In the last decade, concert hall construction has been booming.  And according to architectural historian Victoria Newhouse, these buildings are changing our experience of live music in unexpected ways.  She and Kurt visit Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. Built in 1969, the hall ...

From angels battling demons in heaven to the Beast with the number 666, the Book of Revelation — the apocalyptic conclusion to the New Testament — has been a narrative staple in our popular culture. Elaine Pagels' new book  considers this vivid and controversial text. A religion professor ...

An epic poem written more than 2,000 years ago by a Roman named Lucretius may be one of Western culture's most profound examples of art anticipating scientific discovery and modern thought. The poem is called "On the Nature of Things", and it presents all kinds of radical philosophical ...

The industrial designer Karim Rashid has 3,000 designs in production — including the Umbra “Oh Chair,” the Bobble Water Bottle, and the “Garbo” trash can — many featuring his signature rounded edges, cast in colorful plastics. Born in Egypt, Rashid found his calling as a designer early. ...

Swedish-born, New Orleans-based singer-songwriter Theresa Andersson became an internet sensation a few years ago after she posted a video of her song “Na Na Na” to YouTube. Standing barefoot in her kitchen, surrounded by an array of instruments, Andersson plays each one, using a loop ...

Bonus Track: "What Comes Next"

Over a couple of decades, Isabel Toledo quietly became one of the most sought-after fashion designers in the business. But in 2009, she experienced overnight global exposure when she designed First Lady Michelle Obama's inauguration outfit. Kurt Andersen visited Toledo's studio ...

Video: Isabel & Ruben Toledo in their studio

Last year the artist Richard Prince was sued by Patrick Cariou, a photographer, for copyright infringement. Prince had used dozens of Cariou’s pictures — arty portraits of Rastafarians in Jamaica — in his paintings. This practice of appropriation, incorporating other people's work ...

Unemployment is down, job creation is up, and the auto industry — practically left for dead three years ago — is healthy. The economy finally seems like it's getting back on track, but on television, the Great Recession is the backstory of everything from reality shows to sitcoms ...

This weekend, The Hunger Games opens, and it’s likely to be one of the year’s most successful movies. The film is based on the trilogy of dystopian young adult novels by Suzanne Collins first published in 2008. Some enthralled readers didn’t wait for Hollywood to put the book on screen ...

Video: The Hunger Games fan films

Footnote, a new film by Israeli director Joseph Cedar, has received a lot of international attention, including the best screenplay prize at Cannes in 2011 and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. It opens across the United States this weekend. Set ...

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 ...

Graham Greene wrote more than two dozen novels between the 1920s and the 1980s — downbeat bestsellers set in sketchy places. Writer Pico Iyer has felt an almost mystical connection to Greene, whom he never met. He chronicles that obsession in The Man Within My Head ...

This month, light and space is oddly, magically graspable at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, New York. Doug Wheeler's SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 is an experience that is near-impossible to describe without using the terms "defies comprehension" and "mind-blowing," so we figured we'd get that out of the way now ...

In 2009 the composer Eve Beglarian spent four months traveling down the Mississippi River. The sounds and stories she gathered from the trip inspired her new collection of compositions, BRIM: Songs from the RiverProject. She performs songs from the album live in the studio ...

Video: "It Happens Like This"

Bruce Springsteen's album Wrecking Ball comes out March 6. A recent press announcement supplied a track list of eleven hardscrabble-titled songs. We've come up with our own list of ten real song titles mixed up with ten ringers.  Can you pick the titles that Bruce wrote?

Last fall, Kate Ahearn from Haverhill, Massachusetts, wrote in begging us to redesign the image of teachers. "I have been teaching for 15-plus years and have enough of what I deem 'apple crapple' to last me a lifetime." So we recruited the New York design firm Hyperakt to give teachers a ...

Video: Inside the design process

To rebrand educators for the 21st century, Studio 360 selected Hyperakt, a New York design firm that’s done projects for UNICEF and GOOD magazine, among others. At a recent brainstorming session, former public school teacher Jenna Shapiro summed up the concern of her colleagues ...

Kurt Andersen notes that we're in an age of flux and paralysis at the same time. In entertainment, we yearn for authenticity — but ten million of us watch the Kardashians every week. Where do we go from here? Playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick and Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams help ...

It seems like every Republican presidential campaign right now is doubling as a book tour (Michele Bachmann’s Core of Conviction: My Story, Ron Paul’s Liberty Defined, Rick Perry’s Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington). But this double duty is nothing new for candidate Newt Gingrich ...

Bonus Track: An Historian’s Analysis

Kate Winslet was just 21 when she starred in the mega-blockbuster Titanic (1997). In high demand ever since, Winslet brings depth to her roles, from a former Nazi prison guard (The Reader, 2008) to a bored but complicated housewife (Little Children, 2006). The strains of marriage and ...