The Peabody Award-winning Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, from PRX, is a smart and surprising guide to what's happening in pop culture and the arts. Each week, Kurt introduces the people who are creating and shaping our culture. Life is busy – so let Studio 360 steer you to the must-see movie this weekend, the next book for your nightstand, or the song that will change your life. Produced in association with Slate.
Kurt Andersen talks with comic artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb about her trailblazing work. In 1965, Wilson Pickett went to Stax Records in Memphis to record “In the Midnight Hour” — and nothing was the same after. And “Luke Cage” showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker breaks down how his love of hip-hop and other music shapes his show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The music documentary podcast Pitch , produced by Alex Kapelman and Whitney Jones, is returning after a three-year hiatus. Nine new episodes immerse in subjects including the music of ISIS, the hip-swaying, female-empowerment dance songs of Carnival, and blacklisted 1950s jazz musician Hazel Scott. “Her story is amazing,” Whitney Jones tells Kurt Andersen about Hazel Scott. “She grew up with jazz legends just in her house. They were friends of her mom — Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Lester Young — ...
Monticello is home renovation run amok. Thomas Jefferson was as passionate about building his house as he was about founding the United States; he designed Monticello to the fraction of an inch and never stopped changing it. Yet Monticello was also a plantation worked by slaves, some of them Jefferson’s own children. Today his white and black descendants still battle over who can be buried at Monticello. It was trashed by college students, saved by a Jewish family and celebrated by FDR. With Ste...
When is humor appropriate in the medical field? Bioethicist Katie Watson, an Assistant Professor in the Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program of Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, has thought a lot about this issue. She moonlights as faculty at the Second City Training Center in Chicago, the teaching side of the famous improv comedy club.She has written about gallows humor in medicine , spoken about it at the Chicago Humanities Festival , and used the intersection of he...
Sophie Scott is fascinated by laughter—and she thinks that cognitive science and psychology are missing out by ignoring it. A cognitive neuroscientist at University College London , Scott studies and teaches us how to distinguish between “social” or “voluntary” laughter (the way you politely laugh at a co-worker’s jokes) and “authentic” or “involuntary” laughter (the kind that causes you to gasp for breath). Chris Gethard , the host of “The Chris Gethard Show” on Fusion and the podcast Beautiful...
The practice of laughter yoga began in 1995, when it was invented by Madan Kataria, a doctor in Mumbai, India. Today, its practitioners attend thousands of classes offered all over the world. They say they gain health benefits, including stress reduction and an improved immune system. Kurt Andersen and Mary Harris, a health reporter at WNYC, were curious so they decided to attend a class in New York to find out - and tell us - what it’s all about. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...
Filth in all its forms: whimsical and mundane, literal and figurative. Kurt talks to America’s auteur of the scatological, filmmaker John Waters. Writer Henry Alford and comedian Dave Hill visit a museum exhibit where all the art is made of dirt or trash. Who’s selling and who’s reading the smutty bestseller, “Fifty Shades of Grey”? We get to the bottom of the the shockingly complex world of diaper design. And indie rock band Dirty Projectors performs live in our studio. Learn more about your ad...
On Luke Cage , the Marvel series on Netflix, music is almost everything. “I’m a hip-hop showrunner,” says showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker. “It just permeates every decision we make on the show because we’re not just making decisions about plot. The whole thing has to feel a certain way.” If the first season of Luke Cage introduced the Marvel universe to hip-hop, the second season expands the musical education across the entire spectrum of African American music, Coker says. Episodes in this season ...
Thirty years ago, Public Enemy brought the revolution to hip-hop with “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.” Kurt Andersen talks with the graphic designer Bonnie Siegler about the history of protest art. And the newspaper comic “Nancy” gets a reboot and its first female cartoonist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Fiction, fantasy and reality in the Sunshine State. Lauren Groff talks about writing — and surviving — in Florida. The writer Carl Hiaasen tells Kurt Andersen how he turns sleaze into sunshine noir. In Celebration, Florida, fantasy meets reality. How the Florida wilderness helped create Jeff VanderMeer’s apocalyptic landscape. And Judy Blume tours her old stomping grounds in Miami Beach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
After its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, critics have called Hereditary the scariest movie of the year — perhaps even the scariest movie since The Exorcist. It’s a supernatural film starring Toni Collette about a family dealing with horrifying, unspeakable trauma. It’s the first feature film by writer and director Ari Aster. “It was very important to me that [ Hereditary ] functioned first as a vivid family drama,” he tells Kurt Andersen. “And then all the horror elements grow out of th...
