Michele Siegel

If you’re of a certain generation, you will always love Albert Brooks for his role as a nervous TV producer in Broadcast News; if you’re of another, you will always love him as the vo...

Six years ago, the indie film Me and You and Everyone We Know took everyone else by surprise. It was a smart, funny first-time feature by the short story writer and performance artist...

When you’ve invested hours in the lives of characters in a book, you naturally imagine what becomes of them after the last page.  The novelist Sapphire has done the same, in a sequel ...

April may be the cruelest month, but June has been good for T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem, The Waste Land. Eighty-nine years after it was published, the poem became a runaway hit in the ...

Last week, Apple’s Steve Jobs made a design presentation — not to masses of swooning tech journalists, but to the Cupertino, California city council. What Jobs unveiled this time was Apple’s future corporate headquarters. The design, by celebrated architect Norman Foster, is shaped like a giant ...

Industrial designer Karim Rashid creates ordinary household objects known the world over: he has more than 3000 in production, including the Umbra “Oh Chair” and the Bobble Water Bottle which filters water as you drink.  He found his calling early, when his family crossed ...

Back in 2007, Kirsha Kaechele decided to take the New Orleans neighborhood St. Roch, with its decaying shotgun shacks, and renew it by building an arts community.  But four years la...

"That is one mother of a Confucius!"  Beijing-based reporter Jocelyn Ford is not prone to hyperbole, but that was her uncensored reaction this week when she visited China's National M...

It's the final days of an extraordinary exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center: a photo show by an unknown genius who quietly toiled away at her talents, alone, for decades, but who was almost lost to time.

The comedian Patton Oswalt reads the title essay from his new memoir: Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland. As Oswalt sees it, we all fall into one of these three science fiction fantasy arch...

Amid all the journalist-bloggers on the Cairo streets this week, Ahmed "Danny" Ramadan's posts on the arts news site Hyperallergic stood out to us. Especially the way he noticed how street graffiti had changed since the protests began. When Studio 360 reached Ramadan earlier this week, he told us that the "graffiti started out with simple slogans like: 'We love Egypt' and 'Down with Mubarak.'" But then it got more creative, Ramadan said.

Some of the world's greatest art has been inspired by revolution, but how often does a work of art become part of the revolution itself? Watching the protests in Cairo last week, Egyptian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti was inspired to write a brand new poem -- its Arabic title roughly translates as "Oh Egypt, It's Close."

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.”

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.

To the list of labels Jonathan Safran Foer has acquired over the years--wunderkind author, outspoken vegetarian, one of those Brooklyn "Jonathans"--  we can now add "literary sculptor." This month he's turned the paperback novel into an interactive sculpture which needs no battery power or wifi. Foer's new book will *never* be able to fit on a Kindle or Nook and that's kind of the point.

So, it's mid-autumn and if you're done reading the it-novel of the fall of 2010 --Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, natch-- how about cracking open the it-novel of the fall of 1905? Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton examined the dangerous compromises facing a woman who wants to set her own destiny, and broke ground for countless writers who followed.

Lily Bart is a smart single woman — but she’s nearing thirty, and struggling to manage money, friendships, and romance. In The House of Mirth, published in 1905, Edith Wharton examined the dangerous compromises facing a woman who wants to set her own destiny. Produced by ...

Hurricanes and oil spills won't stop this New Orleans band. They embrace city's gumbo-like spirit layering each tune with a jillion textures and the odd horn riff. Through it all, they never lose their rock n'roll cred. Take 'Montrez-Vous:' it's got a seriously danceable hard-driving percussion but also includes xylophone, cowbell, maracas, bongos, organ, and a chorus in French. The final track 'Indian Summer' makes time for trumpets, gorgeous vocal harmonies, whimsical lyrics, and messy jam-bandy moments. Worth putting on repeat in any season.

Oh, say can you compose a new anthem?

Well, the jury's still out on that. A few weeks ago we began our listener challenge to create a new national anthem with the hopes that people would write new lyrics and music for song that could take the place of the ...