Names and faces

American Public Media Group has canceled musician Chris Thile’s Live From Here radio show, the successor to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. The media organization said this week it was ending national production of Thile’s show while cutting 28 employees at American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio. American Public Media Group said the coronavirus pandemic is causing “a large and unexpected financial challenge resulting from a dramatic and simultaneous decline in some of our revenue sources.” Thile took over as Prairie Home host in 2016 after Keillor, the popular, long-running public radio show’s creator and original host, retired and chose Thile — a mandolin whiz who appeared on Prairie Home as a teenager — as his successor. The show was later renamed Live From Here after MPR cut ties with Keillor in 2017 over a sexual harassment allegation that Keillor denied. Thile tweeted that he was informed over the weekend that APM would no longer be producing the show.

Tyler Perry wrote “we must never give up” in a heartfelt first-person essay in People magazine detailing his thoughts on racial injustice and police brutality against unarmed black people in America. Perry said he almost passed on publishing his essay in the forthcoming issue, which will be released Friday, but the filmmaker felt compelled to follow through because he’s “exhausted” from what he has recently seen across the country. “I’m exhausted from all the hate and the division, the vitriol that I see online from one to another,” the actor-writer-director writes. “I’m exhausted from seeing these kinds of senseless murders play out over and over again with nothing changing in our society.” Perry wrote on various topics including how he felt after watching the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after being restrained in Minnesota by a white officer. He also touched on separate moments of being stopped and frisked in New Orleans and Atlanta. Perry said he is mulling over how to explain racism to his 5-year-old son. When he does have the conversation, the filmmaker wrote that he wants to instill hope in him and that “progress is made in small steps. Looking at his young face, I often ask myself how to broach this conversation: How will I explain that even though Mr. Rogers once said, ‘Look for the helpers,’ sometimes those very helpers will judge his skin before they recognize his humanity,” he wrote.

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