January 19, 2007
Novels about "the immigrant experience" are usually sentimental tales of pluck and dignity. Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan is not one of those novels. The hero of the book is a 300 pound Russian named Misha Vainberg who boasts that he has a huge fancy loft apartment in Manhattan and a Puerto Rican-Mexican-Irish-German stripper girlfriend from the Bronx. Shteyngart tells Kurt Andersen about why he wanted to satirize the wild and crazy immigrant experience.
We consume paper by the ton, but most of us never think about where all that paper really comes from. Just how do trees turn into printer paper? We sent reporter Sean Cole on a mission to find out.
The songwriter Lee Hazlewood just released his last album, Cake or Death. Hazlewood has had many ups and downs in his half-century career, and lately his music has become popular with rock musicians young enough to be his grandkids. Produced by Michael Raphael.
The Wall Street Journal has a new look – the paper recently shaved off a few inches of its width. In this week’s installment of Design for the Real World, we asked design guru Chee Pearlman to give us the skinny on the new format.
Lisa Germano is not your typical female singer-songwriter. Sure, her voice is breathy, and a lot of her songs are confessional and melancholy -- but there's something slightly scary and weird about her work. Kurt Andersen chats with Germano in between songs from her latest album In the Maybe World.
Studio 360 is a co-production of
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National Endowment for the Humanities. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our series on Underground Heroes is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 
