Merrill Garbus is the performer and multi-instrumentalist behind tUnE-yArDs — a music project that blends African-inspired rhythms and vocals with electric bass and saxophone. But she only discovered music after a failed career as a puppeteer. She tells Kurt ...

Video: tUnE-yArDs performs songs from the album w h o k i l l

The Brooklyn-based comedian Eugene Mirman is the stand-up king of hipsterville. He was a regular on the HBO series Flight of the Concords and now features on Adult Swim’s Delocated. But don’t cross this guy: when Mirman got fed up with his cable company, he...

Video: Eugene Mirman vs. Time Warner Cable

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"

Tesla’s biggest innovation was introducing alternating current as the standard for modern electric power, breaking Thomas Edison’s monopoly on DC power. Author and monologist Mike Daisey performs a one-man show about Tesla. In this segment he describes the inventor's obsession with electricity ...

Mike Daisey tells the story of the Tesla’s real Dr. Strangelove moment: inventing the ultimate super-weapon, a death ray. But did it work? The government thought it might, and the Cold War got hotter. Daisey also describes the mystery behind all of Tesla's scientific papers going missing ...

Mike Daisey tells the story of Tesla’s salons, where he played fast and loose with technology. "When he had you there, he'd show you inventions, then make you part of the inventions," Daisey explains. The inventor "cured" Mark Twain of his constipation with an electrical charge ...

Porgy and Bess was groundbreaking: an opera about poor African-Americans in South Carolina, starring a cripple, a tramp, and a drug dealer.  This weekend a new production opens on Broadway entitled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, but it’s not the one George and Ira presented in 1935. ...

Video: a song from the Broadway production

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 ...

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 ...

The first thing you notice walking into Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory is its awesome scale.  In a city where every nook and cranny seems to be spoken for, the 55,000 square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall looks like it might have landed from outer space.  Completed in 1881, ...

“Larger-than-life” doesn’t do justice to performer Sandra Bernhard. She can be cartoonishly tough and irreverent, but also intensely sincere. Her breakout role came in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), in which she plays an obsessed fan who helps kidnap the talk show host ...

A novelist returns home to her prominent California Republican parents with the manuscript of a new book — a memoir filled with very dirty laundry. Needless to say, the reunion is vexed. Jon Robin Baitz’s play Other Desert Cities just arrived on Broadway, starring Stockard Channing and Stacey Keach. It’s part comedy ...

In the days after 9/11, late night talk show hosts like David Letterman and Jon Stewart limped back on screen. A week later, Stewart mused, “They said to get back to work, and there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying, which I gladly would have taken.” ...

Early in 2001, the writer and performer Sarah Jones started working on a one-woman Broadway show called Bridge and Tunnel.  The play, which won a Tony Award, featured Jones playing a diverse cast of characters living in New York – including a middle-aged Pakistani man named Mohammed ...

Over the last several months, Kurt Andersen has been asking guests about their memories of 9/11 and the changes that came after it. Hear responses from Michael Stipe, Jodie Foster, Björk, Suzanne Vega, Robert Lopez, and Miranda July.

When Yowei Shaw was in college, her parents' relationship started to change. Maybe it was empty nest syndrome, maybe it was a midlife crisis — she's not quite sure. But after taking dance lessons on board a cruise ship, her parents turned their lives upside down for the tango ...

Six years before Tony Kushner grabbed the nation’s attention with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, Larry Kramer had staged The Normal Heart, about the AIDS epidemic and its devastating impact on the gay community. The Normal Heart premiered...

Slideshow: The Normal Heart on Broadway

Sleep No More may be the most unusual, fantastical take on Macbeth ever produced.  The London-based theater company Punchdrunk has transformed 100,000 square feet of New York City warehouse space into a meticulously detailed world — a kind of Macbeth theme park with no signage or...

Slideshow: Wandering Through Sleep No More