Arts

Edward Snowden's release of classified information, search for asylum and avoidance of extradition to the U.S. seem to be straight out of a movie plot. Audie Cornish speaks with best-selling author David Baldacci for his take on scripting Edward Snowden, the movie.

The star of Saturday Night Live, Bridesmaids and now Girl Most Likely joins NPR's Melissa Block to talk about lost characters, loud characters, and how shy she is in real life.

Two new documentaries are making headlines. Gabriela Cowperthwaite's Blackfish centers on the whale that killed a trainer before an Orlando SeaWorld audience in 2010. The Act of Killing by human rights researcher Josh Oppenheimer, looks at the mass executions of communists in Indonesia in the 1960s.

First, we go proto-punk. Before The Sex Pistols, or The Ramones, there was A Band Called Death. That's the name of a new music documentary coming to the Triad this weekend. Our Technical Producer Eddie Garcia explores the musical and personal relationships of the Hackney Brothers with Charlotte film maker Jeff Howlett. Next Peter Kairoff is back at the keyboard with Frederick Chopin's Romantic piano music. Hear how it evokes early Italian opera, the expressive nature of the serenade, and so much more. And we wrap up today's program at… Elsewhere. That's Greensboro's living museum, and it's the site of an amazing musical experiment. What would happen if you composed a piece of music using nothing but found objects, polled your audience on how your piece should be performed, and then invited the room full of non-musicians to perform your work? Southern Constellations fellow Andrew Raffo Dewar will answer that question and everything else you ever wanted to know about Material Music.

Boston's Shaw Memorial depicts the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, which was crushed 150 years ago in South Carolina. It took American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens 14 years to complete the Boston Common landmark.

The nonagenarian artist recently received the National Medal of Arts, and museums around the world are still celebrating his May birthday. The Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., is displaying seven "exuberant" pieces: layered or lined-up canvases painted in bold, solid colors.

Around the world, cities like Rio de Janeiro are using new technologies to solve their problems. And while there's great promise in many of these "smart" city programs, urban planner Anthony Townsend is wary of putting so much power in the hands of tech companies.

After "Robert Galbraith" was revealed to be the pen name for J.K. Rowling, many readers have been circling back to a "debut" novel they'd initially overlooked. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the mystery is respectable, but she will shelve it in the "I've read worse, but I've read better" category.