Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

The art world is reeling at the news that Charles Krafft, a sculptor noted (and respected) for making ironic Nazi kitsch, has come out as a Holocaust denier and white supremacist. Isaac Newton sticks a needle in his eye in a new play. Sandra Bernhard falls hard for Carol Channing, and we give you a new assignment in honor of spring: a bird song remix.

Benh Zeitlin, the director of Beasts of the Southern Wild, tells Kurt Andersen about his Oscar-nominated debut film, an apocalyptic fairytale set in Louisiana with a six-year-old hero. We visit indie rocker Thao Nguyen in her mother's laundromat. Plus, the rapper Macklemore says homophobia in hip-hop is so over. (Segments in this week’s show were broadcast previously.)

This week in Studio 360, Kurt Andersen talks with Jamaica Kincaid, whose new novel resembles her life in almost every particular — but please, it’s not all about her. And in China, an architectural gem rises while a bootleg copy, copied from the plans, rises 1000 miles away. And Dwight Yoakam, who traveled a couple of thousand miles from Appalachia to Los Angeles but never forgot his roots, plays a live set. Yoakam’s first album of new songs in seven years is called 3 Pears.

A Latino film producer cries foul on Argo, Lawrence Wright (Going Clear) talks Scientology, and Amanda Palmer talks back to Kickstarter. (Not to mention the UK’s shyest pop stars, The xx.)

This week in Studio 360, the class struggle comes home. In The Outsiders, tough kids from the wrong side of the tracks go toe to toe with entitled jerks wearing Madras shirts. A railroad worker martyrs himself to save his job in “The Ballad of John Henry.” We’ll hear about Emily Dickinson’s death obsession, and one listener’s ambitious bid to write a short story every month of 2013. (No literary martyrdom, please.)

Thirty years ago, Sue Grafton started a series of novels named for the alphabet (most recently, V is for Vengeance). She’s working on W, with three to go — then, “a long nap.” Netflix ushered in a new era of TV binge viewing, and now it’s producing an ambitious new political series, 13 episodes long, that it will release all at once. And these days, every comedian has a podcast, but are they making comedy less funny?

This week, we talk about telling stories in science through words and pictures. The new book The Where, the Why, and the How pairs explanations of scientific mysteries with playful, intriguing illustrations by 75 artists. Kurt Andersen speaks with one of the book’s editors, and gives our listeners a new challenge. And in two true stories from a live Studio 360 event, a mother loses her memories, a father protects his, and their children spend their lives trying to understand what memory is and how it works. This program was produced in collaboration with The Story Collider. Watch the entire event: Studio 360 & The Story Collider

Kurt Andersen talks with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Tracy Letts, who stars as half of American theater’s most notoriously bitter couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And who’s afraid of Zero Dark Thirty, the Osama bin Laden manhunt movie? Several powerful US senators. Plus Kurt talks with George Saunders, maybe America’s most important writer of short stories, who miraculously does dark and funny and poignant all at once.

Kurt Andersen talks with Lois Lowry, author of the dystopian children’s book The Giver, which has been widely celebrated and widely banned. Her new book Son is the final chapter in The Giver series. The celebrated collage artist Romare Bearden is remembered by two friends who were with him in his last days. And a kindergarten teacher learns to let go from Finding Nemo.

What a year was 1913! In an exhibition in a New York Armory, American viewers confronted Cubism and abstraction for the first time. In Vienna, the audience at a concert of atonal music by Schoenberg and others broke out into a near-riot. And in Paris, Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s new ballet The Rite of Spring burst on stage with inflammatory results. Culture Shock 1913 tells the stories behind these and other groundbreaking events that year, and goes back to consider what led to this mad, Modernist moment. "I think in a lot of ways it was just the beginning of a century just of absolute chaos and nightmare, and as so often, the artists heard it and reflected it first," notes the critic Tim Page. WNYC’s Sara Fishko speaks with thinkers, authors, musicians, art curators, and historians about this unsettling era of sweeping change — and the not-so-subtle ways in which it mirrors our own uncertain age. This Studio 360 episode is an abridged version of a one-hour documentary Sara Fishko produced for WNYC. The original program, videos, and related podcasts can be found here. Host/Executive Producer: Sara Fishko Associate Producer: Laura Mayer Editor: Karen Frillmann Mix Engineer: Wayne Shulmister, additional mixing by Edward Haber   Slideshow: Art that rocked the world in 1913

Kurt Andersen talks with the musician Beck, whose new project is a collection of 20 songs released as sheet music. If you want to hear the songs, you have to play them yourself, and we did. Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” defines the sound of dance music we’re still grooving to today. And EEG hits the mass market, as toy makers develop electrode headsets that read your mind.

Kurt Andersen talks with the creator of The Sopranos, David Chase, who returns to New Jersey for Not Fade Away, his first movie. Vince Guaraldi’s score to A Charlie Brown Christmas does the near-impossible — it’s holiday music that conjures childhood without getting too cute. Plus, we'll hear Kurt Andersen’s sci-fi story with a holiday twist.

Kurt Andersen talks with Paul Rudd, king of the bromance. In the new play Grace, he tries to shed his lovable screen persona in the role of an evangelical Christian motel owner. In a new movie about FDR, the fate of Europe is decided over a hot dog. And at Art Basel Miami Beach, an exhibition makes high art of the supremely annoying GIF.

Kurt Andersen talks with Judd Apatow, the writer, director, producer behind some of the funniest movies of the last decade, about why his new film looks so much like his real life. The rapper Macklemore says homophobia in hip-hop is so over. And a new set of educational standards roils high-school English teachers.

We're always talking about creativity, but what do we mean? Can we find creativity, can we measure it, can we encourage it? Kurt talks with professor and author Gary Marcus (Guitar Zero) about what science tells us about creativity. A researcher shoves jazz musicians into an fMRI machines and has them improvise; an intrepid reporter gets her creativity tested and scored; and a little girl introduces us to her imaginary friends (all of them).