On a given weekend, you might find Gabriel Kahane performing a piano sonata in a concert hall … or stumble upon him at a bar, playing with a rock band. He composes classical music for chamber groups and orchestras — plus he's just written a 1940s era musical which combines ...

Video: “Charming Disease” live in the studio

A new kind of leading man has taken hold in Hollywood: the lovable loser. Together with his brother Jay, Mark Duplass has written and directed smart, affecting comedies about these losers.  His new film Jeff, Who Lives at Home stars Jason Segel as a 30-year-old stoner settled in to his ...

The band Of Montreal is known for its theatrical, over-the-top shows. Frontman Kevin Barnes’ antics and flamboyant costumes recall the heyday of glam rock. Barnes wasn’t a born performer — as a teenager, he was a loner, painfully shy. On a family camping trip, his uncle brought along a guitar ...

Bonus Track: Kevin Barnes covers the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb”

It’s rare that a musician comes along whose songs are both political and globally appealing. Nneka’s music is a mixture of Afrobeat, hip-hop, R&B, and folk. She's just released her second album in the US, Soul is Heavy, and plays acoustic versions of some of the songs in our studio ...

Video: Nneka, "My Home" - live in Studio 360

Lena Dunham is the creator, director, and star of the new HBO series Girls, and, at 25, happy to be called a girl herself. The show follows four young women trying to carve out adult lives for themselves in New York City, struggling with independence, sex, and work. Comparisons ...

Bonus Track: Kurt’s extended conversation with Lena Dunham

Will Ferrell can make just about anything funny: playing the flute, negotiating with a toddler, just standing around in his underpants. For his latest movie, he joined a cast of Mexican actors for a role performed entirely in Spanish. Casa de Mi Padre is the big-screen version of ...

Mad Men lets its viewers revel in the glamour of the 1960s while still pointing a finger at the era’s backwardness — particularly when it comes to the treatment of women. But is Mad Men exaggerating? Not so much, says advertising veteran Jane Maas. In her new memoir Mad Women ...

Video: Peggy and Joan on Don's Engagement on Mad Men

A new film called Miss Bala is an artful, riveting depiction of Mexico's drug war, and it isn’t the good guys-bad guys shoot-em-up you might expect. Instead, the story is told through the eyes of an innocent bystander: a beauty pageant contestant who finds herself in the wrong place at the ...

Video: A scene from Miss Bala

What if Anne Frank had lived? That’s the premise of the new novel by Shalom Auslander, who made his name with the dark comic memoir Foreskin's Lament. Hope: A Tragedy is about a yuppie named Solomon Kugel who leaves New York City with his family for a a rustic farmhouse. ...

Bonus Track: Kurt Andersen's full conversation with Shalom Auslander

You don't get much more famous than Angelina Jolie. The acting roles that made her famous (the troubled teen in Girl Interrupted, the ass-kicking archeologist in Tomb Raider) have long been overshadowed by her personal life – the endless stream of chatter about her six children with Brad ...

For our next redesign project, Studio 360 is giving schoolteachers a makeover. Turns out a lot of teachers hate the treacly, old-fashioned visual imagery that gets dumped on them (ABCs, 123s, chalkboards, rulers, apples). One teacher told us she calls this iconography "apple crapple." ...

Back in the 1990s, R.E.M. used to joke that they’d play their final concert on December 31, 1999 and break up the next day.  Had they done that, with the original lineup intact (drummer Bill Berry left in 1997), they would have certainly gone out with a bang.The ...

On a given weekend, you might find Gabriel Kahane performing a piano sonata in a concert hall ... or stumble upon him at a bar, playing with a rock band. He composes classical music for chamber groups and orchestras — but he also writes and sings his own indie pop songs. These days, those two worlds ...

Video: “Charming Disease” live in the studio

He’s written books about World War II, poetry, the fate of newspapers. But as a novelist, Nicholson Baker has another side. Back in the 1990s, he published two R-rated works of fiction: Vox (1993) and The Fermata (1995).  Now he’s returning ...

In July we lost one of the great American painters — Cy Twombly, who was 83. Twombly defied categories. Unlike the abstract painters of the previous generation, like Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning, Twombly’s work was playful...

Bonus Track: Music Inspired by Twombly's Painting

We were saddened to learn of the death today of Cy Twombly, the American artist known for his abstract, childlike paintings. A couple years ago on the show, the songwriter Tift Merritt shared this touching story with us about how a Twombly painting saved her from her writer's block.

In the age of the downloaded single, The Antlers had an unlikely hit with their 2009 concept album Hospice. The main storyline is about coming to terms with the death of a friend. But the music isn't what you'd expect — it’s not morose and spare, it's big and lush. The Antlers have lightened up some, subject-wise, but...

Video: The Antlers perform “I Don’t Want Love”

Even after they became world superstars, the band R.E.M. never quite followed the pop mainstream.  And a lot of that has to do with the band’s frontman, Michael Stipe. Stipe has a distinctive voice and enigmatic lyrics.  But he’s also a photographer and filmmaker.  For 30 years, R.E.M. has released videos that...