While listening to author Max Porter reading on David Naimon’s podcast, Between the Covers, I rerouted to Powell’s to buy Porter’s latest novel, Shy. Describing what Naimon does as “interviews” falls short. The show began as a concise literary segment on KBOO more than a decade ago. It grew as his beloved side gig until, during the pandemic, he left his naturopathy practice of some 20 years to pursue these meticulously researched conversations full time, in partnership with book publisher Tin House.

If you enjoy books, it’s likely Naimon has hosted at least a few of your heroes, probably multiple times: Christina Sharpe, George Saunders, N. K. Jemisin, Sheila Heti, Ada Limón, and Naomi Wolf have all made appearances. Anything classified as “literary” fits the show’s framework, prose or poetry, but the two-hour conversations stretch well beyond jacket copy. Naimon is a profoundly deep reader, and a compassionate conversationalist—perhaps an echo of his former career. For an author, there’s no question of whether he’s read your current book; he’s likely read every word you’ve ever written, and a large sampling of your contemporaries, and thought at length about them. This encyclopedic knowledge, which only feels possible in a project born of pure excitement and enthusiasm (and not profit), makes the show a precious rarity in a time when “people don't read.” —Matthew Trueherz

Listen here: Max Porter on Shy 

This live unrecorded event at the Aladdin in December brought together two podcast hosts: Portlander Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About, which examines misremembered and misunderstood pop culture stories (Tonya Harding, Beanie Babies, Catherine the Great), and Seattleite Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria, which explores, well, moments of American hysteria (the rise of televangelism, Home Depot’s 12-foot skeleton, Furby). In the first half of the evening, Marshall and Weber-Smith took a lively meander through American spiritualism (séances, queerer than you think!), peppering the lesson with deadpan asides. But the second half voyaged somewhere stranger, aided enormously by a Seattle-based Fleetwood Mac cover band called the Little Lies that I’d pay good money to see again. I don’t recall exactly how or when it happened, but with the Little Lies shredding onstage, Marshall and Weber-Smith began to dance, and then kept moving and shaking, moving and shaking, dancing themselves into what seemed a sort of catharsis. I’d been in a fair number of audiences in 2023, but on this evening, on the first row of the Aladdin’s balcony, I looked down at the sold-out crowd, rapt and cheering, and felt something that went beyond delight. Wonder, maybe, or gratitude, or perhaps even a jolt of joy. —Rebecca Jacobson

Chef movies are always terrible in the eyes of chefs. Equestrian dramas or race car flicks? No doubt the same. But Showing Up might be the rare film that accurately captures a creative pursuit. Director-writer Kelly Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond, the Portland-based team behind First Cow and Wendy and Lucy, were interested in a stretch of time of time that Canadian painter Emily Carr spent mostly as a landlord, letting her career lapse, and wanted to explore the reality that most artists confront when trying to make ends meet. Carr was too famous, they decided, but her experience set the foundation of the script.

Michelle Williams—a fixture of the duo’s collaborations—plays a sculptor. Her work is borrowed from Portland’s Cynthia Lahti, whose ceramic figures are both incredibly graceful, and, as a recent New York Times review stated, “gloopy,” “craggy,” and “gnarled, but more emotionally recognizable for it.” The movie’s Portland feels the same. It’s not a caricature; with extended scenes at the retired Oregon College of Arts and Crafts campus and at the local gallery Nationale, it presents a bones-deep reflection of what it feels like to live and create here. It may be the most complicated explanation I’ve found of what is forever misidentified as the “quirkiness” that the city and its art-making population possess. The ensemble cast features Hong Chau, John Magaro, and André-freaking-3000 shortly before his flute renaissance. —MT

SEE IT ON: Hulu, Prime, Paramount+

Journey back for a moment: Portland, summer 2012. We’re a year into the Portlandia era. I’m 24, and in late June I roll up for a Pedalpalooza event that bills itself as a “bike play.” Invasion of the Bicycle Snatchers is a take on 1950s sci-fi flicks—think secret agents and aliens, with U-locks imbued with magic powers—and we pedal behind the performers to a series of locations, a new scene unfolding at each stop.

Jump to Portland, summer 2023. (Pedalpalooza now lasts all summer.) In mid-July I show up to Abernethy Elementary with hundreds of others for installment no. 14 of now-beloved Bike Play. A Jurassic Park rendition features dueling Jeff Goldblums, safety vests as dino costumes, a convoluted plot involving a stolen egg, and some adorable “Maneater” choreography in the parking lot of an abandoned Mormon church. The whole thing is inspiring of adoration: the uncamouflaged glee on the performers’ faces; the cliffhangers at the close of each scene that send us scrambling to retrieve our bikes and pedal to the next stop; the fellow rider giving out bags of nutritional yeast–dusted popcorn. At curtain call, the cast pays tribute to Yohhei Sato, a longtime bike play collaborator who died in 2023, and the crowd falls silent. It’s a reminder that precarity endures, but so does bike play. —RJ

catch the next installment: Stay tuned to Pedalpalooza’s programming or follow @bikePlay