, musical notations you use to describe rhythm.

Well, the notation system that I'm using is what I call clock notation, which is a different notation system than is used in the West.

I thought about the fact in the old days, when you go in the studio, people used to say that drummers are like a clock. And then from there, I was kind of like, maybe I can write the rhythm in a circular way, as opposed to in a flat way.

And it's the thing that's interesting about that is like, even if you don't understand music notation, you can see that there's a structure to what's going on that you can't really see if you look at it through Western notation.

In 2017, a gaunt, bespectacled, 71-year-old woman wearing a crisp white uniform with two stars on the shoulder was arrested in New Mexico.

This was Deborah Green, nee Lila Carter, the leader and self-described general of the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps (ACMTC) — a cult that had been operating with impunity for three decades, despite various attempts by former members to get law enforcement to shut it down.

"But Deborah looked so small, so frail — so old" when she was arrested, writes Harrison Hill in his new book, “The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult.” And yet this was the woman who with her rantings and ravings about God and hell had struck fear into the hearts of her followers.

Hill's book closely follows two characters — Maura Aluzas and Sarah Green — and their journeys into and out of ACMTC. It also explores the broader landscape of cults in the U.S. and how their logic and approach to religion have become less and less fringe over the years, to the point where ACMTC's messy doctrine seems, in a twisted way, to have been ahead of its time.

Maura Aluzas met Lila in the late 1960s, when Maura worked at a hospital and helped care for Lila's dying brother. The young women became close friends for a time; both women were seekers, each wishing to lead a meaningful, intentional life.

During the near-decade they were out of touch, both embraced Christianity, and they certainly weren't alone in their newfound fervor when, in 1980, Lila Carter — now married to Jim Green — reached out to Maura to share that she and her husband had found God; the 1970s had seen a resurgence of religious zeal.

When the Greens returned to California, the families spent time together and Maura's husband, Steve, was impressed with the Greens' vision of a spiritual army that would "take up arms against the forces of secularism and mainstream Christianity."

Maura wasn't entirely convinced, but she loved her husband and still held an old loyalty to the Lila she'd once known, even if this new, born-again version was harsher and stranger. And, so, when Steve wanted to move closer to Lila and Jim Green, Maura Aluzas agreed.

This began a series of incremental choices that wouldn't, at the time, have felt as extreme as they seem in hindsight. Maura and Steve became the first members of the Greens' church. They raised children in the harsh environment that Lila — who'd renamed herself Deborah — cultivated.

And because of her lingering doubts, or simply because she refused to beat her children as firmly as Deborah thought she should, Maura was punished. She was first ostracized then exiled. Although being banished was painful, for Maura, it eventually became a relief, a way to escape.

The twists and turns Hill follows throughout this true story are extraordinary, and the author does a wonderful job of contextualizing the painful, sometimes horrifying choices his subjects made — especially those involving women leaving their children, which, as he points out, would be perceived very differently if these women had been men.

How and why do people end up in cults? Why did Maura Aluzas join ACMTC if she was never fully on board? Well, Hill reminds readers, no one really "joins" a cult. "They join what they believe to be an alternative community, or an especially devoted religious group." Gradually, things change, but by then, the group has become a home, a kind of family.

Those born into or raised in a cult, of course, have no choice in the matter of joining. Sarah Green, Deborah and Jim's first child, grew up in ACMTC, moving with her parents and their followers as they sought to avoid legal consequences for their various actions. When she escaped in adulthood, she left behind three young children of her own — practically speaking, she couldn't run away with them.

She tried to go back to get them, but her mother allowed her to see them only briefly before effectively hiding them away. Part of Sarah still believed that she was very literally going to hell for leaving ACMTC; she rationalized that her children, at least, could still be granted entry to heaven.

Our culture is fascinated by cults, and there's an element of self-soothing to be found in consuming media about them. We would never join a cult, we tell ourselves. But it's generally believed now that what makes a person vulnerable to a cult isn't anything innate about them but rather a confluence of factors relating to their circumstances, their support networks, and the options open to them.

