From Studio 360: Filmmaker Paul H-O tells Kurt Andersen about his life in the shadow of art star photographer Cindy Sherman.
Gatsby Gets Schooled Students in Garth Wolkoff's English class in Brooklyn admire Gatsby, and find Daisy suspiciously ?chillax.? Azar Nafisi, who taught the book in Tehran, recounts the time her university students put the book on trial. The decadent capitalist Jay Gatsby, she says, should be a warning for radical Islamists.
WEB EXTRA: Nancy Harrow Singer Nancy Harrow is developing a theater project from her songs inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's life and work. She explains her fascination with the author and sings the role of Daisy Buchanan.
You're a Complicated Man, Charlie Brown At its peak, over 350 million people around the world read "Peanuts" every day. Its creator, Charles Schulz, led a much darker life than anyone realized, and he put his troubles into the funny pages. Kurt talks with biographer David Michaelis about how America's most beloved comic strip made "depressed" a household word.
What is Stephen Harper Reading? Yann Martel is the author of the bestselling novel Life of Pi. Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister of Canada. For the last six months, Martel has been sending works of literature to Harper, one every two weeks. Kurt called Martel to ask him about it.
Yo-Yo Ma The virtuoso cellist has gotten a lot of attention in the last decade for forming and leading The Silk Road Ensemble ?- a group that draws its members and music from countries all across Asia. Whether on the road or at home in Cambridge, Ma tells Kurt how every day begins with a Bach cello suite.
Bonus Track: Ma plays Bach Yo-Yo performs J.S. Bach's "Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 in G Major: V. Menuett" in Studio 360.
American Icons: Kind of Blue Even if you've never bought a jazz album in your life, you've heard Miles Davis' masterpiece, Kind of Blue -- at a party, in a movie, or in a restaurant. As part of Studio 360's award-winning series on American Icons, Ave Carrillo tries to figure out what it is that makes Kind of Blue so extraordinary.
Iraq and the XBOX In the mid-90s, the U.S. military discovered that Marines were customizing the videogame Doom to practice warfare, which prompted the Marine Corps to develop its own version of the game as an actual training tool. Now they've added another level of realism for a videogame that helps soldiers navigate the complexity of real urban warfare -- it's called Full Spectrum Warrior.
Super Mario Clouds Imagine walking through an art gallery and finding a single wall of digital clouds lifted from the classic 80s Nintendo game Super Mario Brothers. The artist Cory Arcangel tells Rebecca Cascade why reprogramming video game software comes as naturally to him as wielding a paintbrush.
Your Brain on Videogames American kids spend an average of seven hours a week gaming. But what about the grown-ups inside the industry, who play eight to ten 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 in the simulated world.