An old ukulele — bought at an Army-Navy store — started Merrill Garbus on the path to drum-looping, face-painting renown with her band tUnE-yArDs. She told Kurt Andersen that her mother's uke helped her make the career switch from aspiring puppeteer to inventive musician and critical darling.

How did you spend Monday night? Here in Studio 360, we tapped a keg, lined up some killer acts, and hung out with 150 of our closest friends at WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space. We'll air the whole show next week, but until then, you can watch some choice excerpts of performances by comedian Eugene Mirman and the band tUnE-yArDs.

Studio 360 is redesigning Monopoly, and to help us decide what to toss and what to keep, we’ve gotten advice from an all-star team.  The former investment banker William Cohan suggested we let players leverage their holdings and create a bank with vested interests, but former ...

The Scottie dog has all the fun. Along with the battleship, the race car, and the top hat, it’s always part of the in-crowd of Monopoly game pieces. Consistently among the first to be selected, the Scottie dog confidently strolls down Boardwalk and turns heads as it passes Go in ...

We're assembling a top-notch team of advisers for our Monopoly redesign. This week Kurt Andersen called finance expert William Cohan to find out how to make the rules of the game more representative of capitalism in the 21st century. Cohan is a former investment banker and the author of Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World ...

Bonus Track: Kurt Andersen's full conversation with William Cohan

A highly anticipated biography of Malcolm X was published today, with new research that will likely challenge many of our existing notions about the still-controversial black leader.  Sadly, the book’s author won’t be able to engage in the fresh debates it’s certain to generate.  Columbia University historian and civil rights scholar Manning Marable died on Friday at the age of 60, after ten years of work on Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, and just three days before the book was published.

Bonus Track: One of the last recorded interviews with Manning Marable

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.

Even the optimists among us would be hard-pressed to imagine a brighter future for Egypt than Ehaab Abdou does.  Abdou is a youth activist, currently working with the Brookings Institution.  In his spare time, he delivers a message of tolerance and respect for diversity with the pop band Ana Masry.  It translates to the ecumenically flavored “I Am Egyptian.”

On Thursday, January 27, Shara Worden will bring her synergetic mix of classical music, cabaret, and punk to Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series -- and we’re thrilled that she's given us an exclusive sneak preview of a song she wrote for the event.

Garry Trudeau – author of the landmark comic strip Doonesbury – stopped by the studio recently to talk with Kurt about 40 years of penning the ever-expanding Doonesbury universe.  It’s a challenge to cover comics (or really anything visual) on the radio, so Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky made dramatized versions of a few key strips.

One hundred and twenty-five years after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published, a new edition of Mark Twain’s classic is purging some of the book's most objectionable language. On Monday Publishers Weekly reported that NewSouth Books will replace the word “nigger” with the word “slave,” in a new edition due mid-February.  They will also change “Injun” to “Indian” in the Tom Sawyer companion text, and just to be safe, “half-breed” to “half-blood.”  What the Huck?  

Earlier this week, one-of-a-kind comedian/musician Reggie Watts rocked WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space for a special 'Studio 360' all about Theoretical Physics. That’s right…Theoretical Physics.  Here at 360, we like a little science sprinkled in with our arts and culture.

There’s a new art installation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that’s creating quite a stir.  It opened just last weekend, but already, it’s commanding attention for its dramatic, novel use of light and sound.  You may have heard of the artist: Leonardo da Vinci. Sort of.

For our next American Icon, Studio 360 is headed to Southfork Ranch...via Estonia!

After the premiere of nine new stories this fall, our second series of American Icons episodes is nearly complete.  There’s just one more show left to make – yours!  Throughout the broadcasts, we’ve been asking listeners to nominate their own Icons.  We got some great ideas, but none impressed us more than Laura Detre’s suggestion of the television series Dallas, which ran from 1979 - 1991 on CBS.

What do Lucille Ball and Malcolm X have in common? They're both part of Studio 360 American Icons series.  This fall, we’ve traced the impact of The Autobiography of Malcolm X on race relations and glimpsed the dawn of the American sitcom with I Love Lucy.  Last week we visited Monticello – Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia – and in wandering the building and the grounds, confronted some lingering questions about the country and its founding.

Studio 360 has a summer project in the works and we need your help: we're redesigning the Fourth of July. Don't worry, it's not a complete gutting.  We're keeping the red, white, and blue, the cookouts, and the fireworks.  But there are a couple of elements that we think can use some sprucing up.

Last fall Studio 360 looked at how the NFL used throwback jerseys to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the old American Football League.

Those uniforms used design to honor the game's past.  But now the NBA's Phoenix Suns are using uniform design to try to impact the ...

Post-its - those handy little sticky notes - turn 30 this year.  To celebrate the milestone, 3M is inviting young people aged 11 - 18 to create Post-it art.  The winner will work with an artist to create the world's largest billboard made entirely of Post-it ...

Last month artist Jeremy Dean drove a horse-drawn carriage through New York City.  The horses were two White Percherons - standard draft horses for Central Park.  And the carriage was a Hummer H2.

Dean's trip was equal parts performance art and sculpture.  He bought a used Hummer, sliced ...

The New York State Associated Press Broadcasters Association announced the finalists for its television and radio news awards yesterday, and we were happy to see that Studio 360 made the list - not just once, but three times.  The show garnered nominations for Best Radio Interview, Best Radio ...