One classic reinvention fantasy goes like this: you leave a square, respectable job and write a best-selling book. Elizabeth Wurtzel did just that — but in reverse. She was in her twenties when Prozac Nation made her famous overnight. She became a rock critic and wrote a memoir about ...

We received hundreds of submissions to our 420-character-story challenge. Although the contest is over, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to call a couple more authors and have them read their work ...

Submit your 420-character story here

Much of science today is grant-dependent and discourages dreamy, out-of-box thinking — who wants to fund mistakes? "I really think of [Tesla] as one of the last people inventing on his own,” Samantha Hunt tells Kurt Andersen. “He didn't have funding from the Department of Defense ...

Part visionary, part mad scientist, and absolute genius, Tesla should be as famous as Edison — but he’s been largely forgotten. Kurt talks with Samantha Hunt about her novel The Invention of Everything Else. Tesla is the protagonist, and despite the outlandish ...

Bonus Track: Samantha Hunt reads from her novel

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

The best-seller list is dominated by memoirs and self-help books written by celebrities and politicians. Or “written” by celebrities and politicians. “On the non-fiction best-seller list, 12 out of the 15 books listed probably have been ghostwritten,” reveals literary agent Madeleine Morel. ...

Last month, the illustrator-turned-author Lou Beach released a book of extremely short stories — each just 420 characters long. Kurt Andersen challenged our listeners to write their own 420-characters stories. Hundreds poured in; you can read them all here. Lou Beach judged the contest ...

This is what Kurt Andersen considers a holiday tale ... melting ice caps and extraterrestrial spies? Kurt's story, "Human Intelligence," was produced for radio by Jonathan Mitchell, and stars Melanie Hoopes, John Ottavino, and Ed Herbstman. The unabridged version was ...

Robert Downey Jr., who stars in the new movie Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, is the latest actor to take on this iconic role. Guy Ritchie, the film's director, says Holmes' persona is an even divide between enigma and accessibility. WNYC's Sarah Montague traces ...

Forty-eight years ago, Donald J. Sobol put sneakers on Sherlock Holmes and set him in small-town America. Produced by Studio 360's Derek John ...

Where would you expect to find the world's largest Sherlock Holmes archive? Try nine stories below Minneapolis, in the rare book collection at the University of Minnesota. Sarah Lemanczyk descends for a visit ...

Last week, Kurt Andersen talked with Lou Beach, an illustrator who turned his Facebook updates into super-short stories, each 420 characters long.  They are collected in the new book 420 Characters. We asked for your 420-character stories and they’ve poured in ...

Enter Studio 360's 420-Character Story Contest

Patrick Winston is Principal Investigator at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab. He believes that creating better artificial intelligence is not a matter of more powerful processing: we have to teach computers how to think more like humans. “We are a symbolic species,” he ...

Computers have taken over an astonishing array of tasks humans used to do. They fly our planes, give us directions, recommend books, set us up on dates.  But can they tell us a good story? Meet Brutus, a computer programmed to write fiction.  Through a series of mathematical equations, its ...

Bonus Track: “Self-Betrayal,” written by Brutus

Harvard physicist Lisa Randall is at the forefront of the search for new theories about how the universe works.  She’s especially interested in dark matter and is involved in work at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.  And although her work requires complex math and work on the theoretical ...

There’s a new collection of short stories — extremely short stories, just 420 characters long (including spaces). They feature western gunslingers, couples in crisis, dogs and talking chickens. The author, Lou Beach, has managed to pack each tiny tale with vivid descriptions and narratives that ...

Enter Studio 360's 420-Character Story Contest

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

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 ...

Umberto Eco is not your typical best-selling author. He’s a medieval scholar, a semiotics professor, and he packs his complicated fiction with philosophy, history, even passages in Latin. Yet his 1980 book The Name of the Rose is one of the most widely read modern novels. Eco's new novel ...