Kurt Andersen

What makes us creative? What can make us more creative? And where do truly creative people find their inspiration? These are questions that Kurt Andersen and Julie Burstein have been asking for over a decade on PRI’s arts and culture program Studio 360. Kurt is the host of the show. Julie is its former executive producer. And this week, a new book penned by Julie, with a forward by Kurt, hits stores. It’s called “Spark: How Creativity Works,” and it features insights from some of the greatest creative minds of our time, including Chuck Close, Yo Yo Ma, Rosanne Cash, Kevin Bacon, and Joyce Carol Oates.

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.”

What if, ten years ago this Sunday, the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore had gone another way? If the court had found the methods of recounting ballots to be fair; and instead of George W. Bush, then Vice-President Al Gore won Florida's recount, and thus the 2000 presidential election? How different would our world look today? Would it look different at all? 

The Star-Spangled Banner is nearly as old as America itself. But how much do most Americans really know about the time-honored traditional song? The lyrics come from a poem dating back to 1814 and the music from an old British drinking song. The song wasn't officially chosen as the national anthem until 1931. Since then, some have criticized the choice, saying the lyrics are too hard to learn and the notes too high to hit.

When I came across the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade, almost a decade ago, I was fascinated and appalled. As you know if you listen to the show, I'm really not a snob -- I loved The Hangover, for instance, and don't really get opera.

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Kurt Andersen discusses age, youth, maturity, and when personal feelings about being "grown-up" change.

When I first read this 1974 novel, set in West Germany around the time of the Red Army Faction, it seemed very foreign to me in every sense.  A serious terrorist threat?  Law enforcement overreach to deal with it?  Powerful, sensationalist right-wing media whipping up the panic?  Well, times have changed, and the resonances today are different for American readers.  I discovered as much earlier this year, when Penguin asked me to write an introduction for this new paperback edition.

They Might Be Giants is just about my favorite working band, and not just because they're also the only band -- apart from the Byrds, many many years ago -- with whom I've actually worked a show onstage and back stage. TMBG are smart and good and nice and funny. And live in Brooklyn. Really: what more could one want?

According to Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen the economic crisis might have an upside. His latest book is called Reset.

Studio 360 airs on WNYC Saturday at 10am on 93.9 FM and Sunday at 7pm on AM 820.

Event: Kurt Andersen will be in conversation with ...

Stonewall witnesses/participants, Danny Garvin and Tommy Lanigan Schmidt, and historian David Carter will recount the events surrounding the Stonewall rebellion.

Then
Kurt Andersen, host of PRI and WNYC’s Studio 360, and Mark Randall, principal of Worldstudio, a marketing and design agency, will talk about Studio 360’s gay ...

The news is full of Detroit's woes. Chrysler is drawing up bankruptcy papers, GM is shuttering its plants for nine weeks, and just this morning Ford posted a $1.4 billion first quarte...

My time in Los Angeles is coming to an end. I will miss the phantasmagorically perfect weather, the hiking trails (with coyotes!) 5 minutes from my house, the focused and talented students (and faculty) of Art Center, and all the interesting strangers who tend to be, I think, more gratifyingly...open than your typical New Yorker. But it'll also be good to get back to a place where urban life teems just outside one's front door, where I don't have to drive everywhere, and where the city (physically as well as culturally and intellectually) is more coherent, more truly (or at least obviously) a city.

Kurt Andersen, novelist and host of PRI's Studio 360, wrote the cover article for this week's Time Magazine called "The End of Excess: Why This Crisis is Good for America", talks about the end of an era and a way forward.

I am not on the payroll of the California Travel & Tourism Commission, I swear. But as if the weather in general were not splendidly un-wintery enough, here's some of what I encountered a couple of hours west and north of Los Angeles, by aiming for Santa Barbara and then more or less aimlessly wandering. My daughter Kate provivded a perfect iPod score, dominated by Four Tet and the soundtracks of Jungle Book and Carnivàle.

When I visited Johannesberg a few years ago, I was startled by how much, townships aside, it reminded me of southern California -- the topography, the sunniness, the freeways, the shiny Americanism in general. So the other day when I interviewed the delightful founders of the cool South African rock band BLK JKS, Mpumi Mcata and Lindani Buthelezi, before their gig at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, I asked, a little nervously, if they agreed. Yes! They also thought it was cool (and, um, ironic) that they were about to perform next to ethnographic dioramas depicting indigenous Africa. The interview -- and exclusive acoustic performance! -- airs starting Friday.

I’ve just spent a fascinating day in the desert an hour and a half north of Los Angeles.

It was an Art Center College of Design field trip. First stop was a hangar-cum-workshop at the Mojave airport – officially, and very grandly, the Mojave Air and Space Port -- where ...

Attending the Oscar ceremony last night, I realized why the pre-show red-carpet rigmarole has become more and more a focus of the television coverage over the last decade or so: that's the juiciest part of the quasi-official event, a reality-show The Day of the Locust without the apocalyptic ending.

First ...