Michele Siegel

Richard Holmes tells the story of chemist Humphrey Davy’s experiments with nitrous oxide (a.k.a. laughing gas). It's a wild tale of how the scientist convinced friends — like the ...

Finally, a YouTube time-suck guaranteed to delight you with repeated viewings.  If, by the end, your jaw is not scraping the floor, you will be sporting an ear-to-ear smile of gee-whiz amazement.

The band OK Go made viral video history back in 2006 with their goofy treadmill ...

The Guggenheim Museum's walls are bare at the moment to make room for a piece by conceptual artist Tino Sehgal called "This Progress." Kurt talks with Sehgal about the work: a series of four improvised conversations the visitor experiences along the building's famous ...

If pale young couples on the misty heath isn't your cup of Earl Grey, Bright Star will change your mind about British costume dramas. Jane Campion (The Piano) wrote and directed this exquisite film based on the heartbreakingly short life of the poet John Keats ...

Last year classical musician Meredeth Rouse signed up for the U.S. Army Band. Alongside soldiers nearly half her age, she had to get comfortable with rifles, hand grenades, and chemical warfare. In the Army, even an oboist has to get through boot camp. Produced by Studio ...

Ted Riccardi, a retired professor of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages, wrote his own Holmes adventures, set in Tibet, Nepal, India, and Indonesia. His book is The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. Produced by Studio 360's Michele Siegel.

We were sad to learn that Tom Hoving passed away today.  The former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art was an art world insider, an expert on art fraud and forgery, and one of the best storytellers to come by our studio.

It's almost exactly 150 years since On the Origin of Species was published, so for this week's show we decided to put evolution to the test.  We learned a lot of cool facts in producing this hour: did you know the human species was nearly extinct -- dwindling to just 2,000 people -- 70,000 years ago? And if you ever worried about genetic engineering going awry, don't miss the amazing sci-fi short story we commissioned from writer Lydia Millet.

Playlist anxiety this party season? It's The Very Best to the rescue. Fronted by a Malawian Esau Mwamwaya, the band made mixtape history last year with its killer remixes of M.I.A's 'Paper Planes' and Vampire Weekend's 'Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.' Even without those tunes, the album offers dizzying layers of Afropop and sunny vocals in English and Chichewa over techno dance beats. The title track is a party-starter with its happy mix of textures: a deep heartbeat of a bass line, cowbell, choir-style back-up vocals, and toe-tapping guitar riffs. It just might move you to book a flight to Lilongwe, which is appropriate, because it turns out Warm Heart of Africa is Malawi's tourism slogan too.

Design for the Real World: Skulls

Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated and the upcoming non-fiction work Eating Animals, explains how boxes by the artist Joseph Cornell inspired his own creative process.

No new movie, book, or George Lucas rumor to peg it to, but Britain's Architects Journal decided this week to list its Top 10 favorite buildings from Star Wars. Sure, it's blogger catnip: Top 10 List + Star Wars + architecture = hits from every sci-fi geek and design snob this side of Tatooine. But it's a clever round up, including photos of some real-world buildings, in places like Abu Dhabi and Porto, that appear to have quite a bit of Star Wars DNA in them. As for me, I'm over Brooklyn and desperately trolling craigslist for an Ewok treehouse in Endor.

July in June. We aired one of our favorite Miranda July short stories this past weekend. Then I noticed this video popping up on some of my favorite blogs. It's from July's installation at the 2008 International Triennale of Contemporary Art in Yokohama, Japan. It's thoughtful, funny, wordy, and the tiniest bit pretentious. Hooray for existential art! And it makes me excited to see what she comes up with next.

Yale Graphic design grad student Ely Kim conducts a 1-man dance off to his 100 fave songs. You won't hear more than a few bars of each, but you will want watch all 100 (and marvel at all the great art school interiors from printshops to bathroom stalls). Best of all, guests at your future dance parties will thank you for his playlist. (M.I.A. , Technotronic, Yaz, Lil Mama) Watch. Smile. Repeat.
BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

Gaze up above any low slung building in LA and this is the view.

 

Greetings from the other side of the Pacific Rim-- Los Angeles! This winter/spring Kurt Andersen has a special residency at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and we've got some LA-based stories and ...

The movie "Caramel" tells the story of five very different women living in Beirut. Writer, director, and star Nadine Labaki set the film in a beauty parlor, and paints a bittersweet portrait of everyday life in the Middle East. Produced by Studio 360’s

Zarife Öztürk works at a publishing house in Istanbul. A few years ago she made it her mission to translate Judy Blume's children’s books into Turkish. Öztürk fell in love with Blume’s books when she was 10 years old, and about to attend ...

Inspired by his new film "Be Kind Rewind," director Michel Gondry created a special exhibit of movie sets at the Deitch Projects art gallery in New York, where people can walk in and make their own movies. So Studio 360's Michele ...

Aleksandar Hemon, the author of the novel Nowhere Man, was in Chicago in 1992 when the war began in his hometown of Sarajevo. He found out much as he could, through TV news, phone calls, and letters from friends -- and found solace through the ...

When the Congolese civil war broke out in 1998, the novelist Emmanuel Dongala and his family fled Brazzaville. While he was hiding with 40 others in a house as rockets hissed by and exploded just a few meters away, books became Dongala's refuge. Produced by