Culturetopia: Must-Listen Arts & Entertainment (Long Island Edition)

We've got a piping-hot new Culturetopia podcast, a collection of NPR's best arts stories of the week. (You can subscribe here.)

NPR Music producer Frannie Kelley joins me to talk about songwriter and producer Ellie Greenwich, who's one of those secret-history-of-rock types. Until her death last week, few people had heard of Greenwich, even though she helped create countless wonderful 1960s pop classics — from "Be My Baby" to "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy" to "Leader of the Pack." Her career started during her high school cheerleading days in on Long Island

The book Jaws is set on Amity Island (based on Montauk) and features a foul-mouthed Long Islander hunting his own, rather toothier, version of Moby Dick. We've got a great audio essay by writer Lizzie Skurnick about why it's her favorite literary guilty pleasure.

We also take a jaunt to Tijuana to hear the sounds of the Nortec Collective, learn how South Africans feel about the none-too-subtle political subtexts of the terrific new science fiction film District 9, and bid a fond farewell to the long-running PBS kids' show Reading Rainbow.

Finally, we've got an interview with the director behind a fascinating documentary about Vogue's chief editrix Anna Wintour, and its leviathan of a September Issue.