COVER STORY
Imagining History
Kurt Andersen and documentary filmmaker Errol Morris look at how writers and artists reshape history.

War of the Californias
Where were you when Los Angeles attacked San Francisco? Did you serve on the U.S.S. Castro? Did you fight in the battle of Van Nuys? Painter Sandow Birk spent five years documenting his imaginary civil war between Northern and Southern California, creating epic battle paintings, spot-on propaganda posters and a mock-History Channel documentary. Neda Pourang visited Birk to find out why California’s two major cities came to blows.
Go to the In Smog and Thunder website

Lorna Simpson
In Lorna Simpson’s video Corridor two women perform the mundane rituals of life in two different period homes. Projected side by side, the images might simply be voyeuristic if it weren’t for our knowledge that one African-American woman is living in the politically tumultuous year 1860 and the other in 1960. It’s not what’s happening on screen but what we don’t see that prompts us to imagine the history around these women and their relationship to the events of their time. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell. 
Go to Sean Kelly Gallery’s website with images of Lorna Simpson’s work

Philip Roth
In Philip Roth’s latest novel The Plot Against America, Roth imagines what would have happened if the aviation hero Charles Lindberg had defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election. In the book, an 8-year old boy named Philip Roth watches as the U.S. sits out of World War II and anti-Semitism flourishes in America. Philip Roth talks with Kurt Andersen about what inspired him to rewrite reality. Produced by Ave Carrillo.
Listen to the entire Philip Roth interview
Go Houghton Mifflin’s website on Philip Roth
Go to the Philip Roth Society website

SPECIAL GUEST
Errol Morris
Errol Morris has become one of our most celebrated documentary filmmakers, covering offbeat subjects like a pet cemetery, a swamp town in Florida and Stephen Hawking’s views of physics. His investigation of a Texas murder case, The Thin Blue Line, is credited with overturning the conviction of death-row inmate.  His most recent film, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara, won the Academy Award in 2004.
Go to Errol Morris’s official website

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How Art Works
Animators often describe themselves as actors with pencils but in the digital age, many top animators are trading in their pencils and erasers for keyboards and electronic mice. James Baxter, the animator who brought to life Belle in Disney’s Beauty in the Beast, spoke with Eric Molinsky about his method of acting and the adjustment he had to make as a computer animator on Shrek 2.
Go to the list of James Baxter’s credits on imdb.com

Design for the Real World
After a divided election like 2004, it’s tempting to think that we live in an extremely polarized country comprised of red states and blue states. Graphic design is supposed to simplify complex issues into comprehensible terms, but have we fallen into a trap by embracing a 2-sizes-fits-all graphic design matrix?  Kurt Andersen and graphic designer Paula Scher, who designed the best-seller America The Book, explore the grey areas, or at least the purple areas.
Read the text of this interview
Go to an electoral map in shades of violet

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