Daniel Eagan knew from a young age that he wanted to pursue a career in film. The movie he credits with setting him on that path, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels  (1941), also gave him nightmares. The movie is about a disgruntled director named John Sullivan. Fed up ...

Video: A scene from Sullivan’s Travels

There is no shortage of 2011 year-end playlists, but few are as trustworthy as what's currently on David Byrne's iPod. The former Talking Heads front man sat down with Kurt Andersen this week to talk about the new Talking Heads: Chronology DVD, a collection of rare ...

The press calls it the "God particle," about to be discovered by a "doomsday machine." Hyperbole aside, this morning at 8am EST, scientists operating the Large Hadron Collider on the Franco-Swiss border announced their biggest finding yet related to the elusive Higgs boson particle. Two independent teams of ...

Hollywood likes to cast model-type stars as high-level as high level scientists (remember Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in a James Bond movie?). In this case, it’s true. Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood ...

Last month Julian Barnes received the prestigious Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. In 2006, Kurt Andersen interviewed Barnes as part of the National Book Foundation's "Eat, Drink & Be Literary" series ...

Five years ago, Studio 360 redesigned Christmas. We commissioned the design firm Pentagram to come up with a fresh, 21st century concept for the holiday that could be used — and loved — universally. Since then we've done several other redesigns, including of the rainbow Gay Flag, Valentine's Day, and the Monopoly boardgame.

What do you think we should redesign next?

Last week on the show, we heard from people who are so passionate about their careers as scientists and mathematicians that they've tattooed equations and fragments of DNA on their bodies. So we asked: Do you have a tattoo related to your profession? Listener Cris Martin of Arlington, Massachusetts works at Harvard's Davis Center ...

A couple weeks ago, Kurt Andersen came clean on Twitter and Facebook. He admitted that (with two small exceptions), he’s never read a book or watched a movie more than twice. “I wonder how weird this is,” he asked. And we asked you to weigh in: Are you an avid rereader or rewatcher? More than a hundred of you responded ...

A couple weeks ago, Kurt Andersen realized that he’d never read a book or seen a movie more than twice. The reasoning seemed clear: with so many great works (new and classic) to be discovered, life is just too short for revisiting old favorites. Right? We wanted to test Kurt's theory, so we asked: Are you an avid rereader / rewatcher? And if so, which works are worth a second look? ...

The List: Best Books to Reread and Movies to Rewatch 

Finalists for the 2011 National Book Awards were announced today. The nominees include a first-time novelist and the recently deceased biographer of Malcolm X.

Bonus tracks: interviews with Stephen Greenblatt, Téa Obreht, and Manning Marable