Growing up in Brooklyn, Sandra Sherman’s view of the world was limited. “I was supposed to go to Brooklyn College, if I went to college at all, stay at home, and become a high-school teacher just like my parents,” she remembers. Then one day she picked up This Side of Paradise ...

Neil Selkirk is an accomplished portrait photographer.  He began his career in London during the 60s, when being a magazine photographer meant wild parties, fancy cars, and beautiful girls.  During a shoot assisting Richard Avedon, he encountered a photograph: A Family One Evening in a Nudist Camp, Pennsylvania, 1965.  Selkirk was shocked ...

Porgy and Bess was groundbreaking: an opera about poor African-Americans in South Carolina, starring a cripple, a tramp, and a drug dealer. There’s a new production on Broadway now entitled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, but it’s not the one George and Ira presented in 1935 ...

Video: a song from the Broadway production

In the 1980s, Marion Roach was a party girl and aspiring writer, clerking for The New York Times by day and hitting the clubs by night. She was in love with New York and felt she was living in the center of the universe. One day she was handed a copy of William Kennedy’s novel Legs ...

When it comes to the Oscars, cynicism is in vogue — unless, of course, you’re a first time nominee. Andrew Bowler and Gigi Causey are the director and producer of the comedy Time Freak, which is nominated this year for best live action short. They're also a married couple ...

Video: A scene from Time Freak

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 ...

Despite success abroad, the Iranian film industry is in serious trouble with the government. Prominent directors have been jailed, and last week the government shut down the House of Cinema, Iran's largest independent film institute. Filmmaker Rafi Pitts believes the industry "has been pushed ...

Porgy and Bess was groundbreaking: an opera about poor African-Americans in South Carolina, starring a cripple, a tramp, and a drug dealer.  This weekend a new production opens on Broadway entitled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, but it’s not the one George and Ira presented in 1935. ...

Video: a song from the Broadway production

You don't get much more famous than Angelina Jolie. The acting roles that made her famous (the troubled teen in Girl Interrupted, the ass-kicking archeologist in Tomb Raider) have long been overshadowed by her personal life – the endless stream of chatter about her six children with Brad ...

Angelina Jolie may be the most tattooed actress in Hollywood. She has the coordinates of her children’s birthplaces on her arm, a Buddhist Pali incantation on her shoulder blade, a cross on her hip, a rune on her wrist, a tiger on her lower back ... Jolie recently ...

This morning, TIME announced 2011's Person of the Year: The Protester. Studio 360's own Kurt Andersen wrote the cover story, and was sworn to secrecy so we were just as surprised as everyone else. But in retrospect, we probably could have seen it coming. We’ve been covering the art ...

Elliott Carter might be the hardest working man in classical music today. Having turned 103 over the weekend, he’s certainly the oldest. The composer is celebrating his latest birthday by premiering several new pieces, five of which were performed last week. The festivities continue tonight when Julliard's AXIOM ensemble performs ...

For our next redesign project, Studio 360 is giving schoolteachers a makeover. Turns out a lot of teachers hate the treacly, old-fashioned visual imagery that gets dumped on them (ABCs, 123s, chalkboards, rulers, apples). One teacher told us she calls this iconography "apple crapple." ...

It’s been 25 years since Art Spiegelman published Maus, the graphic novel about his father's experiences in the Holocaust. This is the book that opened the doors for graphic novels and eventually graphic nonfiction, and made alternative comics a mainstream ...

Last weekend, the journal Nature Structure & Molecular Biology published a key discovery in the study of HIV — and it was made with the help of online gamers. They were playing Foldit, a game which challenges players to figure out the structures of real enzymes and proteins.  One of those puzzles was a protein ...