Listener Susan Evans grew up in rural Louisiana during the 1950s and '60s. Her first year of high school was also the first year of federally enforced integration in her town — and that did not sit well with her white parents. Susan was never comfortable with her family’s casual racism ...

Susan Eloise Hinton was a teenager when she wrote The Outsiders, the story of rival gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She used the pen name “S.E.” so readers wouldn’t know she was a girl, and bought a Camaro with the earnings. “Some of [the novel’s] faults, like its over-the-top emotions and ...

Slideshow: How The Outsiders became a movie

Probably the most famous African-American visual artist of the 20th century, Romare Bearden was best known for a singular approach to collage art that incorporated scraps of wallpaper, glossy magazines, and fabric into a kind of patchwork cubism. When Bearden was at his height ...

Slideshow: Romare Bearden in his studio

Thirty years ago, hardly anyone knew what a music video was. On the night MTV was launched, its founders — a ragtag bunch of music fans and rookie television execs — took a bus from Manhattan to New Jersey to watch the broadcast, because no local cable company carried the fledgling ...

For almost half a century, the composer Marvin Hamlisch made his way into our heads with ballad after show-stopping ballad, including “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line and the title song from The Way We Were, to name just a few. Hamlisch died this week at age 68 ...

Bonus Track: Hamlisch performs "Trust Me" from The Informant! in Studio 360

WNYC listener Julie Bayley grew up watching daytime talk shows to catch comics like Rodney Dangerfield. But there weren’t any comedians like her: female and black. Then Bayley saw Whoopi Goldberg in her one-woman show on Broadway (it ran for 156 sold-out performances ...

The big, splashy comic book movie has become a fairly predictable piece of Hollywood machinery. So it’s easy to forget just how radical and fresh Men In Black seemed when it came out in 1997. The franchise returns this weekend with Men In Black III. Director Barry Sonnenfeld ...

Best known for his breakthrough 1963 picture book Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak's long career involved one wild rumpus after another. "You have to remember, he's from a generation where picture books were considered trash," says Mo Willems, an acclaimed author ...

Susan Eloise Hinton was a teenager when she wrote The Outsiders, the story of rival gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She used the pen name “S.E.” so readers wouldn’t know she was a girl, and bought a Camaro with the earnings. “Some of [the novel’s] faults, like its over-the-top emotions and ...

Slideshow: How The Outsiders became a movie

We’ve been inundated with reports of corporate layoffs and manufacturing jobs vanishing. But the creative class has been particularly hard hit. In an ongoing series for Salon, reporter Scott Timberg writes that the last few years have seen a huge drop-off in jobs in the creative industries. ...

Back in the 1980s, the Flaming Lips were just an alternative rock band from Oklahoma. They toured for a decade before finally hitting it big in 1993 with their song “She Don't Use Jelly.” But the Flaming Lips didn’t go all Hollywood. “It never occurred to us to move to Los Angeles or New York,” ...

Bonus Track: Obsessed with Brittany, Over Oklahoma

Last year the artist Richard Prince was sued by Patrick Cariou, a photographer, for copyright infringement. Prince had used dozens of Cariou’s pictures — arty portraits of Rastafarians in Jamaica — in his paintings. This practice of appropriation, incorporating other people's work ...

If you ever watched The Dating Game, you know his music — and now you can’t get it out of your head. After a half-century in the music business, legendary bandleader, trumpeter, and producer Herb Alpert is still performing and writing new music. I Feel You, his latest album ...

Slideshow: Album covers of Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass

Over 30 years and 80 films, Willem Dafoe has played a vampire and Jesus Christ; a drug dealer and an FBI agent. This spring, he’s particularly prolific, appearing in three new movies: the big-budget sci-fi epic John Carter, and indies 4:44 Last Day on Earth and The Hunter ...

Bonus Track: Kurt's extended conversation with Willem Dafoe

Birth control is currently the hot button issue of the campaign season. Rush Limbaugh’s noxious remarks to Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke led to a rare apology. Liberals, however, insist that his attack is part and parcel of a conservative “war on women” that ...

Last week one of Kickstarter's founders bragged that he expected the three-year-old crowd-funding site to give more money to the arts this year than the National Endowment for the Arts. That caught Clay Johnson's eye. The author of The Information Diet examined the numbers ...

Manhattan’s West Side has plenty of artist studios, but none quite like Hunt Slonem’s. Kurt Andersen recently dropped by the artist’s eccentric space, which is housed on the third floor of a football field-sized warehouse. It’s stuffed with plaster busts, chandeliers, neo-gothic furniture ...

Video: Kurt Andersen visits Hunt Slonem's studio

While it's become an annual rite to complain about the Oscars, aside from the Super Bowl, more Americans still watch the Academy Awards than any other TV show. But according to agent and producer Gavin Polone, Hollywood's biggest night may be hurting the movie industry ...

The boundary-pushing publisher Barney Rosset died on Tuesday. He was 89. Rosset was the founder of Grove Press, where he made a name for himself publishing titles no one else would touch. In the 1960s, he won consecutive court cases that allowed him to print ...

Last month, Chinese President Hu Jintao announced that his government was investing heavily in homegrown, exportable cultural programming. And yet, just days later, the government shut down two-thirds of its domestic satellite television shows for undermining Chinese values. ...

Video: Hunan Satellite TV’s Spring Festival Gala