I was often reminded, while reading this book, of a now-iconic scene in the second season of “Fleabag,” when Phoebe Waller-Bridge's character, who is grieving the death of her friend — which she believes to have been her fault — confesses to the priest she's in love with that she wants someone to tell her what to do. She wants to be told "what to like, what to hate, what to rage about." Most of all, she wants someone to tell her what to believe in and how to live her life.

It's a relatable impulse, even for those who consider themselves fiercely independent. As Hill points out, the Greens were hippies, enthusiastic members of the counterculture before they became Christian extremists.

"Hippies placed a premium on freedom," he writes, "on the right to improvise their lives as they saw fit. And yet the 1960s and seventies also revealed the limits of freedom – how an endless array of options could be confusing, overwhelming, even debilitating. Sometimes it simply feels better being told what to do."

Indeed — and it is precisely when we're most confused and overwhelmed that we are most susceptible to losing sight of what we actually believe in and how we actually want to live. “The Oracle's Daughter” is a story about the terror of losing the self but it's also, gratifyingly, a story about finding the way back to it.

Ilana Masad is a fiction writer, critic, and founder/host of the podcast The Other Stories. Her latest novel is Beings.

Copyright 2026, NPR

April may well be "the cruelest month," as T.S. Eliot famously opined — and even a five-minute doomscroll makes it tough to deny that cruelty is riding at anything but record levels lately. But remember you do have an alternative to doomscrolling, one that's been around much longer: cracking open a book — or doomflipping, I suppose you could call it.

Don't get me wrong: The books expected this month don't exactly radiate escapist good vibes, riddled as they are with anxiety, corruption, unfulfilled desire — even the occasional direct challenge to our notions of reality itself.

But they do offer the opportunity to step into someone else's shoes and get to know their own particular view of our shared world — and sometimes that's consolation enough. Which is nice, because it may have to be this month.

‘Transcription,’ by Ben Lerner (4/7)

The jacket copy of Lerner's novella is basically a journalist's stress dream: Commissioned to write what may be the final profile of his mentor, an aging literary icon, Lerner's narrator fries his only recording device just minutes before the interview by dropping his phone in the sink.

What follows is a meditation on memory, art and fatherhood, expressed in a handful of conversations that we've got plenty of cause to find unreliable, given the circumstances. As in his previous novels, including “The Topeka School,” Lerner centers some version of himself in this strangely captivating blend of fiction, memoir and critical essay, shot through with humor and anxiety.

‘American Fantasy,’ by Emma Straub (4/7)

Speaking of premises that read like one of my nightmares: Straub's novel portrays the American Fantasy cruise ship and its themed voyage dedicated to an aging boyband and their loyal superfans — at this point, mostly middle-aged women addled with nostalgia and the looming terrors of menopause.

The book bounces between the perspectives of a reluctant attendee, a band member and the boat's hypercompetent event director, who really doesn't deserve this. It's infused with a blend of bemused humor and abiding sympathy familiar to readers of Straub's previous novels, “All Adults Here” and “This Time Tomorrow.”

‘London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth,’ by Patrick Radden Keefe (4/7)

In Keefe's previous book “Say Nothing,” the veteran reporter took hold of a single loose thread — a mother's decades-old disappearance — and pulled with such tenacity that the history of an entire tumultuous era raveled into view.

Here, Keefe applies a similar approach — only this time, instead of Northern Ireland's Troubles, the context of his latest book is modern London's obliging relationship with the international financial elite. But as before, there's an intimately human tragedy at the heart of Keefe's investigation: a young man's fatal plunge into the Thames and all the uncomfortable questions British authorities appear reluctant to pursue.

‘The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie,’ by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (4/7)

"You too can have your mind altered — no drugs necessary." This, from the book's introduction, offers something of a promise — which Prescod-Weinstein keeps with gusto, in this jaunty affront to just about everything our senses tell us about the world.

The University of New Hampshire physicist's follow-up to her lauded debut, “The Disordered Cosmos,” draws from just about every intellectual nook and cranny — from Bantu linguistics and Star Trek, to hip-hop and gender theory — to weave an idiosyncratic illustration of the universe as physicists understand it today.

It's an accessible take on a flabbergasting subject which, to put it mildly, offers a rather different view of reality than the one I remember learning in school.