An American Icons special segment about “Fahrenheit 451,” the cautionary tale about authoritarianism and free speech that has seen a sales surge since the 2016 election. How Tony Visconti, Bowie's longtime producer, captured the artist's career in a 15-minute remix for the exhibit “David Bowie is.” And why filmmaker Bart Layton included documentary elements in his feature “American Animals.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Columbia University astrophysicist Janna Levin talks to Kurt Andersen about gravitational waves, the book she wrote about the breakthrough called “Black Hole Blues,” and the arduous, 50-year journey to finally hearing the sound that proves a 100 year old theory of Einstein’s to be true. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James Gleick tries to imagine what Einstein would have thought about time travel. “For a while, I was hoping I could find a letter from Einstein,” he says. “My dream was that he'd read the 'Time Machine' and said 'Ah ha!' But of course, there's nothing like that. There's no evidence that I could find that Einstein was a sci-fi buff.” And John Wray’s novel, The Lost Time Accidents is about an eastern European family in the early 1900s that believes that they have discovered the secret to time tra...
When he was growing up in Germany in the 1880s and 90s, nobody had pegged Einstein as a genius. He dropped out of high school and had to apply twice to a university in Switzerland that accepted students without high school diplomas. He did well at college, but didn’t apply himself and struggled to complete assignments and pass tests.He ended up working at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland and knew, if he wanted to be a physicist, he had to do research and get published. He was looking at th...
How do you build a monument to a war that was more tragic than triumphant? Maya Lin was practically a kid when she got the commission to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall . “The veterans were asking me, ‘What do you think people are going to do when they first come here?’” she remembers. “And I wanted to say, ‘They’re going to cry.’" Her minimalistic granite wall was derided by one vet as a “black gash of shame.” But inscribed with the name of every fallen soldier, it bec...
In 2012, Bart Layton made his directorial debut with The Imposter — an ambitious true crime story that mixes documentary and narrative filmmaking. His latest movie further blurs the lines between fiction and reality: American Animals depicts a 2004 book heist by interspersing interviews with real people and the fictionalized version of the events. “I found myself thinking maybe there’s a new way to tell a true story,” Bart Layton tells Kurt Andersen. “Where you kind of get to have your cake and ...
The latest installment in Studio 360’s American Icons series: The Muppets — how the world fell for Jim Henson’s troupe of puppets. Plus, teleprompters were supposed to make cue cards obsolete, but not on “Saturday Night Live,” where “Cue Card Wally” Feresten is indispensable. And singer Angélique Kidjo talks about her new album “Remain in Light,” a track-by-track cover of the 1980 Talking Heads album. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
For a long time, mainstream scientists were deeply skeptical about the theory of multiple universes — but comic-book writers immediately saw the creative possibilities. University of Minnesota physics professor (and author of the book "The Physics of Superheroes" ) James Kakalios pays a visit to Source Comics & Games in St. Paul.Plus, the series finale of the show “St. Elsewhere,” where we learn that the entire show had been a fantasy of a boy with autism named Tommy Westphall. Learn more ab...
“The Crawick Multiverse” is a sprawling piece of landscape art tucked into Dumfries and Galloway in the Scottish countryside, on the site of what used to be a coal mine. The artist Charles Jenks took the BBC’s Anna Magnusson on a tour of the site.The landscape is a series of connected paths and landforms, studded with large boulders that make the site feel like a modern Stonehenge. The rocks appear ageless, but the mounds formed in the soil appear contemporary — even futuristic — with clean, geo...
