Arts and Culture

As you do your gift shopping this year, you may find yourself looking at board games — specifically hobby games, which are intended for an older, more strategically minded audience than, say, “Candyland.”

Some might have predicted that the rise of video games would hurt board games, but hobby games, like “Settlers of Catan” and “Pandemic,” are growing — and one of the biggest new games comes from right here in Maine.

Back in 2011, Tom Deschenes made a goal: to invent a board game. He’s a college administrator who lives in Portland, and he’s an avid board gamer.

A Charles Dickens will perform the classic novel “A Christmas Carol” in Portland on Monday, Nov. 27. That’s Gerald Charles Dickens — the novelist’s great, great grandson.

John Hodgman is known for a variety of things — he was a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” he has written several books of funny fake facts and hosts the podcast “Judge John Hodgman,” as well as writing a Sunday New York Times Magazine column as Judge John Hodgman.

The Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine has obtained approval to leave its downtown Portland building for a new location.

The Portland Planning Board approved a permit Tuesday that will allow the museum to move to a yet-to-be-constructed building on Thompson’s Point.

Executive Director Suzanne Olson says they’ve outgrown their current space, one they’ve been in for 20 years. She says the new building will be three stories tall and occupy about 30,000 square feet.

From public radio shows such as The Moth to local storytelling groups, there are more chances than ever to tell a personal tale in front of an audience. This weekend, an event called This Is My Brave comes to Lewiston, inviting people who have experienced mental illness to take center stage at the local Franco Center and share their story.

Corinne Pratt, 39, has struggled with mental illness for most of her life. For a long time, she didn’t think she could open up about it.

At 11:30 a.m. every workday the lunch whistle blows at Bath Iron Works, and shipfitters, welders, pipefitters, electricians and painters gather in at the yard’s south gate for a strict 30-minute lunch break. But many Bath residents know very little about these people or about the dangerous work they do.

Since they first discovered the patterns of the sun and the moon, human beings have searched for more accurate methods of keeping time. Clockmaking developed into something of a fine art in the 18th and 19th centuries, but by the 1980s, the quartz clock movement rendered much of that mechanical knowledge a thing of the past.