Jonathan Mitchell

In a new videogame, the player ventures through the minds of dangerously insane patients at an asylum. The goal of Psychonauts is to resolve their conflicts and save the little kids whom they are threatening. Tim Schafer, the game’s creator, got his ideas from a college ...

In the early 1990s, rap music was sounding angry, even militant. Today, many of those angry young men are mainstream movie and TV stars. So what on earth happened to hip hop over the 90s? How did all the rage against the machine get co-opted? Hip Hop journalist Bakari ...

Majid Majidi's Children of Heaven finally put Iranian film on the map when it earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1999. Since then, Iran's reputation in the film world has grown to the point that an international film festival is practically incomplete without an Iranian entry. ...

In August, Studio 360 asked listeners to send us mail art. And you responded with fantastic enthusiasm. Streams of amazing things poured in through the mail drop from all around the world — a piece of toast, a coconut, a lump of clay, envelopes big, small, glittery, fragile, sturdy and ...

Ned Kahn is a sculptor with dangerous dreams. When a museum in Switzerland asked him what he’d always wanted to make but couldn’t quite pull off, he answered: A tornado made of fire. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

Christine Chapman has always been an actress, but she couldn’t find the time to perform with a full-time job and a family to care for. But her dream of being in theater got a shot in the arm one afternoon when she found herself in an empty movie theater. Produced ...

The composer Lois Vierk names her music after dramatic phenomena, like Jagged Mesa or Demon Star or Simoom, an Arabic name for a powerful wind. So it seemed appropriate that when producer Jonathan Mitchell interviewed her about what makes beautiful music, the forces of nature weighed in with their ...

A saboteur places a bomb under a table. Two people sit down at the table and talk about baseball. According to Alfred Hitchcock, it will be the most suspenseful conversation about baseball you’ve ever watched. We’ve seen it in countless suspense thrillers, like Speed and the James Bond films; our ...

American kids spend an average of 7 hours a week gaming. But what about the grown-ups inside the industry, who play 8 to 10 hours — and then leave the office and go home to play some more? Jonathan Mitchell asked game producer Marc Nesbitt about living almost full time ...

This fall a new opera called Haroun premiered, based on the book Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. In 1989, Rushdie was forced into hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini and declared that his novel The Satanic Verses was heresy against Islam ...

Studio 360 presents the world premiere of Moby-Dude from David Ives, the master of the short play. Mark Price plays a contemporary teenager who summarizes the great American novel for his English teacher ... in two minutes flat. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

In Lorna Simpson’s video Corridor, two women perform the mundane rituals of life in two different period homes. Projected side by side, the images might simply be voyeuristic if it weren’t for our knowledge that one African-American woman is living in the politically tumultuous year 1860 and the other in ...

Born in 1854, poet Arthur Rimbaud was every inch a modern punk star. There was the same love of drugs, cigarettes, long hair, perfectly grungy clothing and contempt for the bourgeoisie. But most of all, there was the poetry — reams of it, which began appearing when Rimbaud was fourteen: ...

When Portland artist damali ayo turned on the radio recently, she was so blown away she had the sudden desire to play air cello. What piece of music could be so powerful? A new version of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, performed by the Vienna Philharmonic and conducted by Simon ...

Some parodies are so clever that those being mocked don’t even realize. The cakewalk dance was created by African American slaves to poke fun of their masters. The masters watched with delight, and years later, vaudeville performers — white men in blackface — started performing the cakewalk in their shows. ...

In August, Studio 360 asked listeners to send us mail art. And you responded with fantastic enthusiasm. Streams of amazing things poured in through the mail drop from all around the world — a piece of toast, a coconut, a lump of clay, envelopes big, small, glittery, fragile, sturdy and ...

A play about a dissolute gambler by a 17th century writer, Jean-Francois Regnard, is currently making the rounds at regional theaters. It was adapted by playwright Freyda Thomas who is not a gambler herself, but who knows first hand the ruin it can bring. Jonathan Mitchell spoke with her ...

Yuri Yunakov is a saxophonist who will do anything to play his music. He is a member of the Roma culture (better known to most people as Gypsies) which historically has been a marginalized group in Europe. Wherever they've gone across Europe, they've been discriminated against, and have survived mostly ...

The composer Lois Vierk gives her music titles taken from dramatic phenomena, like Jagged Mesa and Demon Star and Simoom, an Arabic name for a certain wind. So it seemed appropriate that when producer Jonathan Mitchell interviewed her about what she considers beautiful music, the forces of nature intervened.