This, sadly, is the last episode of Nice Work. It was a good run, but a short one. The first episode of Nice Work aired on October 10, 2025. We were genuinely excited by what we could do, and now nine months later we are still excited about what we made.
Since this is our last episode, we'll spend it reflecting on what we did, and why we did it. As well as playing some of our favorite moments in the show.
There’s so much excellent national media. Places where people are thinking about big ideas, trying to understand art, literature, and society. But with the polarization in our political discourse, we have become increasingly convinced that we need that on a local level, too. We need places to think about who we are in Southern Indiana. And local places to discuss what’s going on.
We have great venues: Eskenazi, I Fell, FAR. Great music. Great film—and even more great film coming with Cicada Cinema’s permanent location. What we don’t have that we at least used to have is the alternative newsweeklies where you’d get reviews of local shows, personal essays, and more from people in your community. Things like Bloomington’s Ryder Magazine and film series are so hard to make, and the support just doesn’t seem to be there.
In this episode we will hear several stories we think demonstrate what we were trying to do with Nice Work. We have an interview our late colleague Kayte Young did with photographer Rania Matar. Nice Work contributor Karl Templeton talked to the hosts of the Bloomington podcast, A Beautiful Day in the Gulch to dig into the history of why people have been calling Bloomington the Gulch for a few decades now, and Bloomington fixture Jim Manion get a little woo-woo. We sit down with filmmaker Boots Riley, whose latest movie, I Love Boosters, is out now. Kayte gets deep into process with ceramicist Claire Miller, and the Nice Work hosts get distracted trying to take a simple trip to a sculpture trail.
We think that we made some pretty good radio for a bit there. We talked to interesting people about all the stuff that makes us excited. We went all over Bloomington to tell those stories. We went to plays, concerts, performance venues, art museums and galleries. We also talked to interesting people when they came to town, like Dandy Wellington, Boots Riley, Jesse Thorn, Rania Matar and many others.
We really did try to tell as many stories as possible that covered all of the arts and culture you can find here in Bloomington. But we also talked about the wider art world, design, film, video games and board games. We talked to authors, musicians, painters, singers, so many creative, curious people.
We feel lucky to have gotten to do it. We believe making this show was important, and we think Philosopher Jürgen Habermas makes a pretty good case for it. His first major book is called The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. He says robust public debate about politics started with periodicals that were reporting on sales of goods - think about commodity prices. Then they started writing about art and literature. Habermas says the “critical debate ignited by works of literature and art was soon extended to include economic and political disputes.”
So basically, lively thoughtful conversations about art and culture lead to more critical thinking and more informed debate about a lot of other stuff. We are not exactly saying that arts and culture programs like Nice Work are a vital part of democracy in southern Indiana. But we’d kind of like to say that... but won’t go that far.
We do think we were trying to give you, our listeners, a sense of how creative activity in our area is always evolving, and of the people involved in that. And to feel that you can also be part of that, if you’re not already. We tried to tell interesting stories in interesting ways—in our own voices—not just the same old way that public media tends to tell arts stories. And we think that helped us bring listeners along for the ride. Occasionally we interrogated ideas, concepts, and observations that might broaden perspectives, if just a little bit.
That was our goal, at least. We’ll leave it up to you to decide if we were successful. Either way, it felt good to be reaching toward that.
It was a good run. And now we’re at the end. So hey, thanks for listening.
Many, many, many thanks to our late cohost and friend, Kayte Young. This show, and countless other good things in this world, would not have happened without her.