March 27, 2009
Nineteen years ago in Boston, two guys wearing fake police uniforms walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and an hour later walked out with masterpieces worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The FBI is still looking for the crooks and the stolen art, but reporter Ulrich Boser thinks he's solved the mystery. Kurt talks with Boser about his new book, The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft.
Amid the 1900 bands who played the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas last weekend, Janelle Monáe stood out from the crowd. She's a funk-soul singer who fills her tunes with sci-fi and robot references. Her new album is Metropolis: The Chase Suite. Studio 360’s Leital Molad caught up with Monáe backstage.
Watch the dazzling Monáe in this video. Note: the audio is off her record. The bass was so loud it blew out the camera's mic.
With fewer customers these days for new desks and kitchenware, manufacturers are nervous. Industrial and product designers are on the case. They're trying to come up with new designs that directly respond to the public’s mood. Produced by Kaomi Goetz.
The fashion writer Lynn Yaeger wondered what kind of advice the high-end fashion magazines were giving their readers during the Great Depression. So she plowed through some old issues of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar for some style hints for the economically-challenged.
Movie ticket sales are up. Book buyers can't get enough of Malcolm Gladwell. What makes pop entertainment recession-proof? Jocelyn Gonzales looks into which films, books, and music are popular when economic times are tough.
Last year Marc Matsumoto got laid off from his marketing job at a technology company. So he decided it was time to embrace his passion: cooking. Produced by Gretta Cohn.
Kurt's brother David Andersen went to L.A. to pursue rock n' roll thirty years ago, but today he's one of the top piano technicians in southern California. Now rock stars are his clients, along with film composers and jazz musicians. Produced by Studio 360's Derek John.
Studio 360 is a co-production of
Public
Radio International and
WNYC New York Public Radio, and is funded in part by
Ken and Lucy Lehman, the
National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the
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. 
