Despite success abroad, the Iranian film industry is in serious trouble with the government. Prominent directors have been jailed, and last week the government shut down the House of Cinema, Iran's largest independent film institute. Filmmaker Rafi Pitts believes the industry "has been pushed ...

The new DVD Talking Heads: Chronology contains film and video of Talking Heads in performance going all the way back to 1975 — before the advent of camcorders, and two years before the release of the band’s first LP. Kurt Andersen talks with David Byrne, the band’s ...

Video: Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer" Live at CBGB, 1975

When Amy Douglas was a teenager, her parents sent her to a boarding school for troubled kids deep in the Arizona desert. There she fell deep into a depression and struggled with an eating disorder. Then a cassette copy of The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads helped ...

Last fall, Kate Ahearn from Haverhill, Massachusetts, wrote in begging us to redesign the image of teachers. "I have been teaching for 15-plus years and have enough of what I deem 'apple crapple' to last me a lifetime." So we recruited the New York design firm Hyperakt to give teachers a ...

Video: Inside the design process

The New Orleans piano player Henry Roeland Byrd made a name for himself as Professor Longhair, a former street hustler turned self-taught musician who started recording in his early 30s. In 1953 Atlantic records released "Tipitina." “As a kid you heard that song seven or eight times ...

What if Anne Frank had lived? That’s the premise of the new novel by Shalom Auslander, who made his name with the dark comic memoir Foreskin's Lament. Hope: A Tragedy is about a yuppie named Solomon Kugel who leaves New York City with his family for a a rustic farmhouse. ...

Bonus Track: Kurt Andersen's full conversation with Shalom Auslander