Mark Oliver Everett (AKA "E") is best known as the singer, songwriter, and driving force behind the indie rock band Eels . A lesser-known biographical detail about Mark: his father, Hugh Everett III, proposed the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Everett's work raised the possibility that multiple realities could exist simultaneously, with multiple versions of us in them. It was an out-there idea when Everett first proposed it in 1957, but over the years it has gained adherents,...
A show about how — and why — pets become our muses. Elias Weiss Friedman, the photographer behind the blog The Dogist, shows Kurt how to photograph a pooch and get that cocked-head, raised-ears look. Dog trainer Teresa Miller explains how she trained the canine stars of the Hungarian film “White God” to perform. Jazz legend Charles Mingus’s lesser known masterwork: a book about how he toilet trained his cat. Why Laurie Anderson decided to start performing concerts for dogs. Writer John Haskell’s...
In the MeToo era, so many creative people are being outed as bullies, sexual predators, and worse. And for journalists who cover arts and entertainment, it’s been a bit of a tightrope: How can you write about House of Cards or The Cosby Show ever again without the work feeling hopelessly tainted? And are they still great shows, even if their stars or creators aren't? How do you investigate claims of harassment if no one will talk, and a star's publicist won't let you near their client? What exce...
The art of motherhood. Gloria Calderón Kellett talks about making “One Day at a Time” and the classic TV moms who influenced how she writes about motherhood. Novelists Louise Erdrich and Megan Hunter, along with Parley Ann Boswell, talk about the artistic choice of featuring pregnant women in dystopian fiction. Isabella Rossellini talks to Kurt Andersen about her short film series, “Mammas,” that looks at different animals’ approaches to motherhood. And listener Beth Greenspan finds inspiration ...
Creating superheroes. Kurt Andersen talks with “Superman” writer Gene Luen Yang on “Boxers & Saints” and “American Born Chinese.” Plus, the complicated — and sometimes divisive — issue of cosplay characters dressing up as a character of a different race. And producers Brendan Baker and Chloe Prasinos talk about all the work and (and a 3-D recording gizmo) that went into making their new podcast, Marvel’s “Wolverine: The Long Night.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi...
After touring the world for the last five years, the "David Bowie is" exhibit is making its final stand at the Brooklyn Museum. The show features over 400 pieces: diary entries, handwritten lyrics, artwork, and lots of unforgettable costumes. But Bowie's music is on display as well. One of the show's highlights is a mashup of David Bowie songs, created by his longtime producer and collaborator, Tony Visconti. It’s a 15 minute musical tour of Bowie’s career that showcases the incredible diversity...
Kurt Andersen speaks with Laurie Metcalf, the actor who is striking gold everywhere: she was nominated for an Oscar for her role as the mother in “Lady Bird,” stars in the Broadway play “Three Tall Women,” and, with most of the rest of the original cast, has returned to the reboot of “Roseanne” on ABC. Wes Montgomery is a legend of jazz guitar, and much of that notoriety first came from a 1960 album, “The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery.” Somewhere between theater and installation art, ...
Three stories from the American Icons series. How “Amazing Grace,” a song written by a slave trader, came to be a civil rights anthem. Plus, a novel that featured “Amazing Grace” and helped popularize it, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book helped promote the abolitionist cause, yet the term “Uncle Tom” became a pejorative for people who betray their race. And far from glorifying small-town life, Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” shocked readers when it came out in 1915 an...
Now that it’s conquered the cineplex and Netflix, Marvel is going after your earbuds — with its first scripted podcast, Wolverine: The Long Night . It tells the story of Special Agents Pierce and Marshall, who arrive in a small Alaskan fishing town to investigate a series of mysterious murders and a suspicious loner living in the woods. Producers Brendan Baker and Chloe Prasinos reveal the high-tech and low-tech ways they made this sound-rich audio drama. For now, Wolverine: The Long Night is on...
An oral history of The Noid. It was a lighthearted Domino’s campaign, with claymation by the same designers who made the California Raisins — but it drove one man over the edge. Plus, Kurt Andersen talks with TV and magazine writer Nell Scovell about her memoir, “Just the Funny Parts.” And Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie talks to Kurt about how, after his wife Geneviève Castrée died, he couldn’t write songs about anything else, and he performs a couple in our studio. Learn more about your ad choices...
