February 23, 2007
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist sets her latest novel, Ten Days in the Hills in a fancy home high above Los Angeles. Sex, Hollywood, and soap opera-like personal drama give the novel a frenzied energy. But there's another element the author adds into the mix. Kurt Andersen talks with Smiley about what inspired her to give the book the tense backdrop of March 2003, the earliest days of the war in Iraq.
In the 1960s and 70s, Hollywood turned to the Western to depict the racial, moral, and military issues of the Vietnam War. Today, directors and screenwriters are again grappling with war indirectly, through genres like fantasy and science fiction. Critics Lisa Schwartzbaum and Laura Miller show us how the war in Iraq gets addressed in the movie Children of Men and television's Battlestar Galactica. Produced by Eric Molinsky
We often picture U.S. combat troops huddled in an armored vehicle in the desert, listening to heavy metal music like Slayer, Metallica, or Megadeth, at full volume. The heaviest of heavy metal also inspired a few young Iraqis to form a rock group. Based in Baghdad, they call themselves Acrassicauda—after a species of black scorpion.
Along with a keyboard, the mouse is the main tool most people use to control their computers. But it’s not exactly subtle. Bill Verplank, one of the founding fathers of interaction design, tells us about the past and future of the mouse. Produced by Gideon D'Arcangelo
The story is simple: a thirty-something guy is single in New York – all of his friends are married. When Stephen Sondheim's Company debuted in 1970, no Broadway musical had portrayed sex, dating and marriage in contemporary America so frankly on stage. But now, at the ripe age of thirty-seven, Company seems very current. Two of its stars, Raul Esparza and Barbara Walsh, along with the show’s music supervisor, Mary-Mitchell Campbell join Kurt in the studio.
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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. 
