Bilal Qureshi

Each week, the guests and hosts on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour share what's bringing them joy. This week: Lizzo playing James Madison's flute, Usher's thirst traps, and more.

After two years of pandemic closures, audiences are back at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to find a season of diverse plays. But for many, change has come too soon.

The first fully reopened edition of TIFF concludes this weekend. But with a film industry still reeling from box office declines and changing audience habits, the award season remains in flux.

In the extraordinary new age of subtitled streaming and globalized filmmaking, the Oscar category is becoming a caricature of itself as a relic of the past.

Samuel Maoz says his latest film was inspired by his experiences as a soldier in the Israeli army. He says Foxtrot deals with the "traumatic circle" his country is trapped in.

At the Toronto film festival, actor and director Nate Parker faced the press about a 1999 rape charge against him. Parker's promoting a movie about Nat Turner's slave rebellion The Birth of a Nation.

With its flashy swagger and quotable one-liners, Empire, the Fox series about a black music label, has become a cultural phenomenon. A watch party in D.C., had just as much.

There was a time when you didn't know what the No. 1 song in America was until Casey Kasem said so. The listener had an emotional relationship with the American Top 40 host for four decades.