Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K‑Pop

Culture isn’t a trophy case. It’s a relay—messy, glorious, and always on the move. In Culture: The Story of Us, Martin Puchner tracks how humans learned to store meaning outside our bodies, to recover it after disasters, and to rewrite it through encounters. We start beneath a mountain in Chauvet, where flickering bison and handprints show how know‑why began. We ride with a sculptor who preserved Nefertiti’s face; watch Plato burn his play to invent a different stage; feel Ashoka’s remorse cut into pillars; and follow a South Asian goddess by sea to Pompeii. We trail a pilgrim to India for sacred texts, sit in a Heian salon, stand in Baghdad’s library, and see Ethiopia claim an ancient ark to author a future. From Aztec Tenochtitlan and Camões’s epics to Haitian abolition and George Eliot’s new history, and on to Hokusai’s wave and Nigeria’s stage, this is a single, breathless performance about how culture survives—by circulation, error, revival, and care.

• Listeners who love sweeping history told through vivid scenes and voices
• Educators and students seeking a lively map of cultural transmission
• Makers—writers, artists, coders—looking for permission to borrow boldly
• Travelers curious about how places become meaning‑making sites

Martin Puchner is a scholar, storyteller, and editor who has spent his career tracing how texts, performances, and ideas travel across time and language. He teaches at Harvard, co‑edits the Norton Anthology of World Literature, and writes widely for general readers. His books include The Written World and The Language of Thieves. He has a knack for big arcs told in human‑sized episodes, from ancient caves to modern waves.