Later this year, Hasbro will unveil a partly-electronic version of one of the classic board games.  But Studio 360 thinks Monopoly needs more of a makeover to bring it into the 21st century.  Game designer Brenda Brathwaite says Monopoly is practically designed to be boring: it’s "literally just about waiting for people to run out of money...

Slideshow: Monopoly Through the Years

Since the quake, Takehiko Inoue (the artist behind the manga Slam Dunk) he has posted several smiling images a day in support of the victims and to lift the spirits of his countrymen.

Last week, Japanese-American historian Bill Tsutsui found himself in Tokyo in the middle of the earthquake: “We were outside this hotel and the earth started moving.  And all of a sudden people started running out.  First just a few, but then wave after wave.  And after it was ...

The indie rockers in No One Knows About Persian Cats (out on DVD today) dare to play the music they love, even though they know it will likely land them in jail. Stars (and real-life musicians) Negar Shaghaghi and Ashkan Koshanejad told Kurt Andersen about the risks they faced while filming on-location in Tehran.

In the off-Broadway spook show Play Dead, master magician Todd Robbins delights in pointing out that illusions are merely that.  But he performs one trick that’s shockingly, horrifyingly real.

If you’ve just tuned in for the implosion of CBS’s most successful comedy, “Two and a Half Men,” you may be wondering: who’s this Chuck Lorre fellow?

This weekend, Studio 360’s got growing pains.  In a special rebroadcast of a show recorded live at WNYC’s Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, Kurt talks to three incredibly talented Gen-Xers -- Josh Ritter, Martha Plimpton, and Juno Diaz -- about the moment they left their youth behind.

Listen to full interviews with Donald Hall, Joel Meyerowitz, and Lynn Nottage.

Listen to full interviews with Ben Burtt, Stanley Kunitz, and Elizabeth Streb.

Listen to full interviews with Chuck Close, Richard Ford, Mira Nair, and Richard Serra.

Jon Robin Baitz was already a successful playwright when he went to Hollywood to create ABC's Brother's and Sisters. The show was a hit for Baitz, but turns out, the city was anything but: "It was a nightmare.  Just the fact that I came from New York and wrote sort of serious-ish plays, before I opened my mouth, there was a kind of trope going around the network already: 'We can't have any of the Baitzian angst.'''

Spark: How Creativity Works doesn't hit bookshelves until February 15.  But to get you in the mood, we've got a sneak-preview.  In his foreword to the book, Kurt describes how he embraced Daniel Boorstin's "Amateur Spirit" and summoned the courage to keep trying new things.

Belarus is called the last dictatorship in Europe.  The government censors the arts, so performance troupe Free Theatre Belarus performs secretly, in converted houses, to avoid arrest.  Today The New York Times is reporting that the leaders of the Belarus Free Theatre have been forced into hiding following an incident at a protest rally.

What, you think you're too cool for Christmas records?  You're going to like this one, and so will your granny.

Requiem for Steam is photographer David Plowden's love letter to the steam engine, full of moving portraits of the machinery, the rails, and the people he's met on a lifetime of journeys.

While doing research for our art and medicine episode, we called our colleagues in the NYPR archives — a treasure trove of nearly a century of media made or collected at the station. And they found some pretty fantastic things in the stacks. 

About a year ago, Carrie Fisher (script doctor, memoirist, recovering Princess) took to Broadway a one-woman show called “Wishful Drinking” — an account of her struggles with alcoholism, failed romances, and brushes with death.  A filmed version of her stage show airs this weekend on HBO.

In the 1960s and 70s, the photographer Lee Friedlander took his family on summer road trips.  Along the way, he took pictures that established him as one of the most acute, celebrated, modern chroniclers of America.  Friedlander’s young son Erik (now a noted cellist) was sitting in the back seat.

Daniel Day-Lewis, you're great and all — but we would've cast someone else as Lincoln in the upcoming biopic.

Last week on the show, we heard about the first volume of Mark Twain's new autobiography, released (at Twain's expressed direction) a century after his death: “It has seemed to me that I could be as frank and free and unembarrassed as a love letter if I knew that what I was writing would be exposed to no eye until I was dead and unaware and indifferent.”  If you don't love Twain enough for 743 pages, here's a treat.