A few years ago in East London a music producer named Johan Hugo walked into a junk shop owned by Esau Mwamwaya. Hugo needed a session percussionist and asked Mwamwaya to audition for him, but Mwamwaya was a much better singer than drummer. As The Very Best ...

Video: “Kondaine,” The Very Best featuring Seye

Originally a graphic novel, the movie Chicken with Plums tells the story of Nasser Ali, a virtuoso violinist living in Tehran in the 1950s. He loathes his wife, has no patience for his children, and he loses his will to live. The film was adapted for the screen and directed by its creator, Marjane Satrapi ...

Slideshow: Stills from Chicken with Plums

A radical slowing of the earth is the premise for Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel The Age of Miracles. In her story, the earth's spinning slows down by an hour — within a few months, a full rotation takes 40 hours. Scientists are stumped. The concepts of “day” and ...

Just in time for Canada’s 145th birthday, Studio 360 gives our northern neighbor a brand makeover. To get beyond hockey, beer, and Mounties, we asked the international firm Bruce Mau Design to come up with a visual rebranding. As part of its research, the BMD team talked with ...

Kurt Andersen and Jian Ghomeshi, the host of Q, the CBC's daily arts and culture show go head to head in a cross-border cultural quiz. The North American showdown is the culmination to our month-long redesign project. Ophira Eisenberg, host NPR quiz show Ask Me Another, plays quizmistress ...

For decades comedians have been shaping the way Americans understand Canada: Samantha Bee, Martin Short, Mike Myers, to name a few. As part of its preparations to rebrand Canada for Studio 360, the team at Bruce Mau Design called up Mark McKinney of The Kids in the Hall ...

Video: The Kids in the Hall, "Message from Queen of England to Canada"

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

To help make the Canada brand more vivid and memorable we hired Bruce Mau Design, an international firm that has created marketing and branding campaigns for Coca Cola, General Electric, and MTV. Hunter Tura, the firm's president and CEO, says that with offices in both the ...

Video: What Should Americans Know About Canada?

What would Canada and the US look like if we gave each other a makeover? Kurt Andersen joins forces with Jian Ghomeshi, host of the CBC’s daily arts and culture program Q, for our new redesign project. All through June, the two programs will be giving each countries' brand identities a jolt ...

Submit your slogan for Canada

Hand it to AMC's Mad Men: on its own, it has reshaped the way we think about the 1960s. Much of that is the work of costume designer Janie Bryant, whose outfits and shifts in style signal the tensions of 1960s America. Writer Tom Fitzgerald deconstructs the characters' clothes ...

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 ...

From angels battling demons in heaven to the Beast with the number 666, the Book of Revelation — the apocalyptic conclusion to the New Testament — has been a narrative staple in our popular culture. Elaine Pagels' new book  considers this vivid and controversial text. A religion professor ...

An epic poem written more than 2,000 years ago by a Roman named Lucretius may be one of Western culture's most profound examples of art anticipating scientific discovery and modern thought. The poem is called "On the Nature of Things", and it presents all kinds of radical philosophical ...

Swedish-born, New Orleans-based singer-songwriter Theresa Andersson became an internet sensation a few years ago after she posted a video of her song “Na Na Na” to YouTube. Standing barefoot in her kitchen, surrounded by an array of instruments, Andersson plays each one, using a loop ...

Bonus Track: "What Comes Next"

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. ...

Over a couple of decades, Isabel Toledo quietly became one of the most sought-after fashion designers in the business. But in 2009, she experienced overnight global exposure when she designed First Lady Michelle Obama's inauguration outfit. Kurt Andersen visited Toledo's studio ...

Video: Isabel & Ruben Toledo in their studio

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 ...

Unemployment is down, job creation is up, and the auto industry — practically left for dead three years ago — is healthy. The economy finally seems like it's getting back on track, but on television, the Great Recession is the backstory of everything from reality shows to sitcoms ...

This weekend, The Hunger Games opens, and it’s likely to be one of the year’s most successful movies. The film is based on the trilogy of dystopian young adult novels by Suzanne Collins first published in 2008. Some enthralled readers didn’t wait for Hollywood to put the book on screen ...

Video: The Hunger Games fan films

Will Ferrell can make just about anything funny: playing the flute, negotiating with a toddler, just standing around in his underpants. For his latest movie, he joined a cast of Mexican actors for a role performed entirely in Spanish. Casa de Mi Padre is the big-screen version of ...