NPR Staff

The game Charles Darrow sold in the 1930s bore a striking resemblance to a game Lizzie Magie patented in 1904. In The Monopolists, Mary Pilon tells Monopoly's origin story.

To get the most out of your smartphone, do you really need a cellphone plan? That's the question a Wall Street Journal reporter tried to answer by relying only on Wi-Fi networks for a month.

In an exclusive interview, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf remembers how Liberia was "the poster child of everything that could go wrong." But people lived up to the local proverb: "Go fix it."

The man behind the look of Selma and A Most Violent Year talks about depicting violence, participating in history and being a black cinematographer in Hollywood.

Diane Downs teaches music to the Louisville Leopard Percussionists in Kentucky. She says she hopes the kids feel like rock stars now that a video of their Led Zeppelin medley went viral on YouTube.

Julissa Arce was a stellar student and an even better financial analyst, but she was scared to go to work every day. "Maybe today's the day someone's going to find out," she feared.

In his novel She Will Build Him a City, Raj Kamal Jha weaves the reality he sees as a journalist in New Delhi — where many gravitate looking for a better future — into a fictional, magical world.

One of rock music's most loved, feared and prolific scribes, the 72-year-old Christgau says he knew early on that he liked criticism better than journalism: "I didn't want to get into people's faces."

For this week's installment of our occasional Weekend Reads series, what's old is new again, and we're talking about a book that was published back in 1965: The Millstone, by Margaret Drabble. It's set in 1960's London and centers on a young lady called Rosamund Stacey, who discovers she's pregnant ...

Women and minorities continue to be under-represented on TV and in film, both behind and in front of the camera, according to a new study — even though diverse films and shows make more money.

The electronic artist's new album, Gliss Riffer, is his most accesible yet. In a conversation with Arun Rath, he waxes philosophic on stress, technology and the value of a wandering mind.

Back in 1987, Nancy Cartwright made a risky, last-minute decision during an audition: Instead of trying out for the part of mild-mannered Lisa Simpson, she went for the role of rebellious Bart.

Mohsin Hamid has been called a water lily for the way he's drifted from place to place. The 43-year-old novelist and essayist, born in Lahore, has established roots, grown and thrived in places as disparate as Pakistan, London, California and New York. He's best known as the author ...

Before he soaked up the American Songbook, Tom Brosseau grew up with music in church, school and home, surrounded by the hymnal and folk songs adored by his grandparents. Today he lives in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, but the North Dakota native says his heart remains ...

Kazuo Ishiguro has written his first novel in ten years — making it both a literary event and a news story. The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day has gone even deeper into history to write a story that's both one couple's on-the-road tale, and a ...

Survivors Annie Clark and Andrea Pino brought a Title IX complaint against the University of North Carolina. "This is not about UNC," Clark says. "We're not doing this to vilify our institution."

The president interviews 18-year-old, Noah McQueen, who's participating in a White House mentoring program for young men of color. "It's hard to always make the right decision," McQueen tells Obama.

An NPR team visited the Liberian village of Barkedu to capture the sights and sounds of life after Ebola. They found sorrow, hunger ... and a sense of hope.

Chef Marcus Samuelsson has a ritual whenever he travels to a new place — ask the cabdriver, "Where do you eat?" When he did that on a trip to Barbados, he fell in love with a fish sandwich.

Longtime Morning Edition commentator Sandip Roy has written a new novel, propelled by family secrets, which crisscrosses back and forth between the two "Cals" in his life: California and Calcutta.