Super 8 may be the biggest movie of the summer — but nothing can sway my loyalty to Friday Night Lights.

We were saddened to learn of the death today of Cy Twombly, the American artist known for his abstract, childlike paintings. A couple years ago on the show, the songwriter Tift Merritt shared this touching story with us about how a Twombly painting saved her from her writer's block.

Pandora dominates the field of music streaming, with its playlists generated by algorithm. (Founder Tim Westergren explained the process to Kurt Andersen last summer.) But a worthy opponent is emerging: Turntable.fm. Instead of sophisticated algorithms, Turntable.fm has you and your fellow listeners do the work of playlisting for each other. In the first month, the site claims 140,000 users, suggesting that the programmers might be missing something.

Citing budget cutbacks, the Brooklyn Museum announced this week that it was canceling its upcoming exhibition of “Art in the Streets,” a popular and controversial retrospective of street art currently showing at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. “Art in the Streets” has brought in droves of visitors to LA MOCA, while reigniting that very old culture war over whether a tag on the side of a building or a subway — an act of vandalism — can also be classified as a work of art.

Last week, James Franco and the art duo known as Praxis (Brainard and Delia Carey) kicked off a fundraising effort for a new project. Franco has his hands on so many projects that one wonders how he can execute them all, so this one is perhaps fitting in that Franco doesn’t have to execute anything. The Museum Of Non-Visible Art (MONA) is an art museum "composed entirely of ideas."

Just in time for Father's Day, Adam Mansbach's big time, bedtime book for grown-ups was officially released today; it's been the most-discussed item in publishing for months, after a pirated PDF version went viral. Go the Fuck to Sleep has already been a gigantic success for small press Akashic Books, which typically publishes literary fiction, noir, and counterculture nonfiction, and the book is currently number-one on Amazon's bestseller list.

Marie Curie is the sexiest story in science history and has charmed authors, filmmakers, and playwrights.  Add Alan Alda to the list, who makes his playwrighting debut with Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie.  At the opening gala for the World Science Festival last night, a terrific cast (including Maggie Gyllenhaal and Liev Shreiber) performed a reading.

Listen to an excerpt

An old ukulele — bought at an Army-Navy store — started Merrill Garbus on the path to drum-looping, face-painting renown with her band tUnE-yArDs. She told Kurt Andersen that her mother's uke helped her make the career switch from aspiring puppeteer to inventive musician and critical darling.

How did you spend Monday night? Here in Studio 360, we tapped a keg, lined up some killer acts, and hung out with 150 of our closest friends at WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. We'll air the whole show next week, but until then, you can watch some choice excerpts of performances by comedian Eugene Mirman and the band tUnE-yArDs.

The Book of Mormon is the toast of Broadway (with 14 nominations for June’s Tony Awards). Trey Parker and Matt Stone teamed up with Robert Lopez, best known for Avenue Q, to put the spring in the Mormons' steps. In this preview clip of Kurt Andersen's interview with Lopez, the composer deconstructs the song “All-American Prophet” and revives hooks previously lost to the cutting-room floor.

Jason de Caires Taylor’s haunting, beautiful underwater sculptures are human figures — they're modeled after locals in Cancun and the West Indies and made of an artificial material that acts like coral reef. Collectively, they comprise the world’s only underwater sculpture gardens.

Christian fundamentalist Harold Camping believes the apocalypse will come on Saturday (not in 2012 as the Mayans predicted), and is doing his best to make sure you're prepared.   The hip music magazine L.A. Record is also getting its readers ready by asking them to contribute original songs to their "Judgment Day Mixtape" — a collection of tunes that should be the perfect soundtrack to the rapture.

What songs would you put on an apocalypse-themed mixtape?

Usually when we heard from Osama Bin Laden it was on audio tapes broadcast on Al Jazeera — but he also appeared in bedrooms all over the world, haunting our dreams. This piece, Dreaming of Osama, was produced by Pejk Malinovski and originally aired on WNYC and PRI's The Next Big Thing.

No stranger to controversy — the cliché fits Tony Kushner, whose groundbreaking play cycle Angels in America (subtitle A Gay Fantasia on National Themes) was one of the major flashpoints in the modern culture war.  Now Kushner's views are once again subject of debate, this time from an unexpected quarter.

Studio 360 is redesigning Monopoly, and to help us decide what to toss and what to keep, we’ve gotten advice from an all-star team.  The former investment banker William Cohan suggested we let players leverage their holdings and create a bank with vested interests, but former ...

Edgar Choueiri's digital audio filter can take almost any recording and turn it into 3D — stereo tracks take on new depth and sound amazingly realistic after a quick pass through his algorithm. 

Listen to a demonstration and watch Kurt Andersen make a binaural recording

Edgar Chouieri is a longtime professor of applied physics and aerospace engineering — but since 2003 he has been moonlighting as an audio engineer, obsessed with 3D sound. And he's has figured out how to reproduce realistic 3D sound from just two speakers.

Video: Edgar Chouieri considers Bach in 3D

Recently, the singer-songwriter Antony Hegarty has been inspired by a peculiar out-of-body sensation. It's triggered by what he calls "swanlights ... the reflection of light on the surface of the water at night and the moment when a spirit jumps out of a body and turns into a ...

The Scottie dog has all the fun. Along with the battleship, the race car, and the top hat, it’s always part of the in-crowd of Monopoly game pieces. Consistently among the first to be selected, the Scottie dog confidently strolls down Boardwalk and turns heads as it passes Go in ...