Every time a new Apple product is rumored, a fraction of the country goes into a frenzy. Every bit of new information is pored over by millions of Apple cultists. A new release is earning that kind of excitement right now, but it’s an old-fashioned book — a handsome, hardcover biography of Steve Jobs ...

Bonus Track: Kurt's extended conversation with Walter Isaacson

“Larger-than-life” doesn’t do justice to performer Sandra Bernhard. She can be cartoonishly tough and irreverent, but also intensely sincere. Her breakout role came in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), in which she plays an obsessed fan who helps kidnap the talk show host ...

Jesmyn Ward was at the tail end of her summer break when Hurricane Katrina struck her hometown of Delisle, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast. In the days leading up to the storm, she was supposed to return to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to start teaching. "But because I’m always so homesick,” she tells Kurt Andersen ...

Bonus Track: Jesmyn Ward reads from Salvage the Bones

Last week on the show, we heard from people who are so passionate about their careers as scientists and mathematicians that they've tattooed equations and fragments of DNA on their bodies. So we asked: Do you have a tattoo related to your profession? Listener Cris Martin of Arlington, Massachusetts works at Harvard's Davis Center ...

It’s great to be a vampire, right? Shows like True Blood and Vampire Diaries make them so glamorous. And consider the buzz around the last Twilight movie, which comes out next month. But Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky has learned that being a vampire isn’t as easy or attractive as pop culture would have us believe ...