It’s commonly said now that we’re living in a golden age of television, but try telling that to executives at the Big Four networks. The buzzy shows you love to talk about are on cable, while CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox are all wrapping up one of their worst seasons on record. Many successful shows ...

Singer-songwriter Dominique Pinto goes by Dom La Nena, ‘Dom the Little Girl.’ Like Lil’ Wayne before her, the name refers unironically to her delicate stature. Unlike Lil’ Wayne, La Nena makes music that fits the pseudonym: delicate, very simple acoustic songs that could almost be lullabyes ...

Video: "Anjo Gabriel"

At the end of 2012, Studio 360 listener Ariel Lautman, of Silver Spring, Maryland, resolved to teach herself woodworking and build furniture for her home. Despite an exceptionally cold East Coast winter that limited her ability to work with lumber outside, Ariel has completed her first project ...

Slideshow: Work in Progress

What do you do when your favorite museum of contemporary art and design decides to destroy one of your favorite examples of contemporary design? New Yorkers have asked themselves that question after the Museum of Modern Art recently announced that it would be razing its neighbor ...

Mel Brooks still writes comedy, but his main business is collecting awards. He’s an “EGOT,” one of only a dozen or so people to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony, and he’s had no trouble settling into a stream of never-ending accolades. In May, one more arrives on PBS ...

Bonus Track: How Gene Shalit saved Brooks' career

South London is like the Brooklyn of Britain. In the past few years, that part of town has churned out pop stars like Adele, Florence Welch (who made a big splash with Lungs), and now Jessie Ware, whose album Devotion finally comes out in the United States this week after great success in the UK ...

Video: "Wildest Moments"

Even by its own standards, North Korea’s saber-rattling has gotten intense lately. Its leaders have reneged on the decades-old ceasefire with the South; shared maps that display targets inside the US; and warned of imminent nuclear warfare. So it’s apt timing that The Orphan Master’s Son ...

Bonus Track: Kim Jong-un’s basketball obsession

As 2012 drew to a close, Studio 360 listener Michael Relland resolved to perform his first public cello recital in 2013. In January, we set out to make sure he got it done, and this week, we checked in to see how the preparations are coming. Michael, a Phoenix-area music teacher ...

Slideshow: Michael's Photo Journal

If we’re living in a "golden age" of television, Edie Falco is its queen. After working for years on network shows, she made the jump to HBO to play a troubled prison guard on Oz, then crossed over to the other side of the law as the matriarch of America’s most famous mafia family in The Sopranos ...

Macklemore is an unlikely rapper: he’s from the Pacific Northwest, he’s white, he’s proud of wearing secondhand clothes. His single “Thrift Shop” recently topped the Billboard Hot 100, making him the first unsigned artist to do so in more than a decade. But Macklemore ...

Bonus Track: How Macklemore got his name

Among country superstars, Dwight Yoakam has always been a guy who didn’t fit in. A cool, mysterious dude in a crowd of boys next door. An Appalachian-turned-Angeleno who spurned Nashville. An actor with a penchant for playing creeps, psychos, and other unsavories. And recently ...

Video: “Heart Like Mine”

When Dwight Yoakam came into the studio recently, he didn’t just answer questions — he got into character, adopted regional accents, and proved he was a true student of American music history.  We’ll broadcast the segment this weekend.  But he told one story we just couldn’t wait to ...

We asked you to come up with literary-themed names for the NFL teams. As usual, you didn't disappoint.

Throughout 2013, we’re going to check up on four listeners who made creative resolutions for the New Year and were brave enough to go public with them. Linda Brewer of Tucson wants to tell the stories of people’s lives in the American West, but her literary ambitions have been sidelined by ...

Read Linda's story for January: "It's All Good"

The Osama bin Laden manhunt movie Zero Dark Thirty opens in theaters across the country this weekend. But as director Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller has opened in a few theaters, it has earned rave reviews while generating a fair amount of controversy. Senators John McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and Carl Levin ...

In the final weeks of 2012, we asked our listeners for their creative New Year’s resolutions. Kurt Andersen is choosing projects to check in on during the year. Last week, he spoke with Michael Relland, an elementary school band and orchestra teacher in Phoenix who has resolved to ...

Slideshow: A creative New Year's resolution in progress

When you go to see a film these days, there’s a good chance you’re not watching actual film. Rather, you’re seeing a projection of 1s and 0s coming from a computer hard drive. For the past few years, movie studios have been extolling the virtues of digital projection systems ...

Next year is a big one for artists whose work was published in 1978. A revision to copyright law allows musicians, authors, or any copyright holders to reclaim their rights after 35 years. For the already-struggling music industry, this could be a lethal blow, or what Kurt Andersen calls the "copyright cliff" ...

Beck has always been an unpredictable musician: from the folk-rock of Mellow Gold, to the digital sounds of Odelay, to the raucous funk of Midnite Vultures. But for his latest project, there’s no music at all — unless you want to make some yourself. Song Reader, published by McSweeney's ...

Video: Kurt Andersen & radio friends perform "Saint Dude"

Paul Rudd returns to the role of awkward father and husband later this month in Judd Apatow’s This is 40, a quasi-sequel to Knocked Up, but he’s taking on a less familiar character on Broadway now. In Grace, Rudd plays an evangelical businessman who wants to start a chain ...