Studio 360: Maurice Sendak & Filmmaker Mark Duplass

American literature lost one of its giants this week. Best known for his breakthrough 1963 picture book Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak's long, colorful career involved one wild rumpus after another. Sendak’s work was often powerfully dark, in the manner of the old Grimms’ fairy tales; Wild Things might be a nightmare, with its chaotic dreamscape and its ferocious, smothering monsters. But children loved it, critics loved it, parents loved it, and it changed the way America thought about books.

Then, hackers became anathema to the music labels at the dawn of digital file sharing, but now are key players in the industry. At the Rethink Music conference in Boston, programmers, developers, and tinkerers showed up for a 24-hour coding frenzy — a hackathon — at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (NERD) Center, vying to make the coolest app that could transform music.

After that, a new kind of leading man has taken hold in Hollywood: the lovable loser. Steve Carrell, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill — they're not suave and handsome, they’re geeks and schlubs. Judd Apatow introduced these characters as comedy stars (starting with The 40-Year Old Virgin), but the emerging master of the genre is Mark Duplass. Together with his brother Jay, Mark Duplass has written and directed smart, affecting comedies about these losers. Their latest film, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, stars Jason Segel as a 30-year-old stoner settled in to his mother's basement.

Following that, It’s the first poem about David Bowie to win the Pulitzer Prize. Tracy K. Smith’s collection Life on Mars contains many references to the man she salutes as the “Pope of Pop.” Inspired by Smith, we asked for your poem about the rock star or other teen idol who captured your imagination — as a teenager or now.

And finally, in the last decade, concert hall construction has been booming. And according to architectural historian Victoria Newhouse, these buildings are changing our experience of live music in unexpected ways. Newhouse spent the last five years visiting and studying these spaces for her new book Sight and Sound: The Architecture and Acoustics of New Opera Houses and Concert Halls. [Broadcast Date: May 12, 2012]