Janna Levin

Inspiration strikes in the dead of night. A coffee-fueled Kurt pays a midnight visit to filmmaker Alan Berliner, whose documentary about insomnia airs next week on HBO. We’ll hear why novelist Sherman Alexie compares his insomnia to a bad romance. Plus, indie-pop act Alsace Lorraine — featuring an American priest and an Argentine illustrator who […]

Smashing atoms and colliding worlds. We try to wrap our brains around the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, which revs up this summer. Writer Lydia Millet imagines a quantum accident at the Collider in a story, read by Martha Plimpton. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, two worlds collide violently in […]

Studio 360 wonders: could an enormous science project create the conditions for a black hole? We try to wrap our brains around the Large Hadron Collider, which just opened for business. Hear how rock n’ roll history owes a lot to a simple laundromat in New Orleans. Plus, live in the studio, the indie-soul sound […]

This week in Studio 360, novelist Walter Kirn explains how Twitter and Walt Whitman are helping him make sense of the Arizona tragedy. The cartoonist Garry Trudeau looks back at f…