The director Alex Timbers is young, but in the last few years he’s already carved out a unique niche as a director of historical mashup musicals. He directed Gutenberg! The Musical! as well as the critically acclaimed Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Timbers is the director of a new show, Here Lies Love ...

Isabella Rossellini’s Mammas is an unsentimental look at motherhood — very unsentimental. The mothers in this new series of film shorts take multiple husbands, abandon their young, even cannibalize them. And they take maternal self-sacrifice to an extreme, letting their hungry young devour ...

Video: "Wasp"

Ten years ago, Beth Greenspan put a poem in her wallet that she’s carried ever since. Her son was just on the verge of adolescence, and she was wistful. “I noticed that his wrists were starting to get thicker, his hands were starting to look bigger. His hand was almost the size of my own ...

Darcy James Argue’s new album Brooklyn Babylon is one of the most anticipated jazz albums of the year. But Argue wondered if he should even record it. “I thought long and hard whether this would work as a record,” he tells Kurt Andersen, because Brooklyn Babylon was originally a score ...

Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who have them. “They tend to be more social, less shy, and do better on tasks which require you to take the perspective ...

The Irish actress and director Fiona Shaw stars as Mary, the mother of Jesus, in a one-woman show opening this week on Broadway. The Testament of Mary, which Colm Tóibín based on his own novel, presents not the saintly exemplar of maternal love familiar from religious paintings ...

“You can’t play a bad guy thinking, ‘I’m a bad guy,’” Jeremy Irons tells Kurt Andersen. “You’ve got to say, ‘Why does he make that choice to behave in that way?’” It’s all about playing the gray areas. Irons knows from despicable; for 40 years, he’s been our best bad guy ...

Bonus Track: Jeremy Irons' 3 for 360

Meg Wolitzer’s latest novel, The Interestings, is both a coming-of-age and coming-of middle-age story. Six teenagers meet at a performing arts camp in the Berkshires — the kind of place where kids put on Beckett plays — and become lifelong friends. It’s the summer of 1974 ...

Bonus Track: Meg Wolitzer's 3 for 360

William S. Burroughs famously said that “language is a virus.” Novelist Ben Marcus took Burrough's line as inspiration for The Flame Alphabet. In the book, the language of children has become literally poisonous to adults, and a married couple with a teenage daughter is faced ...

Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University did groundbreaking research on reconstructing the DNA of viruses (sort of like microbial Jurassic Park). The method was used to re-create the spectacularly lethal influenza behind the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed between ...

Computer viruses emerged in the 1980s. But in the internet era, we decided not to beat viruses, but to join them. “Going viral” became the goal of any piece of content, from a movie to a Facebook post. Bill Wasik is the author of And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture ...

Long before science explained rabies, the virus showed up in folklore and literature. "The vampire myth, the werewolf myth, and the zombie myth," Bill Wasik tells Kurt Andersen, "are all saliva-born infections that manifest as a contagious animal essence. Rabies is the only thing ...

"Oscar...Totally Naked" is an Oscar special hosted by Kristen Meinzer of The Takeaway and Rafer Guzman of Newsday. Listen to this hour-long spectacular, which pulls back the velvet curtain on Hollywood's biggest night.

Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who have them. “They tend to be more social, less shy, and do better on tasks which require you to take the perspective ...

“The men were all talking about the great American novel, the great American play, ... the great American everything,” said Georgia O’Keeffe. “So I thought ... I’ll make it an American painting ...”

Slideshow: Georgia O'Keeffe's World

“The men were all talking about the great American novel, the great American play,...the great American everything,” said Georgia O’Keeffe. “So I thought . . . I’ll make it an American painting.”

Back in the 1930s, as part of the Federal Art Project, the government paid artists to make thousands of paintings, from famous murals to little landscapes. It wasn't possible to keep track of it all, and some ended up in private hands. Once in a while, a canvas turns up, ...

The City Reliquary, a scrappy little storefront museum in Brooklyn, decided to try out a Depression-era method for fundraising: a rent party, 1930's style. Produced by Ann Hepperman and Kara Oehler.

One of the big names in American dance, Lar Lubovitch was a painter until he saw a performance by the late Jose Limon. It turned him into a choreographer on the spot. Produced by Ann Hepperman and Kara Oehler.