Everywhere we go, we leave a trail of personal information — in the stray hairs that land on park benches, or saliva on the edges of coffee cups. And artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg may be collecting that information, whether you like it or not. Using equipment and procedures ...

Video: Kurt Andersen's DNA Mask Revealed

Owners of 3-D printers can create all sorts of imaginative items — cups, tools, jewelry. All they need is a design and the printer. But now some gun parts are being produced with this technology, alarming some in the burgeoning 3-D printing industry.

Everything we’re able to do today to enhance humans — from genetic engineering to artificial limbs — simply improves on the base model we were born with. But for some, that doesn’t go far enough. They think we shouldn’t be stuck with the factory-installed settings in our DNA ...

Slideshow: Transhumanist Art

Neil Harbisson is a painter, a musician, and a cyborg. Born with a rare form of colorblindness, Harbisson can only see the world in grays. In 2004, he collaborated with a scientist to create a device called the Eyeborg, which he wears everywhere — even in his passport picture ...

Video: Neil Harbisson's Sonochromatic Portrait #1

The pink ribbon has been an incredibly successful piece of marketing for breast cancer research. For cancer survivor Leonor Caraballo, though, it's supremely annoying. Caraballo is a sculptor who collaborates with her husband, Abou Farman. The couple came up with a new ...

Slideshow: Tumor as Sculpture

A couple years ago, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for directing The Hurt Locker. It wasn’t quite the tipping point for women many in the industry had hoped for: of the 250 major movies that came out last year in the US, women directed only 5% of them ...

Video: Take This Waltz (clip)

Sellers and publishers of books from all over the world convened in New York this week for their annual convention, Book Expo America. Conference discussions focused on e-books, social media, and self-publishing, but the real buzz was about a book: a dirty book. E.L. James ...

Just like with movies, videogames come in different sizes: the blockbusters with massive marketing campaigns, and the quirkier small releases that get known by word of mouth. "A lot of independence has to do with making something that doesn’t have a place yet," explains Ian Bogost. ...

Television drama has created the impression of an ideal world where decisions in hospitals are made quickly and cost is never an issue. It directly affects our expectations for treatment, according to Billy Goldberg, an emergency-room physician, and Joseph Turow ...

Video: A scene from the Scrubs episode "My Musical"

A murderous rampage in Afghanistan earlier this month left 16 civilians, nine of them children, dead. The stereotype of the combat veteran who snaps in an act of crazed violence has been familiar since the Vietnam War in movies and fiction. The novelist and essayist George Saunders ...

We’ve always heard the television brought Americans together. Now a lot of what’s on just makes us mad at each other. Sociologist Max Kilger says you can tell a person’s politics by the television they watch. Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky decided to do his own experiment. He submitted ...

Gerald Joyce is a professor of biochemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In the 1970s, he was studying biochemistry at The University of Chicago, when he discovered Gravity's Rainbow, the sprawling World War II novel by Thomas Pynchon ...

The best-seller list is dominated by memoirs and self-help books written by celebrities and politicians. Or “written” by celebrities and politicians. “On the non-fiction best-seller list, 12 out of the 15 books listed probably have been ghostwritten,” reveals literary agent Madeleine Morel. ...

Everything we’re able to do today to enhance humans — from genetic engineering to artificial limbs — simply improves on the base model we were born with. But for some people, that doesn’t go far enough. They think we shouldn’t be stuck with the factory-installed settings in our DNA. And they're not satisfied with a lifespan ...

Slideshow: Transhumanist Art

Neil Harbisson is a painter, a musician, and a cyborg. Born with a rare form of colorblindness, Harbisson can only see the world in grays. In 2004, he collaborated with a scientist to create a device called the Eyeborg, which he wears everywhere — even in his passport picture ...

Video: Neil Harbisson's Sonochromatic Portrait #1

It’s great to be a vampire, right? Shows like True Blood and Vampire Diaries make them so glamorous. And consider the buzz around the last Twilight movie, which comes out next month. But Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky has learned that being a vampire isn’t as easy or attractive as pop culture would have us believe ...

Every time a new Apple product is rumored, a fraction of the country goes into a frenzy. Every bit of new information is pored over by millions of Apple cultists. A new release is earning that kind of excitement right now, but it’s an old-fashioned book — a handsome, hardcover biography of Steve Jobs ...

Bonus Track: Kurt's extended conversation with Walter Isaacson

Téa Obreht is 26-years old, and she’s already received wide acclaim for her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. Last summer, she won the Orange Prize awarded to the best English-language book written by a woman. Now The Tiger's Wife is one of five works nominated for this year's National Book Award in fiction ...

Last week Amazon had its second Campfire conference, bringing a group of writers together for an under-the-radar gathering in Santa Fe, NM. Kurt Andersen attended last year, and he felt the company was trying to soften up the literary establishment as it moves toward publishing. In recent months ...