‘My Dear You: Stories,’ by Rachel Khong (4/7)

This is Khong's third book of fiction and her first short story collection. In it, she shows off the kind of range suggested by her previous novel, the tripartite “Real Americans” published two years ago.

Here, in the new collection, heavy subjects such as race and grief coexist with conjured spirits and a psychic cat, extraterrestrials and a God who has reconsidered the whole "human" thing — and given everyone a deadline by which they'll need to decide what other species they'd like to be instead. Understandably, given the givens so far.

‘Go Gentle,’ by Maria Semple (4/14)

Now this, my friends, is what we call a romp. Semple is best known for funny, deceptively poignant portraits of mothers in midlife crisis — see: “Where'd You Go, Bernadette,” a smash best-seller with its own Hollywood adaptation. The star of her newest novel is Adora Hazzard, a divorced philosopher with a sullen teenage daughter, a job teaching morals to rich kids and a growing "coven" of friends living nearby.

Hold on tight, though — this one's plot has twists and turns in abundance, as Hazzard certainly earns her last name in a series of, dare I say, shenanigans, animated always by a subtle, irrepressible joie de vivre.

‘On the Calculation of Volume, Book IV,’ by Solveig Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (4/14)

Yep, it's still November 18. This unassuming date has detained Balle's narrator for three novels already, and is likely to continue doing so for another three after this one. I hesitate to relate any more details about where the plot of the planned septology stands at this point, for fear of spoiling it for folks who still intend to catch up.

Suffice to say, change is afoot at this point for our timelocked narrator, who may not be nearly as alone in her plight as she had initially thought.

‘Last Night in Brooklyn,’ by Xochitl Gonzalez (4/21)

Gonzalez stays close to home with her third novel. A dyed-in-the-wool Brooklynite, born and bred, the author of Olga Dies Dreaming has already earned a nod as a Pulitzer finalist for her column concerning gentrification in the borough she calls home.

So the departure in her latest book is less in space than time, as her latest novel deposits readers in Brooklyn in 2007, on the cusp of global financial freefall, for a story of class, race, dangerous aspirations and the looming death of a heady era, which bears unmistakable echoes of “The Great Gatsby.”

‘American Men,’ by Jordan Ritter Conn (4/21)

The American men referred to in the grandly sweeping title of Conn's sophomore book of narrative journalism, in fact, number just four. Each of these men bears the mantle of masculinity differently, grappling differently with all the pressures that the label entails, but each one has also bared his experiences and innermost thoughts to Conn with equally thorough candor.

From these four interspersed stories Conn does not produce any sociological claims, still less a polemic, so much as a portrait of four lives so disarmingly frank, it can be difficult to look away — and maybe we shouldn't.

‘Small Town Girls: A Memoir,’ by Jayne Anne Phillips (4/21)

Phillips won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her last book, “Night Watch,” a wrenching portrayal of trauma and recovery set in a West Virginia mental asylum following the Civil War. Now, Phillips ("one of our greatest living writers," according to Michael Chabon, one of that year's Pulitzer jurors) is returning to the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, not in historical fiction but in personal retrospect.

It's where Phillips grew up, where she has come to set most of fiction, and her new memoir is not so much about her life alone as it is her lifelong relationship with this place she "can never truly leave."

‘The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to Today,’ by Steve Brusatte (4/28)

Brusatte could not be any clearer about this, folks: Birds. Are. Dinosaurs. The American paleontologist underlines the idea, which is apparently a century and a half old, early and often in “The Story of Birds.” This expansive history of our fine-feathered neighbors, as scientists understand them today, traces an evolutionary thread that leads directly from landbound behemoths like the triceratops to the airborne raptors that patrol our own skies.

As he has done in his previous books — which covered dinosaurs and mammals, respectively — Brusatte offers a lively, loving introduction to his topic that's as comprehensive as it is accessible.

Copyright 2026, NPR

The restaurant inside the Walker Art Center is replacing its front-of-house staff with QR codes and a counter service model starting Wednesday.

A spokesperson for DDP Restaurant Group, which owns Cardamom, confirmed employees were notified of layoffs on Thursday. Employees will receive severance pay due to the short notice, according to their email.

Olivia Martin, the DDP Restaurant Group social media coordinator, said in a Saturday email to MPR News the change has been discussed for several years as Cardamom’s guest traffic relies on Walker events and seasonality.

