Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, at the Metropolitan Museum, contains hundreds of strange and fascinating pictures, all of them altered in different ways. Wandering through the show, Kurt Andersen realized that each image could be plotted along two axes ...

My first experiences of Gore Vidal were not his writing, but as a pop cultural performer playing himself on television. When I was a little kid, he was a regular on late-night talk shows, chatting with Johnny Carson and then Dick Cavett about '60s politics and culture and ...

I have a new novel coming out next week, True Believers, that isn't easy to pigeonhole. So I'll defer to the novelist Scott Turow, who describes it as "one part bildungsroman, one part political thriller and one part contemplation on age." The part that's a bildungsroman is the story of my ...

Since Kit White and I met when I was a freshman in college, I've just realized that means we've been friends for two-thirds of our lives. He is pretty much the same person he was then: philosophically serious but funny and fun, learned, lucid, wise, and a painter ...

I started writing on a computer in the early 1980s when I worked at Time magazine. The several of us younger writers, including Walter Isaacson, who were eager to abandon typewriters had to go to use special non-PC consoles in a special little room. There were no PCs, no on-screen icons, ...

On the morning of September 11, I was in midtown Manhattan, so I walked south – downtown.  There I encountered the wave of refugees walking north, people still wearing white breathing masks, people in suits covered head to toe in dust and soot. And finally, after an eight mile hike, I arrived home to my wife and kids Brooklyn, where our little backyard ...

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, ...

The Book of Mormon is straight-up brilliant, by far the best new musical of the 21st century.

My last novel, Heyday, opens in 1848. When I wrote the book, I was struck by the resonance between the 1840s and the 2000s in America — the go-go economy, all the new technological marvels, the birth of marketing and youth culture... But these last two months, as the democratic protests and rebellions broke out and spread across North Africa and Egypt, I found myself once again gobsmacked by the historical parallels: the 2011 revolutions bear a lot of uncanny resemblances to the 1848 revolutions.

Kurt Andersen talks about seeing the premiere of Tom Stoppard’s play "The Real Thing" as a young man in his twenties, and seeing it again two decades later. Had the play changed, or was it Kurt?

When I came across the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade, almost a decade ago, I was fascinated and appalled. As you know if you listen to the show, I'm really not a snob -- I loved The Hangover, for instance, and don't really get opera.

When I first read this 1974 novel, set in West Germany around the time of the Red Army Faction, it seemed very foreign to me in every sense.  A serious terrorist threat?  Law enforcement overreach to deal with it?  Powerful, sensationalist right-wing media whipping up the panic?  Well, times have changed, and the resonances today are different for American readers.  I discovered as much earlier this year, when Penguin asked me to write an introduction for this new paperback edition.

They Might Be Giants is just about my favorite working band, and not just because they're also the only band -- apart from the Byrds, many many years ago -- with whom I've actually worked a show onstage and back stage. TMBG are smart and good and nice and funny. And live in Brooklyn. Really: what more could one want?

My time in Los Angeles is coming to an end. I will miss the phantasmagorically perfect weather, the hiking trails (with coyotes!) 5 minutes from my house, the focused and talented students (and faculty) of Art Center, and all the interesting strangers who tend to be, I think, more gratifyingly...open than your typical New Yorker. But it'll also be good to get back to a place where urban life teems just outside one's front door, where I don't have to drive everywhere, and where the city (physically as well as culturally and intellectually) is more coherent, more truly (or at least obviously) a city.

I am not on the payroll of the California Travel & Tourism Commission, I swear. But as if the weather in general were not splendidly un-wintery enough, here's some of what I encountered a couple of hours west and north of Los Angeles, by aiming for Santa Barbara and then more or less aimlessly wandering. My daughter Kate provivded a perfect iPod score, dominated by Four Tet and the soundtracks of Jungle Book and Carnivàle.

When I visited Johannesberg a few years ago, I was startled by how much, townships aside, it reminded me of southern California -- the topography, the sunniness, the freeways, the shiny Americanism in general. So the other day when I interviewed the delightful founders of the cool South African rock band BLK JKS, Mpumi Mcata and Lindani Buthelezi, before their gig at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, I asked, a little nervously, if they agreed. Yes! They also thought it was cool (and, um, ironic) that they were about to perform next to ethnographic dioramas depicting indigenous Africa. The interview -- and exclusive acoustic performance! -- airs starting Friday.

I’ve just spent a fascinating day in the desert an hour and a half north of Los Angeles.

It was an Art Center College of Design field trip. First stop was a hangar-cum-workshop at the Mojave airport – officially, and very grandly, the Mojave Air and Space Port -- where ...

Attending the Oscar ceremony last night, I realized why the pre-show red-carpet rigmarole has become more and more a focus of the television coverage over the last decade or so: that's the juiciest part of the quasi-official event, a reality-show The Day of the Locust without the apocalyptic ending.

First ...

Last night I visited the new highrise called Tokyo Midtown, which is the tallest building in the city and on its lower floors contains -- thanks to vast swaths of wood, elaborate lighting, and other beyond-the-call-of-duty architectural and furnishing details -- the most convincingly, tastefully luxurious shopping mall I've ...

I will probably never be an expatriate. But that doesn't mean I don't fantasize in every foreign city I visit about which neighborhood I'd live in. In Tokyo, I think it'd probably be on the Naka-meguro canal, a quiet, Amsterdamish stretch of just-hip-enough gentility only two subway stops from the ...