January 30, 2009
As a starving writer, Katy Lederer had credit card debt and couldn't hold on to her apartment. So she took a job at a hedge fund, but she kept writing poetry on the side, often about money and our complicated lust for it. Now a full-time poet, her recent collection is Heaven-Sent Leaf. Lederer tells what modern money-making and modern verse have in common.
Enlighten Us: Submit your haiku about the financial crisis
Travel writer Pico Iyer has lived in Japan for 20 years. And while he knows the locals still see him as an outsider, he told Kurt that this status helps him pay attention to his surroundings. Iyer says Japan is like a "2000-year-old person wearing a micro-skirt, with an artificial tan and carrying a surfboard." Special thanks to Matthew Cavnar.
Iyer tells Kurt about Buddhism in Japanese daily life:
The tea ceremony is a 400-year-old ritual for making and presenting green tea. But in Japan's fast-paced techno-centric society - one increasingly fueled by coffee - we wondered how the tea ceremony can survive. Studio 360’s Jenny Lawton talked with tea masters, old and young, to find out.
Aokigahara is the name of the forest at the foot of Mount Fuji. It’s been mythologized in Japanese literature as a sacred place for people to end their lives – and every year close to a hundred suicides are committed there. Studio 360’s Pejk Malinovski went to the forest to uncover its haunting allure and how the place lingers in the Japanese psyche.
Studio 360 is a co-production of
Public
Radio International and
WNYC New York Public Radio, and is funded in part by
Ken and Lucy Lehman, the
National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our series on Underground Heroes is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 