As a result, employees were cut early on slow days or stretched thin on busy ones, Martin said. Rising labor, food and operating costs are also a factor.

“After careful consideration, we believe this new format will create a stronger, more sustainable and viable path forward for Cardamom while allowing us to better align staffing with the needs of the business and create more reliable, stable hours for employees who remain with Cardamom,” Martin said in the email.

Martin said back-of-house employees and bartenders will not be impacted.

But 16 hosts and servers will end their employment on Sunday, according to Jac Kovarik, communications coordinator for CTUL. The workers’ rights nonprofit has supported organizing efforts by Cardamom employees over the last year.

“Some of the workers that we organize with received the email when they were working on Friday, which is just so horrible and disrespectful,” Kovarik said.

Maya, who asked to have their last name withheld to preserve future employment opportunities, had their last day as a server on Friday. They said Cardamom workers had sought basic safety plans during Operation Metro Surge and asked management for steps like signage and briefings for front-of-house employees. Maya said Cardamom had been steadily growing business and opposed the company’s reasoning for cutting employees.

“I immediately felt like the layoff was retaliatory,” Maya said. “I felt incredibly angry and shocked. I felt betrayed.”

The DDP Restaurant Group faced criticism last year for closing Café Cerés after staff voted to unionize.

While employees were invited to re-apply for roles bussing and running food at Cardamom, Kovarik said most are not interested in that for a variety of reasons. One is that it’s typical for half their paychecks to come from tips, which would drop with a QR code model.

Workers plan to be more vocal in coming days, according to Kovarik.

The Walker Art Center said in a Monday statement they are separate entities and not involved in managing Cardamom.

A new choral work marking the nation’s 250th anniversary will debut Sunday at Orchestra Hall, launching a yearlong project that asks what civic responsibility looks like in the United States today.

The project, led by Celia Ellingson and Gary Aamodt, will unfold over the next year as a nationwide choral and instrumental collaboration.

Throughout 2026, 175 different choirs in 30 states will take part in performing "Sing Democracy 250," which will mark the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The first of the two new works, “Redeem the Dream,” is by Brandon A. Boyd. It offers a look back at American History. The song’s lyrics are from the poem "Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes.

They were drawn to the poem because it acknowledges who had access to the “American Dream.”

“He points out correctly that unless you were a male who owned land in the beginning of this country, you were not eligible to participate in the full promise of the declaration,” she said.

Written in 1935, the poem was a product of what the Harlem Renaissance writer saw as the profound disparity between the proclaimed dream and the realities of inequality that Black Americans, the working class and other marginalized groups faced.

“It ends on a very powerful note of hope that America can be and still will be what the founders dreamed it would be,” Ellingson said.

The song includes influences from jazz, folk, blues, and gospel.

The second piece is based on Richard Haass’s writing about civic responsibility in the book “The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens.” The song composed by Michael Bussewitz-Quarm is named “Us.”

“People ask him all the time, ‘what's the greatest threat to America?’” she said. “He always points out that it's us. You know, we are our greatest threat; it is from within.”

They said weaving past and present was essential to the piece. The goal is to encourage people to recognize opportunities for civic engagement today.

“Recognize that we're not perfect. We haven't reached that more perfect union yet that the Constitution speaks of, but that it's up to us,” she said. “We, the people, are the ones who can do that.”

Ellingson says recent events in Minneapolis have shown what civic responsibility can look like.

“The response of Minnesotans to those circumstances was, in itself, inspiring and a demonstration of how we can speak up, take care of our neighbors, exercise our rights of free speech and assembly, and to do so without violence.”

There will be four performances across the U.S. that feature the Twin Cities’ Together In Hope Choir alongside local groups. Sunday’s performance at Orchestra Hall will also feature St. Scholastica Chamber Choir, Minnesota State University Moorhead Dragon Choir, Choral Arts Ensemble Singers from Rochester, Honors Choirs of SE Minnesota and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.

Correction (April 12, 2026): A former version of this story misstated the U.S.'s anniversary. The story has been updated.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Lauren Groff’s novels and short stories have been finalists three times for the National Book Award, and now she’s out with a new collection of short stories entitled “Brawler.”

