Linda Holmes
Linda Holmes is a pop culture correspondent for NPR and the host of Pop Culture Happy Hour. She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.
Holmes was a writer and editor at Television Without Pity, where she recapped several hundred hours of programming — including both High School Musical movies, for which she did not receive hazard pay. Her first novel, Evvie Drake Starts Over, was published in the summer of 2019.
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An Academy Award in Best Casting will be the newest prize at the Oscars in March. An NPR panel examines what an achievement in casting might mean.
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Sit down with pop culture critic Linda Holmes as she watches the 2026 Winter Games. She is exhausted by cross-country, says "ow ow ow" during moguls, and makes the case, once and for all, for curling. -
James Van Der Beek, who played heartthrob Dawson Leery on "Dawson's Creek," died Wednesday at 48 years old.
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The first season of The Pitt was about acute problems. The second is about chronic ones. -
Up First Winter Games brings you the latest news and culture from the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics. -
Sinners landed a record number of nods, while Avatar: Fire and Ash and Wicked: For Good fell short of their franchise predecessors. -
NPR's Linda Holmes and Sarah Handel discuss why they are hooked on documentaries and some of the best ones you may not yet have seen.
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Two popular streaming series return Thursday: "The Pitt" and "The Traitors." Pop Culture Happy Hour previews those shows and some of the other big events coming to the small screen in January. -
After five seasons and almost ten years, the saga of Netflix's Stranger Things has reached its end. In a two-hour finale, we found out what happened to our heroes (including Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard) when they set out to battle the forces of evil. -
Hope springs eternal, and that is nowhere more true than in the realm of New Year's Resolutions. Today, we give ourselves goals for 2026. And because we believe in accountability, we'll tell you how well we stuck to our resolutions for 2025.
