Did some of our “Genius” rub off?

$500,000 with absolutely no-strings-attached. The dreamiest fellowship of them all. It’s that time of year and the MacArthur Foundation has announced its list of fellows. We noticed among the list of “geniuses” a few past Studio 360 guests. Last spring Kurt Andersen spoke to David Simon, the creator of The Wire and Treme on HBO [...]

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“Genius of Love” Gets Its Due

The first time I heard the Tom Tom Club’s song “Genius of Love” off their eponymous debut album I thought  “Hey, that’s Mariah Carey’s song.” Turns out I was only half-right.  Back in 1995, when I was twelve, Mariah Carey’s hit “Fantasy” was playing on every Top 40 station and I was choreographing dance routines to it [...]

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We’ll Pay You to Listen to This

The music industry is dying, and the smart money says the key to success is giving music away for free.  Scott Blaszak has a better idea: he’ll pay you $10 to download his album.  “Free is not enough!” Blaszak says.  He has a name for his revolutionary business model: “PremiFree.”  You saw it here first. [...]

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Captain’s Log

Ronald D. Moore has one of the coolest jobs in Hollywood — he gets to play god in science fiction worlds that he creates. Before “re-imagine” and “reboot” were buzzwords, Moore re-invented the cheesy 1980s TV show “Battlestar Galactica” as an allegory for the War on Terror. His new series on the Syfy Network is [...]

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The Strange Boys Shake Up A Classic Sound

In 1966, when Britain’s The Troggs hit it big with their classic tune “Wild Thing,” the members of the Austin-based garage rock band The Strange Boys had yet to be born. Thanks to the lasting power of records and a strong Texas scene, the group is now poised to inherit garage rock’s musical legacy. Lead vocalist [...]

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Stewart, Colbert to Rally at Lincoln Memorial

Last night, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert announced that they would hold sort-of-but-not-really-competing rallies at the Lincoln Memorial on October 30th. Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” will be the voice of reason countering Colbert’s alarmist “March to Keep Fear Alive.” It’s a real-life satire of Glenn Beck’s Tea Party demonstration called “Restoring Honor” held on the National mall [...]

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New Star Rises in the Pinkett-Smith Dynasty

The next time you hit the club, you may find yourself rocking out to a song sung by a nine-year old. I’m amazed at the buzz swirling around Willow Smith‘s first single “Whip My Hair.” The song is sassy, confident, and already receiving comparisons to Rihanna. Of course, it’s no secret that Willow comes from [...]

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Photographing the Impossibly Small

Ready for an extreme close-up? Felice C. Frankel has spent 20 years photographing objects outside the range of conventional microscopes — bits of matter 1/100,000th the size of a baby’s eyelashes.  Nanoscience is one of the frontiers of technology, and with her book No Small Matter (co-written by Harvard chemist George Whitesides), Frankel hopes to [...]

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Chocolate Genius’s Bittersweet Farewell

It’s Murphy’s Law that you’ll discover your new favorite musician just after they announce they’re giving up music, right? Over the last decade Marc Anthony Thompson has released a series of albums under the name Chocolate Genius. His music straddles everything from alt country to experimental R&B, to pop soul. Sadly, he’s just released what [...]

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Jonathan Franzen Mans Up

When guests come into Studio 360 and get settled, I tend to have a bit of friendly small talk with them before we start the Official Interview. But as Jonathan Franzen and I chit-chatted earlier this week as we prepared to talk about his terrific new novel Freedom, one bit of that talk wasn’t so [...]

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