Maire Wilson of Huxley & Hiro Booksellers in Wilmington, Del., says this work is just as strong as her others.

Unlike Groff's earlier short story collection, “Florida,” the nine stories in “Brawler” vary their locations as well as time periods and life circumstances.

In “What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?,” the longest piece in the book, a young man struggling with alcoholism retreats to his family’s estate to grapple with the ways his life has fallen short of his expectations. “The Wind” is the story of fleeing domestic abuse, passed from mother to daughter.

In each story, Wilson says, “everything is so elegantly simple that it's almost like maintaining a conversation with the person across from you, or just kind of listening into this life story. I feel like I'm in the room.”

Wilson loves Groff’s “attention to the liveliness of the surroundings” in each story, adding that she comes out of Groff’s novels and short stories "just kind of feeling full” and satisfied.

It's been 80 years since Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker, yet our fascination with the Nazi era seems eternal. By now I've read and seen so many different things that I'm always surprised when somebody offers a new angle on what the Nazis wrought.

Ian Buruma does this in “Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945”, a new book about living in a country where you have no control over what happens. Inspired by the experience of his Dutch father, Leo, who was forced to do factory work in Berlin, Buruma uses diaries, memoirs and some personal interviews — most of the witnesses are dead, of course — to explore how it felt to be in Berlin during World War II.

He weaves together a chronicle that carries Berliners from the triumphant days when Germany steamrolled Poland and daily life felt almost "normal" (unless you were Jewish, of course) through the end of the war when bombs pulverized the city, and Soviet soldiers arrived to rape and pillage.

As he writes of air raid drills, food shortages and the incessant deluge of rumors, Buruma has to deal with the difficulty that most ordinary Germans left behind very little record. They kept their heads down and tried to stay alive. And so the book moves among more interesting characters whose multiplicity gives dimension to our usual flattened sense of Nazi Germany.

We meet Coco Schumann, a young Jewish guitarist who risks his life to play the jazz music that Nazis considered degenerate. We meet 15-year-old Lilo, who starts off thinking that Nazi ideals make life beautiful, but comes to admire the greater nobility of those who tried to assassinate Hitler.

There's the dissident intelligence officer Helmuth von Moltke, a conservative who seeks to work from inside against the Nazis (he gets hanged for his trouble). And there's Erich Alenfeld, a Jew who converted to Christianity and remained a German patriot: He sent a letter to Reichsminister Hermann Göring asking if he could serve.

We also encounter several of the usual suspects, most notably propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who, when not coercing young actresses into sex, is busy generating false headlines, ordering movie spectacles to distract the masses (he loved Disney films), and monitoring the city's morale.

Always laying down edicts — like ordering Jews to wear the yellow star — he's the Nazi who may have done most to affect Berlin's daily life: He even keeps banning and reinstating dancing.

Along the way, “Stay Alive” is laced with nifty details. How one family trained its parrot to say "Heil, Hitler" to fool the Nazis if they came to arrest someone. How, a crew of filmmakers kept shooting a movie with no film in the camera so they wouldn't be drafted to fight doomed last ditch battles.

How Jewish villas in the posh Grunewald area were bought up or seized by Nazi bigshots, but now belong to Russian oligarchs. And how some of those trying to elude the Nazis became known as U-boats, because they dived into the city's murky underworld, even hiding out in brothels.

As one who's written well for decades about historical guilt and denial, Buruma is too savvy to belabor familiar Nazi horrors. That said, he offers two dark truths that strike me as being especially apt in these days when authoritarianism is making a worldwide comeback.

The first is that you can't live in a dirty system without somehow being corrupted. Whether you were a famous symphony conductor or a cop on the beat, Nazism tainted virtually everyone, forcing people to do and say abhorrent things they often didn't believe in, and weakening their moral compass.

As von Moltke wrote his wife: "Today, I can endure the sufferings of others with an equanimity I would have found execrable a year ago."

He wasn't alone. The second dark truth is how easy it is to simply go along. Most Berliners — and even Buruma's own father — did their jobs, took their pleasures and preferred not to think about the evils under their noses. This, Buruma says, "is disturbing but should not surprise anyone. Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don't wish to see or hear."

