In Jon Robin Baitz's new play, Other Desert Cities, a novelist returns home to her prominent California Republican parents with the manuscript of a new book — a memoir filled with very dirty laundry. Kurt talks to Baitz about how this combination of tension, comedy, and politics has become the playwright's specialty.

We're celebrating 360's first decade on the air with the publication of the book Spark: How Creativity Works, by long-time Studio 360 executive producer Julie Burstein. This week, Julie shares childhood stories from Chuck Close, Richard Ford, Mira Nair, and Richard Serra.

(To hear our original full-length interviews with those artists go here.)

Kitchen designer Lyn Peterson says that everything we take for granted can be traced back to the Frankfurt Kitchen, created by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in the late 1920s. It's the mother of all modern kitchens, and an original version was recently acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The buzzy new novel O imagines Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, but its insider author is staying anonymous. Kurt is hot on the trail of who it might be, with help from New York magazine political writer John Heilemann.

Hollywood never produced a realistic movie about lesbian parents — until 2010's "The Kids Are All Right." It tells the story of two moms and their sperm donor, and it's now up for several Oscars. Last summer the writer-director Lisa Cholodenko told Kurt how she managed to make an accessible, touching film out of what could have been an outsider art-house flick.

We all complain about the 24-7 news cycle, but nobody actually does anything about it. Except maybe Studio 360’s resident folksinger, Scott Blaszak.