In 1985, The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean started traveling around the country to find out how Americans spend their Saturday nights. One thing she discovered? How many Saturday night songs there are.
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Arts and Culture
We take a closer look at one of Shirley Jackson's most haunting short stories, "The Daemon Lover." Joan Wylie Hall is our guide. She's the author of "Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction."More
In addition to her haunting short stories and novels, Shirley Jackson also wrote comic essays about her struggles to balance her writing career with family life. Her children Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt have assembled a collection of that writing called "Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings."More
Chuck Palahniuk has made a very successful career out of writing transgressive fiction. So maybe it's not surprising that Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" had a huge impact on Palahniuk.More
Ruth Franklin is the author of "Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life." In her book, Franklin argues that Jackson's body of work channeled women's anxieties at the time, representing "nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era."More
Reflecting on the devastating fires in California, we revisit a conversation with a longtime "hotshot" crew firefighter, Mary Pauline Lowry. More
What's it like to host a talk show in virtual reality? We talk avatars with Will Smith, host of “The Foo Show.”More
Our digital producer, Mark Riechers, tells us why he got married in a movie theater.More
Matt Conboy, co-founder of one of NYC’s most famous indie music venues, tells us how “Death By Audio” died.More
Author Min Jin Lee grew up Korean-American and she thought she knew her ancestors. But when she moved to Tokyo, she discovered a history she didn’t know. The history of Koreans in Japan.More
Kazuo Ishiguro just won the Nobel prize. Here's the best stuff he's said to us.More
Daniel Mendelsohn was surprised—and unnerved—when his 81-year father enrolled in his seminar on "The Odyssey." And then delighted to see how his dad’s cranky comments excited his students. The experience also brought Daniel closer to his dad.More
Teachers Curtis Acosta and Jose Gonzalez explain the origins of Tucson's Mexican-American Studies program—and how their personal histories in school led them to teach these courses.More
Humanities programs are under siege. Their budgets are getting slashed as critics say schools should focus on job skills. But essayist Mark Slouka believes this is a tragic mistake.More
A listener reminds us that it wasn't just teenage boys listening to Pink Floyd in 1973. More
Jonathan Lethem considers Philip K. Dick one of his literary heroes. Lethem talks about how Dick was able to combine his brilliant imagination with his original mainstream ambitions to produce the groundbreaking literary science fiction that he's known for.More
If you think you haven't seen any movies based on Philip K. Dick's work, you're probably wrong. David Gill talks about Hollywood's adaptations of Dick's work.More
During the last two years of his life, Philip K. Dick tried to make sense of a series of strange visionary experiences. Jonathan Lethem explains how these events changed Dick's life.More