If the book has a hero, it's probably Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist who didn't turn away. Along with her partner, the conductor Leo Borchard, she ran a resistance group named Uncle Emil, risking her life to protect Jews, help them escape, and support other groups battling the Nazis. All this makes her much braver than I've ever been.

But I equally admire her refusal to be sanctimonious about those who, fearing prison or worse, didn't rise up against the dictatorship. She had the rare virtue of being righteous without being self-righteous.

Copyright 2026, NPR, Fresh Air

A new documentary making its Midwestern debut at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival tackles racism within hospital spaces.

“The Chaplain & the Doctor” is the latest documentary by Dr. Jessica Zitter, a California-based physician and filmmaker. She said this film came about after her hospital’s chaplain confronted Zitter about her biases as a doctor.

“It made me just really take note of how much we attribute personality types and all sorts of things to somebody based on a few superficial things,” Zitter said.

The film will premiere at the Main Cinema in Minneapolis at 4 p.m. on Friday and again at the Edina Mann at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday.

Listen to the conversation by clicking the player above.

After “An American Marriage,” her wildly successful 2018 novel, Tayari Jones signed a contract for her next book to be about a woman grappling with gentrification in modern Atlanta.

She tried to write that story. But it wasn’t doing that “magical thing that lets you know you have art,” she says on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “It was a good idea. But the book wasn’t booking, as my students say.”

And then 2020 happened. A million Americans died from COVID, including some of Jones’ friends. Then George Floyd was murdered. Protests rocked the country. Jones started to wonder if writing a novel even mattered. And then she got sick with an autoimmune disorder.

She started to write again just to soothe herself.

The new story “kept me company the same way reading a book may keep someone company,” she tells host Kerri Miller. “I loved [main characters] Annie and Niecy. I was eager to see what would become of them. I was delighted with the minor characters. I enjoyed visiting with them — asking them the questions of their heart. And asking the same questions of my own heart.”

The result is “Kin,” Jones newest novel, and by all accounts, this story is doing that “magical thing” that good books do. It’s already an Oprah Book Pick and a New York Times Bestseller.

Jones talks about all of this and more with Miller — including the power of female friends and the grief of family lost and found — on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Tayari Jones is a professor of writing at Emory University and the author of four novels, including “Kin,” her newest book, which was published in February.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

This week’s lineup leans toward proximity, with several events designed to bring audiences closer to the work itself. From studio-based festivals and in-development musicals to open artist spaces and interactive cultural programming, the emphasis is on direct engagement rather than distance.

International Festival of Minnesota at St. Paul RiverCentre in St. Paul — April 10–11

The relaunch of the former Festival of Nations brings more than 70 communities together for food, performance and hands-on activities. Returning after a multi-year hiatus, IFest-MN offers a large-scale, all-ages way to experience global cultures in one place.

‘The Full Monty’ at Frey Theatre in St. Paul — April 10–19

Theatre 55 stages “The Full Monty” with a cast of performers over 55, shifting the emphasis toward aging, resilience and humor. Set in Buffalo, the production follows a group of unemployed men who turn to an unlikely solution, balancing comedy with questions of dignity and vulnerability.

Puppet Lab Festival at Open Eye Theatre in Minneapolis — April 10–19

Open Eye’s Puppet Lab Festival showcases new work developed over a six-month residency. The resulting pieces range from experimental to interactive, offering a look at how contemporary puppetry is created and performed in the Twin Cities.

‘The Postman’s Daughter’ at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis — April 11–25

A new musical in development from Minnesota-connected composer Justin D. Cook, “The Postman’s Daughter” centers on the relationship between a new mother and her mail carrier. The production continues Illusion Theater’s focus on developing locally rooted work.

‘Once Upon a River 2026’ at The Historic Auditorium in St. Croix Falls — April 12

Created by Dan Chouinard, “Once Upon a River” combines music and storytelling in a program tied to Earth Day themes. The event brings together performers and audiences for an evening focused on the St. Croix River and its surrounding landscape.

‘Mississippi Valley Orchestra: Fantasy’ at The O’Shaughnessy in St. Paul — April 12

Mississippi Valley Orchestra’s “Fantasy” program features works by Debussy and Bartók alongside Germaine Tailleferre’s “Ballade.” The concert highlights a mix of familiar and less frequently performed repertoire.

