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It seems like every Republican presidential campaign right now is doubling as a book tour (Michele Bachmann’s Core of Conviction: My Story, Ron Paul’s Liberty Defined, Rick Perry’s Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington). But this double duty is nothing new for candidate Newt Gingrich ...

Bonus Track: An Historian’s Analysis

As events unfolded in Arizona this week, novelist Walter Kirn turned to Twitter to express what he was seeing and feeling. Kirn tells Kurt he fears that our digital world is breeding characters who are unhinged from reality.

Like the rest of the twitterati,  the novelist Walter Kirn quickly tried to make sense of the Arizona shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several others.

As events unfolded, Kirn’s tweets stood out. By Sunday night, Kirn realized the uncanny similarities alleged shooter Jarred Loughner shared with Kent Selkirk, the socially-inept-loner-on-the-internet protagonist of Kirn’s novel, The Unbinding.

“It was a sense of recognition,” Kirn told Studio 360's Kurt Andersen. “The forces that created this Loughner may be spawning more of him.”

Oscar-nominated film, "Up in the Air," tells a story made for the recession. George Clooney plays a corporate grim reaper, flying all over the country to lay off his clients' employees. Director Jason Reitman ("Juno") based it on the 2001 novel by

Walter Kirn thinks the American education system focuses far too much on standardized tests, extracurricular activities and class rankings at the expense of intellectual fulfillment. In his book, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever, Kirn looks at the intellectual costs of our current education system.

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