Derek John

April may be the cruelest month, but June has been good for T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem, The Waste Land. Eighty-nine years after it was published, the poem became a runaway hit in the ...

Roll out the red carpet: the big screen is officially back in North Brooklyn. On Friday, the new Nitehawk Cinema lifts the curtain on its three-screen movie theater in Williamsburg.

Last week, Apple’s Steve Jobs made a design presentation — not to masses of swooning tech journalists, but to the Cupertino, California city council. What Jobs unveiled this time was Apple’s future corporate headquarters. The design, by celebrated architect Norman Foster, is shaped like a giant ...

Timothy Schaffert’s new book isn’t a typical mystery novel. It’s got an ominous crime set in a small town rife with intrigue, but the narrator isn’t a hardscrabble police detective...

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. It wasn’t until years later that ...

Another season of primetime television just wrapped up and, as always, it was chock full of liberal programming designed to brainwash America. At least that’s according to Ben Shapi...

On Thursday, Slope residents can get a rare glimpse of the neighborhood's grittier past on the big screen. As part of its celebration of filmmaker Hal Ashby, BAMcinématek is screening...

From the beginning it was like fiction.  The world’s most famous skyscrapers vaporized by two hijacked airliners.  The phrase you heard over and over again was: "it seemed just like a movie."  Yes, but the implausible opening sequence of a bad action movie — spectacular destruction orchestrated by a rich, ...

Edgar Chouieri knows how things work; he’s a rocket scientist — officially, the Director of Princeton University's Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory. If NASA ever sen...

It may just be the best use of 3D technology yet: to bring moviegoers to a place they will never, ever, be able to visit. That's what director Werner Herzog does with Cave of Forgot...

Edgar Chouieri is a longtime professor of applied physics and aerospace engineering — but since 2003 he has been moonlighting as an audio engineer, obsessed with 3D sound. And he's ha...

It turns out the ghosts of the city's Civil War past are in more places than one might think. Beyond obvious sites like Grant's Tomb (don't ask who's buried there), the city boasts ...

On this week's show marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, historian Adam Goodheart talks to Kurt Andersen about his new book 1861, which reveals how technological changes li...

A highly anticipated biography of Malcolm X was published today, with new research that will likely challenge many of our existing notions about the still-controversial black leader. ...

Are there too many little theater companies in America? Last month, that question was the shot heard round the theater world from National Endowment for the Arts Chair Rocco Landesman, a former Broadway producer. Landesman shocked the theater community by observing at a play development conference ...

Last week, Japanese-American historian Bill Tsutsui found himself in Tokyo in the middle of the earthquake: “We were outside this hotel and the earth started moving.  And all of a sudden people started running out.  First just a few, but then wave after wave.  And after it was ...

Meet Watson, the newest contestant on Jeopardy! Starting Monday, February 14, he’ll compete against the greatest Jeopardy! players of our generation. Did we mention that Watson is a s...

Anyone else feeling a little political déjà vu?  Fifteen years ago a salacious political novel called Primary Colors offered a thinly veiled account of President Bill Clinton’s electi...

Road signs on interstate highways have been standardized since the Eisenhower era. But the typeface is badly out of date, and it looks fuzzy in all sorts of road conditions. Graphic designer Don Meeker explains how he helped bring highway signage back into focus with a typeface called Clearview. Produced by Studio 360’s Derek John.

One hundred and twenty-five years after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published, a new edition of Mark Twain’s classic is purging some of the book's most objectionable language. On Monday Publishers Weekly reported that NewSouth Books will replace the word “nigger” with the word “slave,” in a new edition due mid-February.  They will also change “Injun” to “Indian” in the Tom Sawyer companion text, and just to be safe, “half-breed” to “half-blood.”  What the Huck?