‘St. Paul Spring Art Crawl’ across St. Paul — Through April 12 (and April 17–19, April 24–26)

The Spring Art Crawl opens studios and exhibition spaces across multiple neighborhoods, including Cathedral Hill and Hamline Midway. Visitors can explore artist studios, pop-ups and galleries throughout three weekends.

Taken together, these events offer a range of ways to engage, whether you’re moving through a large festival, settling into a performance or stepping inside a working studio.

A new play about the Hmong experience comes as fears remain within the community, following a months-long immigration surge that has forced some immigrants to go into hiding.

“It's just a hard time to make any kind of work,” said playwright Katie Ka Vang, who wrote “HMong Futures: The Future of Us,” which is set to officially open on April 11 in St. Paul.

Vang spent months developing the story for “HMong Futures,” holding community engagement events where members of the Hmong community across generations could share their input about what the show should tackle.

“I always feel like each play kind of teaches me something different,” Vang said. “Even though we're in different generations, we still want similar things. But the way it's done is different.”

The day before “HMong Futures” was supposed to have its first public reading as part of a new works festival, Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents on Jan. 24.

With a show titled “HMong Futures,” concerns about safety for the Asian community led Theater Mu to cancel the reading.

“It was one of the most, if not the most challenging things that I've ever had to do as an artist,” said Fran de Leon, Theater Mu’s artistic director.

In a Zoom meeting with the “HMong Futures” team after the reading was canceled, de Leon remembers sitting in silence.

“They had been so strong and so resilient and stalwart, and in that moment when we had the thing that we love most taken away from us, there was so much pain and betrayal,” de Leon said.

Even though tensions are still high following Operation Metro Surge, Theater Mu is still moving ahead with the premiere.

“This play talks a lot about healing… it just felt right that we would say we're going to go on,” de Leon said.

‘HMong Futures’ in the present

“HMong Futures: the Future of Us” takes place in 2031. It follows three generations of Hmong women on their family farm in Minnesota, where past family drama and generational trauma drive the story.

Throughout the play, however, granddaughter Maly tries to teach the family to navigate hard discussions through NVC — nonviolent communication, which emphasizes empathy and vocalizing one’s needs.

“I don't think that I could ever have this conversation with my grandma,” said actor Melody Her, who plays Maly, noting that discussions of feelings is a struggle for parts of the Hmong community.

“This show is all about Hmong futures… I hope that the audience can, you know, see that this is a possibility,” Her said.

All My Relations Arts gallery in south Minneapolis presents a new solo exhibition by a Lakota artist.

Denver-based artist Danielle SeeWalker says her exhibition, Uŋči Said So, was inspired by the uŋči, or grandmothers, and elders in her life, and their way of storytelling.

“We as Native people, we really take it serious when our grandmas say something. That's it,” SeeWalker said.

SeeWalker, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, describes her paintings as having loud explosions of colors, using bright greens, yellows and oranges. Many works feature expressionist portraits of women with a striking feature — a single realistic eye.

“The eye kind of sets the tone, the mood, the vibe of the story — of what the painting is about,” she said.

In one artwork, titled “They Whisper About Her & She Knows,” SeeWalker portrays the experiences of Native women who have experienced lateral violence in their lives.

“Her eye creates sort of a somber-like [feeling] — she's disappointed, maybe sad, frustrated,” said SeeWalker.

Another work, inspired by her own life, shares the experience of raising a child who has mixed heritage. Two figures fill the canvas — a mother with dark hair and a child with lighter hair.

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“It's exploring this idea of identity based on how we look, being mixed race,” she said. “It's a special, personal piece.”

For SeeWalker, having her artwork showcased in All My Relations Arts gallery feels special. The gallery is run by the Native American Community Development Institute, which is headquartered in what is known as the American Indian Cultural Corridor in Minneapolis. The gallery provides a space for both seasoned and upcoming Native artists to share their creations.

She says Native community members often relate to her artwork, which she finds rewarding.

“I have been inspired by and really representing and telling our stories in a way that we don't often hear being told in a public way,” SeeWalker said. “It's art for the people, for our community.”

