Lu Olkowski

S.E. Hinton was a teenager herself when she wrote a novel that broke all the rules of young adult fiction.

Independent producer Lu Olkowski continues her tour of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach with a look at automation moving to supplant the human dockworker.

About 40 percent of everything that the United States imports comes through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Together, they are the busiest port complex in the United States.

The complex racial history of two towns in Ohio leads members of the same family to disagree strongly about whether they're black or white.

Susan Eloise Hinton was a teenager when she wrote The Outsiders, the story of rival gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She used the pen name “S.E.” so readers wouldn’t know she was a girl, an...

Tattoos are the defining fashion statement of the present generation. A few years ago, the writer Carl Zimmer was at a pool party and found that a young scientist friend of his, a ne...

Just over 30 years ago, an Englishman named Christopher Alexander tried to revolutionize architecture. In A Pattern Language, Alexander told architects and planners to design homes on emotional and spiritual principles – not on traffic flow. The revolution didn’t quite come. But the book had a ...

Don Ingber is a cell biologist from Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital. One day he saw a piece of modern sculpture, Kenneth Snelson's "Needle Tower" — and Eureka! — it inspired a scientific breakthrough. Produced by

In Gulfport, Mississippi, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey visits her cousin Tamara Jones, still battling financial problems triggered by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It inspired Trethewey's poem "Believer," and the visit was documented by photographer Joshua Cogan. Produced by Studio 360's Lu ...

Susan B.A. Somers-Willet wrote a poem about DJ Guerrin, another one of Troy's single mothers struggling to get by. "In Verse" is Studio 360's series documenting the lives of the working poor through poetry and photography. It was created by Lu ...

A century ago, Troy, New York, was a thriving industrial capital. Today many of its residents live in poverty. Studio 360's Lu Olkowski went to Troy with poet Susan B.A. Somers-Willet and photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally to document some of Troy's stories. They ...

The Lillian Booth Home in Englewood, New Jersey is a retirement home for former entertainers. Studio 360 met some residents that are not done performing. Produced by Pejk Malinovski with Lu Olkowski and Nick Heling.

A young woman's apartment goes up in flames and a dashing young man saves the day! But to firefighter Louis Garcia, evidence at the scene didn't quite add up....at least, they didn't quite add up to that. He hunts down the source of the blaze.

Family X ...

His groundbreaking book A Pattern Language urged architects consider emotional and spiritual ideas when designing. It was the beginning of an elaborate, nuts-and-bolts philosophical system. Christopher Alexander failed to revolutionize the practice of architecture, but he inspired a movement in computer programming that affects how ...

A generation of Chinese artists left the country in the 1980s and 90s. Some found great success in the west, but China still looms large in their minds. Lu Olkowski talks with artists about why calligraphy and ink drawing seem so 21st century.

The pipa, or Chinese lute, has been part of traditional music in China for more than 2,000 years. These days, a few intrepid players have been incorporating the pipa’s sound into jazz, bluegrass, and modern classical music. Pipa virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen finds it impossible to stick to ...

Studio 360’s Lu Olkowski talked to artists (including painter Fernando Botero), writers, and a former soldier who have spent years trying to figure out what the Abu Ghraib photos really mean, and how seeing torture changes us.