Darcy James Argue’s new album Brooklyn Babylon is one of the most anticipated jazz albums of the year. But Argue wondered if he should even record it. “I thought long and hard whether this would work as a record,” he tells Kurt Andersen, because Brooklyn Babylon was originally a score ...

Jaron Lanier is a pioneering computer scientist, a creator of virtual reality, a musician, and the author of You Are Not a Gadget, which takes a skeptical view of the role we have given technology in our lives. Lanier worries that it discourages originality and uniqueness in the generation ...

Kurt Andersen talks with Gary Marcus about what science knows, and doesn’t know, about creativity. Marcus is the director of New York University’s Center for Language and Music, and the author of Guitar Zero, a book about how the brain learns. Marcus is skeptical of tests that measure ...

Kurt Andersen asks about the role of disinhibition — the brain loosening control of its output — as a component of creativity, noting alcohol and drug use among artists of all kinds. Marcus adds LSD to the list, for a brief but innovative era. But he describes current research ...

Love in the movies is about the flirtation, the exciting courtship, the comic mismatch, the embarrassing one-night stand — not waking up next to someone every day for the rest of your life. Jeanine Basinger, the author of the new book I Do and I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies ...

William S. Burroughs famously said that “language is a virus.” Novelist Ben Marcus took Burrough's line as inspiration for The Flame Alphabet. In the book, the language of children has become literally poisonous to adults, and a married couple with a teenage daughter is faced ...

Computer viruses have evolved from an annoyance to a national security threat. Recently the Department of Homeland Security told Americans to disable Java on our home computers (a thing that few of us knew how to do) because of flaws that left it vulnerable to viruses ...

Most plays about historical events and figures take liberties with the facts — you probably couldn’t write a good play if you didn’t. Audiences, though, can be distracted by wondering ‘was that bit really true?’ Lucas Hnath’s new play about Isaac Newton handles the problem in a unique way ...

Argo has been one of last year’s most celebrated films. Ben Affleck directed the movie and stars as the CIA operative who masterminded the escape of six US embassy employees from Tehran during the 1979 hostage crisis. That man’s name is Tony Mendez, and Latinos ...

In the ballad, told countless times over more than a century, the railroad worker John Henry wins a race against a new steam-powered drill, but the victory is Pyrrhic: he collapses, saying “Give me a cool drink of water before I die.” “Did he win? Did he lose?,” wonders novelist Colson Whitehead ...

Emily Dickinson is one of those writers whose life is as famous as her writing: after she died, having spent much of her life writing at home, her sister found nearly two thousand poems in her bureau. "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," Dickinson’s fantasy of getting picked up by the grim reaper ...

Lois Lowry’s The Giver is one of the most celebrated children’s books of our era, and one of the most banned. Son, the final book in The Giver series, tells the story of Claire. Assigned at age 12 to the job of birthmother, she feels a forbidden love for the boy she delivers at 14 ...

Jeff Bridges has been interested in making a film of The Giver since the 1990s, when Lois Lowry’s dark science fiction novel for young adults was a bestseller. The story has yet to shoot. But yesterday in an interview with Kurt Andersen, Lowry confirmed that the film has a green light ...

Jaron Lanier is a pioneering computer scientist, a creator of virtual reality, a musician, and the author of You Are Not a Gadget, which takes a skeptical view of the role we have given technology in our lives. Lanier worries that it discourages originality and uniqueness in the generation ...

Kurt Andersen asks about the role of disinhibition — the brain loosening control of its output — as a component of creativity, noting alcohol and drug use among artists of all kinds. Marcus adds LSD to the list, for a brief but innovative era. But he describes current research ...

Kurt Andersen talks with Gary Marcus about what science knows, and doesn’t know, about creativity. Marcus is the director of New York University’s Center for Language and Music, and the author of Guitar Zero, a book about how the brain learns. Marcus is skeptical of tests that measure ...

Professional photographers have always tweaked their images. But the ubiquity of image manipulation tools like Photoshop has brought us to a new place: for the first time, we no longer assume that a photograph documents real life. Maneesh Agrawala, a MacArthur “genius” ...

For the candidate who loses a presidential election, it’s got to be humbling. What would you say to a friend who’s America's #1 loser? “The last thing you want is something snarky,” says David Ellis Dickerson, a former Hallmark writer (true!) who takes special requests for unusual circumstances ...

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