Back in the 1980’s, the Flaming Lips were just an alternative rock band from Oklahoma. They toured for a decade before finally hitting it big in 1993 with their song "She Don't Use Jelly.” It was an ironic grunge anthem that landed them a cameo ...

Bonus Track: Obsessed with Britney Spears, Over Oklahoma

The News of the World phone hacking scandal is rocking the UK to its core and riveting Americans. It's a tale of vast illegal snooping, cover-ups, political liaisons, a mysterious death. The cliché is, ‘You can’t make this stuff up’ — but lots of ...

One of America's most original soul singers, the man who put the funk in R&B's trunk, is touring again. Swamp Dogg (no relation to Snoop) is playing just a few dates, including a free concert in Brooklyn tomorrow night.

The political and military chaos in Libya is about to enter its sixth month. As the rebels wage war against Muammar Gaddafi from their capital in Benghazi, and NATO air strikes continue to target his forces, subtler forms of protest that don't make...

April may be the cruelest month, but June has been good for T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem, The Waste Land. Eighty-nine years after it was published, the poem became a runaway hit in the form of a new iPad application that’s selling like gangbusters...

Timothy Schaffert’s new book isn’t a typical mystery novel. It’s got an ominous crime set in a small town rife with intrigue, but the narrator isn’t a hardscrabble police detective or a noirish gumshoe. Instead, Schaffert’s story is told by an 83-year old grandmother — and obituary writer. Schaffert’s choice of the elderly Essie Myles as...

Listener Challenge: Write your own obituary

Last week, Apple’s Steve Jobs made a design presentation — not to masses of swooning tech journalists, but to the Cupertino, California city council. What Jobs unveiled this time was Apple’s future corporate headquarters. The design, by celebrated architect Norman Foster, is shaped like a giant ...

Another season of primetime television just wrapped up and, as always, it was chock full of liberal programming designed to brainwash America. At least that’s according to Ben Shapiro, author of the new book Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV.  Shapiro writes a conservative...

Listener Susan Evans grew up in rural Louisiana during the 1950s and 60s. Her first year of high school was also the first year of federally enforced integration in her town — and that did not sit well with her white parents. It wasn’t until years later that ...

From the beginning it was like fiction.  The world’s most famous skyscrapers vaporized by two hijacked airliners.  The phrase you heard over and over again was: "it seemed just like a movie."  Yes, but the implausible opening sequence of a bad action movie — spectacular destruction orchestrated by a rich, ...

It may just be the best use of 3D technology yet: to bring moviegoers to a place they will never, ever, be able to visit. That's what director Werner Herzog does with Cave of Forgotten Dreams. He tells Kurt Andersen how he came to film one of the most amazing discoveries of our time — the 30,000-year-old...

Bonus Track: Kurt Andersen's Full Conversation with Werner Herzog

Edgar Chouieri knows how things work; he’s a rocket scientist — officially, the Director of Princeton University's Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory. If NASA ever sends a person to Mars, Chouieri’s research probably will have played a role. But Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen visited his lab recently to get a taste of the future right now. Chouieri’s hobby is acoustics...

Bonus Track: Listen to Sound in 3D

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

On this week's show marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, historian Adam Goodheart talks to Kurt Andersen about his new book 1861, which reveals how technological changes like the telegraph helped fuel the conflict.  But war wasn't the only thing that broke out between the North and South — so too did men's facial hair.

A highly anticipated biography of Malcolm X was published today, with new research that will likely challenge many of our existing notions about the still-controversial black leader.  Sadly, the book’s author won’t be able to engage in the fresh debates it’s certain to generate.  Columbia University historian and civil rights scholar Manning Marable died on Friday at the age of 60, after ten years of work on Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, and just three days before the book was published.

Bonus Track: One of the last recorded interviews with Manning Marable

Are there too many little theater companies in America? Last month, that question was the shot heard round the theater world from National Endowment for the Arts Chair Rocco Landesman, a former Broadway producer. Landesman shocked the theater community by observing at a play development conference ...

Last week, Japanese-American historian Bill Tsutsui found himself in Tokyo in the middle of the earthquake: “We were outside this hotel and the earth started moving.  And all of a sudden people started running out.  First just a few, but then wave after wave.  And after it was ...

As Congress holds hearings this week on the radicalization of American Muslims, a Pakistani-American playwright is trying to flip the script. Wajahat Ali, who earned raves for his post-9/11 family drama The Domestic Crusaders, told Kurt Andersen, "It would be similar to ...

Meet Watson, the newest contestant on Jeopardy! Starting Monday, February 14, he’ll compete against the greatest Jeopardy! players of our generation. Did we mention that Watson is a supercomputer?

Anyone else feeling a little political déjà vu?  Fifteen years ago a salacious political novel called Primary Colors offered a thinly veiled account of President Bill Clinton’s election campaign and was written by…well, no one knew. Primary Colors was a huge success and turned into a movie.  Now, as if on cue, we get O: a Presidential Novel, a juicy speculative account of President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign written by another “Anonymous” author.