Studio 360

Studio 360

AT THE END of the last century, Public Radio International and New York’s public radio station WNYC decided to create a weekly one-hour national magazine program about culture and the arts. They asked me to help create it, and to be the host.

 

Studio 360  went on the air in New York and Los Angeles and a few other cities in the fall of 2000; today we’re broadcast on 217 stations, and 600,000 smart people listen with what seems to be enormous enthusiasm. My guests have included Chinua Achebe, Madeline Albright, Sherman Alexie, Woody Allen, Isabel Allende, Pedro Amodovar, Robert Altman, Tori Amos, Laurie Anderson, Aziz Ansari,  Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Kevin Bacon, Jon Robin Baitz, Nicholson Baker, Samantha Bee, Bell Orchestre, Tony Bennett, Michael Bierut, Kathryn Bigelow, Andrew Bird, Roy Blount, Eric Bogosian,  TC Boyle, Ray Bradbury, Billy Bragg, Jeff Bridges, Bill Buford, T-Bone Burnett, Tim Burton, David Byrne, Don Byron, John Cale, James Cameron, Elliot Carter, Roseanne Cash, Michael Chabon, Lisa Cholodenko, Jimmy Cliff, Chuck Close, Diablo Cody, Stephen Colbert, Robert Coles, Billy Collins, Ry Cooder, Stewart Copeland, Sofia Coppola, Elvis Costello, Wayne Coyne, Mike Daisey, Matt Damon, Del the Funky Homosapien, Jonathan Demme, Junot Diaz, Joan Didion, Simon Doonan, Steve Earle, Christine Ebersole, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Chris Elliott, James Ellroy, Nora Ephron, Carrie Fisher, Jonathan Safran Foer, Caio Fonseca, Richard Ford, Milos Forman, Jodie Foster, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Morgan Freeman, Alan Furst, Neil Gaiman, Ricky Gervais, Frank Gehry, Paul Giamatti, William Gibson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Gilliam, Milton Glaser, Paul Goldberger, Adam Gopnik, John Guare, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Merle Haggard, Donald Hall, Marvin Hamlisch, Herbie Hancock, Ethan Hawke, Werner Herzog, A.M. Homes, Nick Hornby, Arianna Huffington, John Irving, Pico Iyer, Howard Jacobson, Marlon James, Bill T. Jones, Rickie Lee Jones, Sharon Jones, Miranda July, Mindy Kaling, Maira Kalman, Charlie Kaufman, Diane Keaton, Catherine Keener, Ben Kinglsey, Barbara Kingsolver, Barbara Kruger, Lisa Kudrow, Tony Kushner, Ben Kweller, Jaron Lanier, Spike Lee, Annie Leibovitz, Sean Lennon, Neal Labute, Jhumpa Lahiri, k.d. lang, Ursula Le Guin, Elmore Leonard, Jonathan Lethem, David Lindsay-Abaire, George Lois, Courtney Love, Baz Luhrmann, Patti Lupone, David Lynch, Yo-Yo Ma, Ian McEwan, Bobby McFerrin, Larry McMurtry, David Milch, David Milch, Joanathan Miller, Eliza Minot, Susan Minot, Moby, Alfred Molina, Janelle Monae, Jason Moran, Errol Morris, Walter Mosley, Rick Moody, Errol Morris, Toni Morrison, Azar Nafisi, Mira Nair, Randy Newman, Lynn Nottage, Todd Oldham, Yoko Ono, Chuck Palahniuk, Gary Panter, Sarah Jessica Parker, Dolly Parton, Alexander Payne, Austin Pendleton, Itzhak Perlman, Arthur Phillips, Martha Plimpton, Amy Poehler, Richard Powers, Richard Price, Sam Raimi, Joshua Redman, David Remnick, Paul Reubens, Josh Ritter, Robert Redford, Jason Reitman, Anne Rice, Robbie Robertson, James Rosenquist, Paul Rudnick, Geoffrey Rush, Luc Sante, Sapphire, George Saunders, Simon Schama, Ridley Scott, Julian Schnabel, Liev Schreiber, Amy Sedaris, Pete Seger, Duncan Sheik, Gary Shteyngart, David Simon, Jane Smiley, Anna Deavere Smith, Patti Smith, Jill Sobule, Todd Solondz, Stephen Soderbergh, Regina Spektor, Art Spiegelman, Frank Stella, Michael Stipe, Tom Stoppard, Quentin Tarantino, Lili Taylor, Teller, Twyla Tharp, Paul Theroux, They Might Be Giants, Garry Trudeau, Chali 2na, Tune-Yards, Suzanne Vega, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Gore Vidal, Sarah Vowell, Christopher Walken, Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips, John Waters, Reggie Watts, Lawrence Weschler, Wilco, Connie Willis, Wim Wenders, Wilco and Neil Young.  As well as the late Solomon Burke, Thomas Hoving, Norman Mailer, Frank McCourt, Anthony Minghella, Samuel Mockbee, Susan Sontag, John Updike and Wendy Wasserstein, may they rest in peace.

We won Peabody Awards in 2005 and 2013, as well as a bunch of other awards.

And it is huge fun.

My surpassingly smart, kind, professional, hard-working colleagues – John DeLore, David Krasnow, Jenny Lawton, Leital Molad, Sean Rameswaram and Michele Siegel – make it easy for me. They deserve a lot of the credit for the generous coverage the show receives in the press, such as New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman’s description of Studio 360 as “the best program on radio,” and articles like these in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Current.