Television drama has created the impression of an ideal world where decisions in hospitals are made quickly and cost is never an issue. It directly affects our expectations for treatment, according to Billy Goldberg, an emergency-room physician, and Joseph Turow ...

Video: A scene from the Scrubs episode "My Musical"

A murderous rampage in Afghanistan earlier this month left 16 civilians, nine of them children, dead. The stereotype of the combat veteran who snaps in an act of crazed violence has been familiar since the Vietnam War in movies and fiction. The novelist and essayist George Saunders ...

We’ve always heard the television brought Americans together. Now a lot of what’s on just makes us mad at each other. Sociologist Max Kilger says you can tell a person’s politics by the television they watch. Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky decided to do his own experiment. He submitted ...

Gerald Joyce is a professor of biochemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In the 1970s, he was studying biochemistry at The University of Chicago, when he discovered Gravity's Rainbow, the sprawling World War II novel by Thomas Pynchon ...

The best-seller list is dominated by memoirs and self-help books written by celebrities and politicians. Or “written” by celebrities and politicians. “On the non-fiction best-seller list, 12 out of the 15 books listed probably have been ghostwritten,” reveals literary agent Madeleine Morel. ...

Everything we’re able to do today to enhance humans — from genetic engineering to artificial limbs — simply improves on the base model we were born with. But for some people, that doesn’t go far enough. They think we shouldn’t be stuck with the factory-installed settings in our DNA. And they're not satisfied with a lifespan ...

Slideshow: Transhumanist Art

Neil Harbisson is a painter, a musician, and a cyborg. Born with a rare form of colorblindness, Harbisson can only see the world in grays. In 2004, he collaborated with a scientist to create a device called the Eyeborg, which he wears everywhere — even in his passport picture ...

Video: Neil Harbisson's Sonochromatic Portrait #1

It’s great to be a vampire, right? Shows like True Blood and Vampire Diaries make them so glamorous. And consider the buzz around the last Twilight movie, which comes out next month. But Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky has learned that being a vampire isn’t as easy or attractive as pop culture would have us believe ...

Every time a new Apple product is rumored, a fraction of the country goes into a frenzy. Every bit of new information is pored over by millions of Apple cultists. A new release is earning that kind of excitement right now, but it’s an old-fashioned book — a handsome, hardcover biography of Steve Jobs ...

Bonus Track: Kurt's extended conversation with Walter Isaacson

Téa Obreht is 26-years old, and she’s already received wide acclaim for her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. Last summer, she won the Orange Prize awarded to the best English-language book written by a woman. Now The Tiger's Wife is one of five works nominated for this year's National Book Award in fiction ...

Last week Amazon had its second Campfire conference, bringing a group of writers together for an under-the-radar gathering in Santa Fe, NM. Kurt Andersen attended last year, and he felt the company was trying to soften up the literary establishment as it moves toward publishing. In recent months ...

If you live in New York or can make it there by January, the season's must-see painting exhibition is the new Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which spans the artist’s long and productive career. We see his early days ...

There are so many surveillance cameras installed in public spaces (malls, gas stations, ATMs) that you can be photographed hundreds of times in a day. The top–selling iPhone app iSpy lets the user watch thousands of live–streaming closed–circuit television cameras around the world ...

In September, DC Comics rebooted all of its main story lines, wiping the slate clean for the best-known superhero titles.  Each starts over at issue #1.  Fans were puzzled as Wonder Woman came back as a horror comic, fighting supernatural ickies rather than putting bad guys in the place. It’s been a tough year for Wonder Woman.  NBC’s much-anticipated pilot ...

Slideshow: Wonder Woman Through the Ages

In 1966, Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Gotham's police commissioner, began fighting crime in DC Comic's "Batgirl." Then, in the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke, she was shot by The Joker, paralyzing her from the waist down. And so Batgirl became the paraplegic character called Oracle ...

Slideshow: A New Batgirl

Lately it seems like you can't pick up a new work of fiction without some character crawling out of the grave or casting a spell. Authors we used call "serious" and "literary" — shorthand for writers who wrote realism — are suddenly writing about the magical and supernatural. Colson Whitehead ...

The actor Jeff Bridges has appeared in nearly 60 feature films, and won his first Academy Award this year for his performance as Bad Blake in Crazy Heart. Blake is a washed-up country singer who returns to music, reluctantly. Turns out, Bridges himself was a musician before he was an actor ...

This weekend, a menace from outer space will invade a dusty town in the Wild West. The movie Cowboys and Aliens is the ultimate genre mash-up — science fiction meets the Western. Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky thinks there’s a reason why we keep retelling the narrative of the alien invasion over and over: it's our history.

Téa Obreht is 25 years old, and she’s already received a career’s worth of plaudits for her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. The novel gained attention for the deftness with which it shifts between realism and fable, and for its sense of deep wisdom about ...