The Scene: Baltimore
From WYPR's The Signal, a weekly radio magazine devoted to Maryland's cultural scene, hosted by Andy Bienstock.

David Silverman’s got a collection of almost 900 pinball machines, and he’s just opened the National Pinball Museum in downtown Baltimore.  We drop in at the museum for a crash course in pinball history. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, just arrived in theaters.  It's an adaptation of the September 11-themed novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. But before Foer became a novelist, he was an aspiring sculptor. ...

Angelina Jolie may be the most tattooed actress in Hollywood. She has the coordinates of her children’s birthplaces on her arm, a Buddhist Pali incantation on her shoulder blade, a cross on her hip, a rune on her wrist, a tiger on her lower back ... Jolie recently ...

This year, Kurt talked to movie stars, revolutionaries, and polymaths — and he hosted the first-ever audio broadcast in 3D. Intriguing things often happened before the mic is switched on and the story continues after it's switched off. The Studio 360 staff ...

There is no shortage of 2011 year-end playlists, but few are as trustworthy as what's currently on David Byrne's iPod. The former Talking Heads front man sat down with Kurt Andersen this week to talk about the new Talking Heads: Chronology DVD, a collection of rare ...

Christmas starts earlier every year, and perhaps the wreaths and peppermint mochas have you rolling your eyes. If so, too bad! It’ll be over soon enough, so light a pine-scented candle, set your Pandora to "Jingle Bells," and dig in to the Studio 360 Christmas archive. ...

This morning, TIME announced 2011's Person of the Year: The Protester. Studio 360's own Kurt Andersen wrote the cover story, and was sworn to secrecy so we were just as surprised as everyone else. But in retrospect, we probably could have seen it coming. We’ve been covering the art ...

The press calls it the "God particle," about to be discovered by a "doomsday machine." Hyperbole aside, this morning at 8am EST, scientists operating the Large Hadron Collider on the Franco-Swiss border announced their biggest finding yet related to the elusive Higgs boson particle. Two independent teams of ...

Elliott Carter might be the hardest working man in classical music today. Having turned 103 over the weekend, he’s certainly the oldest. The composer is celebrating his latest birthday by premiering several new pieces, five of which were performed last week. The festivities continue tonight when Julliard's AXIOM ensemble performs ...

Since Kit White and I met when I was a freshman in college, I've just realized that means we've been friends for two-thirds of our lives. He is pretty much the same person he was then: philosophically serious but funny and fun, learned, lucid, wise, and a painter ...

The first thing you notice walking into Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory is its awesome scale.  In a city where every nook and cranny seems to be spoken for, the 55,000 square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall looks like it might have landed from outer space.  Completed in 1881, ...

Hollywood likes to cast model-type stars as high-level as high level scientists (remember Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in a James Bond movie?). In this case, it’s true. Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood ...

Last month Julian Barnes received the prestigious Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. In 2006, Kurt Andersen interviewed Barnes as part of the National Book Foundation's "Eat, Drink & Be Literary" series ...

Inní by Sigur Rós is both a trippy documentation of the band's 2008 tour and the band's first-ever live album.  The DVD/CD set is out today and the New York Times calls it a concert film that "leaves most of its genre in ...

This weekend, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented a new work of originality, power, and beauty that left an audience slack-jawed. Brooklyn Babylon is a collaboration between the graphic novelist Danijel Zezelj and composer Darcy James Argue, and it is destined to be considered a classic of the ...

This week, David Ives’ Venus in Fur opened at Manhattan Theatre Club's Friedman Theatre for a limited run, with Nina Arianda playing opposite British actor Hugh Dancy.  The show opened Off Broadway in January 2010 and killed; the New York Times’ critic called Arianda's performance sensational, ...

Right now 20th century photography geeks are experiencing something of a perfect storm. From a new coffee table book, to a major museum exhibition, to images just made available on Wikimedia Commons ...

Last night, New York City’s famed Webster Hall played host to the second-to-last stop on St. Vincent's sold-out North American tour.  Her 80-minute set was dominated by songs off her critically acclaimed new record Strange Mercy ...

It’s been 25 years since Art Spiegelman published Maus, the graphic novel about his father's experiences in the Holocaust. This is the book that opened the doors for graphic novels and eventually graphic nonfiction, and made alternative comics a mainstream ...