Linda Holmes is a pop culture critic and host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. She just released her debut novel, Evvie Drake Starts Over. It's about love and loss and the choices we make that sometimes require us to start from scratch. Linda joins the show to talk about her start in writing and how the game of baseball contains a great lesson on the importance of perseverance.

Joe Talbot is the director of 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco.' It's a beautiful film about a guy named Jimmie and his desire to reclaim a San Francisco house built by his grandfather, many moons before tech booms rolled in and massive amounts of money changed the city. Joe talks about gentrification, his thoughts on authenticity in the Bay Area and the best reaction to a movie Jesse has ever heard.

Sara Driver is a director who refined her craft during NYC's independent filmmaker boom of the late 1970s through the 1990s. She made her directorial debut in 1981 with You are Not I, a film about a young woman who escapes a mental institution during the chaos of a pileup. We revisit our conversation with Driver from 2018 where she discussed her latest movie, Boom For Real. It tells the story of a young Jean Michel Basquiat and the New York arts community he came up in. Sara currently appears in Jim Jarmusch's latest zombie flick, The Dead Don't Die.

H. Jon Benjamin is the voice behind some of television's most beloved animated characters. He's the voice of the titular character "Bob" in Fox's heartwarming sitcom "Bob's Burgers." He also plays Sterling Archer in "Archer," which just premiered its 10th season this past spring on FXX. Jon talks about his book, his work on so many great TV shows and the beauty of fatherhood.

Who comes to mind when you think of a character actor? There's a lot of good ones, sure ... but there's no one quite like the great Wallace Shawn. On screen he's had over 180 credits! You've seen him in films like Clueless, The Princess Bride and My Dinner with Andre. He's also had regular roles on Gossip Girl and Crossing Jordan. Wallace is also an Obie award-winning playwright and the author of several books. When he joined us back in 2017, he had just written Night Thoughts, an extended collection of essays touching on topics like politics, morality, and privilege. Plus, he'll talk frankly about how the movie business has changed since he started acting some 40 years ago. You can hear him as the voice of T-Rex in Toy Story 4 later this month.

We're revisiting our conversation with John Waters! You might know him as the director and writer of classics like: Pink Flamingos, Hairspray and Crybaby. But even though he hasn't made a movie lately, he keeps busy. He's done a ton of live performances, released a few compilation albums, and he's just released his seventh book. When he joined us in the studio he talked about Make Trouble, his book based off a commencement speech he gave at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. Jesse talks with John about Little Richard, trigger warnings, and how the film industry tried (and failed) to make the King of Trash compromise his work. Plus, he'll tell us about the fabulous Commes de Garcon shirt he wore to the recording. His latest work is his memoir, Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, which is out now.  

Kulap Vilaysack is an actor, comedian, showrunner, and director. She just directed her first feature length film: <i>Origin Story.</i> It's about her family's journey to the US and trying to establish a relationship with her biological father in Laos. It's a film about family secrets, learning to adapt to them, to empathize with difficult parents, and to connect with brand new ones. We talked to Kulap about facing her family's darkest secrets and finding healing through the pain.

We're back with John Bradley who played Samwell Tarly on a tiny little show called Game of Thrones for eight seasons. The HBO program recently had its series finale which was the network's most-watched program of all time! John talks about performing on one of the biggest TV shows in history and how his perceived weaknesses made him the perfect actor for his character's arc.

If you go to an art museum: contemporary, encyclopedic, local... odds are most of the art displayed was made by white men. Even if you leave out the renaissance painters and the Dutch Masters. It's still not that common to see a solo show by a woman or a person of color these days. This was even more true in the mid-80s. Some of New York's most prominent galleries showed less than 10% of women artists. Others were showing no women at all. In 1984, an art collective known at The Guerilla Girls drew attention to issues of discrimination and representation in galleries and museums all over the world. The group demonstrated in front of museums with placards and picket lines. And they wore gorilla masks while doing it. Jesse talks to a founding member of The Guerrilla Girls, who goes by Kathe Kollwitz. She'll reflect on the origins of the group, anonymity in the art world, and what the group means now more than 30 years later.