DJ /rupture says a good remix has to disrespect the original song, breaking it down to build it back up into something surprising; he doesn’t want to hear the original with little embellishments or a new beat. He provided the raw materials for our Remix Challenge: six tracks from "L'Avion," ...

Listen to the winning remix

A couple years ago, when the writer Joel Stein found out he and his wife were expecting a son, he worried that he lacked the manliness to properly raise a boy. He never learned to fish, hunt, or fist fight. So Joel set out to fix that: he rode with firefighters, survived three days of ...

Video: Manning Up at the Rifle Range

In the last decade, concert hall construction has been booming.  And according to architectural historian Victoria Newhouse, these buildings are changing our experience of live music in unexpected ways.  She and Kurt visit Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. Built in 1969, the hall ...

Inspired by Tracy K. Smith’s collection Life on Mars, we want your poem about the star who captured your imagination — as a teenager or now. This week, we feature an entry in tribute to Led Zeppelin. ...

Enter our Ode to a Teen Idol Poetry Contest

The industrial designer Karim Rashid has 3,000 designs in production — including the Umbra “Oh Chair,” the Bobble Water Bottle, and the “Garbo” trash can — many featuring his signature rounded edges, cast in colorful plastics. Born in Egypt, Rashid found his calling as a designer early. ...

This year’s South by Southwest Music Festival featured 2,000 singer-songwriters, bands, rappers, and DJs, among them Kimbra. A 21-year-old from New Zealand (born Kimbra Johnson), she sang on last year’s pop hit “Somebody That I Used to Know.” SXSW was her ...

Video: Kimbra performs "Two Way Street" at SXSW

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

My sister, a psychiatrist, has been collecting the work of untrained artists for as long as I can remember, and travels to New York every January for the Outsider Art Fair. This year, I tagged along and discovered Phyllis Kornfeld’s Inside/Outside Envelope Project. Kornfeld has ...

The first thing you notice walking into Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory is its awesome scale.  In a city where every nook and cranny seems to be spoken for, the 55,000 square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall looks like it might have landed from outer space.  Completed in 1881, ...

Last night, New York City’s famed Webster Hall played host to the second-to-last stop on St. Vincent's sold-out North American tour.  Her 80-minute set was dominated by songs off her critically acclaimed new record Strange Mercy ...

An estimated 500 canines and 3,000 humans gathered in New York City's oldest dog run last weekend for the 21st annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade. This year’s attendees included Elvis, Yoda, a Doggie in the Window, and the M23 bus (named Best ...

Slideshow: Dogs on Parade

For the last two decades, Björk has pushed every boundary she could find, making just about the weirdest pop music that can still be considered pop music. She’s made beautiful, soulful songs out of electronics, musique concrete, an Inuit choir from Greenland, and her inimitable Icelandic accent that makes English unfamiliar ...

Video: Inside Biophilia's Apps

Before I left Los Angeles for New York City, one of the cultural experiences I was encouraged — no actually commanded — to experience by the culturally elite of my friends, was a Jon Brion show at the Largo.  (He had an ongoing residency at ...

Wesley is a talented man. His third novel (under his given name, Wesley Stace) came out this year, a crime story called Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer. Under the stage name John Wesley Harding, he always seems to have an album coming out. His twelfth is The Sound of His Own Voice ...

Video: "I Should Have Stopped"

Lou Reed, Laurie Andersen, Dan Zanes, Suzanne Vega, and others gathered in New York’s Central Park to salute Shel Silverstein — the poet and the songwriter — in a SummerStage concert wryly titled “Shelebration!” ...

Sleep No More may be the most unusual, fantastical take on Macbeth ever produced.  The London-based theater company Punchdrunk has transformed 100,000 square feet of New York City warehouse space into a meticulously detailed world — a kind of Macbeth theme park with no signage or...

Slideshow: Wandering Through Sleep No More

Industrial designer Karim Rashid creates ordinary household objects known the world over: he has more than 3000 in production, including the Umbra “Oh Chair” and the Bobble Water Bottle which filters water as you drink.  He found his calling early, when his family crossed ...

Josh Rogosin, an independent public radio producer, has been staked out at the Staples Center in Los Angeles since way before the dawn. He's been talking to fans and mourners who have begun to fill the streets of downtown Los Angeles in preparation for Michael Jackson's memorial service. The Takeaway joins Josh on the street along with fans from across the nation; we also talk to Aaron Flournoy, a waiter at Bennigan's in Jackson's hometown of Gary, Indiana.

Michael Jackson will be laid to rest this morning in Los Angeles in a private ceremony in the Hollywood Hills. The funeral is for family and friends only, but at LA's Staples Center thousands of his fans are gathering to say their goodbyes to the King of Pop. Over 16,000 lucky fans were able to get tickets to the service, while many thousands of devoted fans are expected to line the streets surrounding the arena. Joining The Takeaway from outside the Staples Center is Josh Rogosin, independent public radio producer and downtown Los Angeles resident. Also joining the conversation is Belinda Luscombe, Time Magazine's editor-at-large, who wrote much of the magazine's Jackson coverage.