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.

Albright Allen Anderson Bennett Bogosian Close

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 about 140 stations, and a half million smart people listen with what seems to be enormous enthusiasm. My guests have included Madeline Albright, Sherman Alexie, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Tori Amos, Laurie Anderson, Margaret Atwood, Kevin Bacon, Nicholson Baker, Tony Bennett, Michael Bierut, Eric Bogosian, TC Boyle, Ray Bradbury, Billy Bragg, Bill Buford, David Byrne, Roseanne Cash, Chuck Close, Billy Collins, Elvis Costello, Jonathan Demme, Steve Earle, Dave Eggers, Chris Elliott, Nora Ephron, Jonathan Safran Foer, Caio Fonseca, Ian Frazier, Neil Gaiman, Frank Gehry, Terry Gilliam, Adam Gopnik, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Merle Haggard, Donald Hall, A.M. Homes, Nick Hornby, Thomas Hoving, Arianna Huffington, John Irving, Pico Iyer, Bill T. Jones, Maira Kalman, Catherine Keener, Barbara Kruger, Tony Kushner, Sean Lennon, Neal Labute, Jhumpa Lahiri, k.d. lang, Ursula Le Guin, Elmore Leonard, Jonathan Lethem, George Lois, Courtney Love, Baz Luhrmann, Frank McCourt, Bobby McFerrin, Larry McMurtry, David Milch, Anthony Minghella, Eliza Minot, Susan Minot, Samuel Mockbee, Walter Mosley, Rick Moody, Errol Morris, Toni Morrison, Azar Nafisi, Todd Oldham, Chuck Palahniuk, Gary Panter, Dolly Parton, Alexander Payne, Austin Pendleton, Itzhak Perlman, Amy Poehler, David Remnick, Robert Redford, Anne Rice, Paul Rudnick, Luc Sante, Simon Schama, Ridley Scott, Liev Schreiber, Anna Deavere Smith, Todd Solondz, Susan Sontag, Art Spiegelman, Frank Stella, Lili Taylor, Paul Theroux, They Might Be Giants, John Updike, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Sarah Vowell, Wendy Wasserstein, John Waters, Lawrence Weschler, Wim Wenders, Wilco and Neil Young.

We won a 2005 Peabody Award for a show we did about Moby Dick.

And it is huge fun.

My surpassingly smart, kind, professional, hard-working colleagues – Julie Burstein, Ave Carillo, Derek John, David Krasnow, Sarah Lilley, Leital Molad, Eric Molinsky 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.