Uŋči Said So is the first exhibition at the gallery this year. During the immigration enforcement surge, the gallery was used as a donation center for supplies.

Juleana Enright is the gallery and programs manager. They are a member of Lower Brule Lakota Tribe.

Enright says SeeWalker’s storytelling welcomes the community back into the All My Relations Arts gallery.

“It just has a way of really healing something in our soul, really connecting us to our ancestors, and really moving us forward into the future,” Enright said.

SeeWalker sees storytelling as innate and as a tradition to be passed down within Native communities.

“I think a lot of my paintings — people will see it for what it is visually, but when they really dive into what it's about, I think it kind of brings a whole new context to some of these paintings and pieces of artwork,” she said. “That story is probably the most powerful part of it.”

An opening reception will be held at All My Relations Arts gallery on April 10 at 6 p.m. The gallery is located off Franklin Avenue East in south Minneapolis.

SeeWalker’s exhibition will be on display through June 6.

Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.

The Science Museum of Minnesota has wowed generations with its dinosaur fossils, including an 80-foot Diplodocus. And tens of thousands of people have visited its other exhibits explaining everything from outer space to the history of race.

But these days, fewer people are visiting.

Like other cultural institutions across the country, the St. Paul museum has struggled to lure people back after the COVID-19 pandemic. Attendance is half of what it was in 2019, forcing the museum to eliminate summer camps, lay off employees and make other cuts.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks about what contributed to the drop in visitors and how the museum is trying to sell more people on its cool collections, current exhibits and educational programming.

Guests:

• Alison Rempel Brown has been the president and CEO of the Science Museum of Minnesota since 2016. She was previously chief of staff at the California Academy of Sciences.

• Colleen Dilenschneider is founder and managing member of IMPACTS Experience, a market research firm that works with cultural organizations, including museums, zoos, aquariums and science centers. She is based in Chicago.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. 

From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above.

Want to be an Art Hound? Submit here.

A puppet rock opera returns

Azure Anderson of St. Paul is an artist, musician, and podcaster, and she’s a huge fan of Phantom Chorus Theatre.

They are re-mounting the founders’ 2019 production of “Razia’s Shadow,” a puppet rock opera. The production contains 12 songs by Forgive Durden, performed live, with a new cast of puppet characters ranging in size from two to eight feet.

The show runs April 10–25 at the Hive Collaborative in St. Paul. In-person and live-streamed tickets are available. While not designed as a children’s show, Anderson says the show is recommended for ages six and older due to a few spooky elements; if your child enjoys Tim Burton’s film “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” this show should be a good fit.

Having seen all Phantom Chorus’s productions for the past three years, Anderson raves about them.

Azure says: “The visuals are always incredible. The music's always incredible. And the technical aspect never misses.

— Azure Anderson

Sewing and style at Twin Cities Frocktails

For Hannah Olanrewaju of St. Paul, sewing means community. She’s looking forward to Twin Cities Frocktails, an evening event where attendees are invited (though not required) to wear clothes they made themselves.

This year’s theme is “Making Through the Decades.” Frocktails takes place 6 to 10 p.m., Saturday, April 11 at Steady Pour in Minneapolis.

Hannah describes the vibe of the first Frocktails in 2024.

Hannah says: There's something so uniquely wonderful about being in a room with people who've made at least one part of their outfit and can really speak the same language as you do. And so, I remember walking around with my bingo sheet and getting to know people and where they're from.

They're asking you about your outfit, and you're asking them about their outfit. And so by the end of the night, you're saying goodbye to all these people that you've really never met before, but now, you’re finding ways to keep in touch.

I think that's something that's so beautiful about Frocktails and about sewing, specifically, that I don't think I've been able to find anywhere else.

— Hannah Olanrewaju

Poetry and community in Rochester

John Sievers is a trombonist from Rochester, but tonight, he’s looking forward to an event that celebrates poetry. The Southeastern Minnesota Poets will hold their next Bright Lights Poetry Night tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the historic Chateau Theatre.

The theme of tonight’s reading is “Emergence.”

John says: This event is really a community event that is encouraging people to come together as people who are interested in language and words and poetry.

And I just love the fact that I can hear people from my community sharing their deep thoughts about important themes in today's society.

— John Sievers