Puppets are popping up everywhere, from TV to Broadway. Kurt wonders what's behind this unexpected trend.

Ben Katchor is best known for his comic strips about eccentric characters, like Julius Knipel, Real Estate Photographer. Katchor has now transformed one of his strips into a stage musical. It's called The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island or the Friends of Dr. Rushower. It's a romance and ...

In the 1970's painter Chuck Close helped spur a renaissance of portraiture. His huge photorealist canvasses of family and friends were created with the help of — the grid. Close's recent paintings explode with pixelated blobs of color. His work has been the subject of major retrospective exhibitions ...

Producer Simon Rentner explores how the grid has served artists throughout history.

Morton Feldman was a composer who decided graph paper could set his music free. He created a whole new way of notating music in the 1960's. It included a lot of scribbled marks in rows of little boxes. The music scholar David Bernstein and percussionist Jan Williams describe how Feldman's ...

Kurt Andersen walks the streets of Lower Manhattan with Marilyn Taylor. She is the chairman of the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill — and heads its urban design and planning practice. Her firm is rebuilding 7 World Trade Center, one of the buildings destroyed alongside the towers. On ...

"You'd sell more books if you wrote more poems about your mama," Tennessee's poet laureate Maggie Vaughn once told an aspiring fellow poet. We hear Vaughn recite some of her "Mama Songs." Produced by Andy Scheinman and Hal Humphries.