In the latest installment of our series on forwarded emails, Kurt Andersen gushes over a nine second video in which 500 kilovolts of electricity light up the Nevada sky.

The hero of Colson Whitehead's new novel Apex Hides the Hurt is an advertising executive with a natural gift for branding new products. Kurt Andersen asked Whitehead why he gave his character the strange gig of renaming a small town with a troubled history.

In some ways, the career of film composer Hugo Friedhofer was a typical Hollywood story. He was a brilliant musician who created some of the most memorable scores -- like the soundtrack to The Best Years Of Our Lives -- but never got the fame he deserved. WNYC's

Lawrence Weschler sees amazing patterns and provocative echoes in images that shouldn't share anything in common -- like a photo from Ground Zero and a Rembrandt painting. The results are eerie and possibly profound -- but Weschler wants us to figure out what it all means.

When Tom Long first heard the song "Born to Run" in the summer of 1976, he realized he was just like a character in a Bruce Springsteen song; living a life of quiet desperation in a dead-end job. So Tom joined the army.

Caveh Zahedi's films are auto-biographical, to say the least. His new film I Am a Sex Addict follows his previous indie films I Was Possessed by God and I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore. Producer Jonathan Mitchell thinks we can learn something from watching ...

Many of the New Orleans musicians who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina decided to make Austin, Texas their new home. In some ways, Austin and New Orleans are a natural fit: they're both big music towns with a reputation for tolerance. But their signature styles of music might as well ...