Alex Blumberg
Contributors List
As a producer, Alex was the driving force behind The Fix Is In (168), The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar (352) and Act V (218, with Jack Hitt). It was his obsession with mortgage-backed securities that led us to The Giant Pool of Money (355) and all the Planet Money shows that came after.
91: Escape the Box
Stories of people trying to escape the box of their own lives, and create new lives.
113: Windfall
What happens when you suddenly strike it rich. And the power money has over our lives, for good and bad.
115: First Day
Stories of the first day on the job, the first day in a relationship, the first day in school. On the first day, any first day, we're expected to live by the rules and customs of the culture we're entering, but we don't know those rules...
141: Invisible Worlds
Stories of people who are trying to make invisible worlds visible, and what happens when you make them visible.
151: Primary
Today's program is made all of stories from the New Hampshire primary. Voters want to find a candidate who inspires them. Candidates want to inspire. So where's the system failing? Why do most of us feel like the system doesn't produce...
157: Secret Life of Daytime
All those people you see in the middle of the workday, in coffee shops and bookstores? Who are they? Why aren't they at work?
159: Mother's Day
Stories of moms: How they treat us, how we treat them.
168: The Fix Is In
There are all sorts of situations in which we suspect the fix is in, but we almost never find out for certain. On today's show, for once, we find out.
171: Election
Stories for the eve of the Presidential election, in which we try to evade, sidestep or look beneath the candidates' soundbites.
173: Three Kinds of Deception
A story of self-deception, a story about deceiving others, and a story about accidental deception. And how one type of deception can easily turn into another.
177: American Limbo
Stories of people living completely outside the grid of American life. Americans in Paris. Chinese in America. West Virginians in treehouses. Mexican-Americans in Rochester.
180: Return to Childhood
Stories of people who try to revisit their childhoods. What they find. And what they do not find.
206: Somewhere in the Arabian Sea
Life aboard the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea that's supporting bombing missions over Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Only a few dozen people on board actually fly F-18s and F-14s. It takes...
218: Act V
We devote this entire episode to one story: Over the course of six months, reporter and TAL contributor Jack Hitt followed a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearsed and staged a production of the last act—Act V—of...
220: Testosterone
Stories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire.
236: My Two Cents
Stories from a contradictory recession. (Audio is from the updated 2004 broadcast)
250: The Annoying Gap Between Theory...and Practice
Why is it always harder than you think it'll be? We explore several case examples of the annoying gap between theory and practice.
265: Fake Science
Stories of people trying to drag science where it doesn't belong.
272: Big Tent
Stories of the Republican Party, America's new majority party. Yes, they're still just barely the majority in the Senate...and in the last Presidential race...and in state legislatures around the country, where they hold just one percent...
293: A Little Bit of Knowledge
Stories about the pitfalls of knowing just a little bit too little.
296: After the Flood
Surprising stories from survivors in New Orleans. We give people who were in the storm more time than daily news coverage can to tell their stories and talk about what they're thinking. This leads to a number of ideas that haven't made it...
300: What's In A Number?
About a year ago, a study estimated the number of Iraqi casualties since the war began at 100,000 dead—higher than any other estimate. The study was mostly ignored. Alex Blumberg revisits that study to look at the reality behind it.
319: And the Call Was Coming from the Basement
For Halloween, scary stories that are all true. Kidnappings, zombie raccoons, haunted houses—real haunted houses!—and things that go "EEEEK!!!" in the night. Plus, a new story by David Sedaris, in which he walks among the dead.
320: What's In A Number? — 2006 Edition
Recently, the British medical journal The Lancet published an study which updated their estimate of the number of Iraqis who've died since the U.S. invasion.
325: Houses of Ill Repute
An old man in Brooklyn invites some homeless prostitutes into his house on a cold winter night. They never leave. Plus other stories about houses, such as the United States Congress, where the inhabitants don't always act as they should.
332: The Ten Commandments
Stories of people struggling to follow the Ten Commandments from the book of Exodus.
351: Return to Childhood 2008
Seventh-grader Kayla Hernandez likes to reminisce about when she was a child, back in fifth grade. She visits her school, where her fifth grade class met, and looks at her old books, thinks about what happened there.
355: The Giant Pool of Money
A special program about the housing crisis produced in a special collaboration with NPR News. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall Street? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans...
365: Another Frightening Show About the Economy
Alex Blumberg and NPR's Adam Davidson—the two guys who reported our Giant Pool of Money episode—are back, in collaboration with the Planet Money podcast.
366: A Better Mousetrap 2008
Stories about people trying to find new solutions to age-old problems—solutions that sometimes cause problems of their own. Alex Blumberg returns (in collaboration with the Planet Money podcast) with the latest in the financial crisis.
373: The New Boss
Stories about what happens when someone new takes over—someone with a vision of how things ought to be. Including international economics correspondent Adam Davidson of the Planet Money podcast on how Obama's new stimulus plan might...
375: Bad Bank
The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes.
382: The Watchmen
Since Congress hasn't held 1930's-style hearings into the causes of the financial crisis, we stage one of our own.
384: Fall Guy
Sometimes when things go wrong, parsing out who all is to blame and taking them to task is just too complicated and haaaard! What's easy is pinning it all on one person and watching them go down in flames.
390: Return To The Giant Pool of Money
In which we mark the anniversary of the economic collapse and the anniversary of Planet Money: Recapping some of the original episode, The Giant Pool of Money, and finding out what's happened to all those guys in the year since.
392: Someone Else's Money
This week, we bring you a deeper look inside the health insurance industry. The dark side of prescription drug coupons. A story about Pet Health Insurance, which is in its infancy, and how it is changing human behaviors—for example, if you...
397: 2010
At the start of a new year, journalistic outfits put out lots of mealy "perhaps oil prices will rise or perhaps they won't" predictions for the coming year. Instead of that, we asked our contributors to predict real events that will happen...
400: Stories Pitched by Our Parents
For our 400th show, we try something harder than anything we've ever tried in the previous 399. We take the random ideas that members of our own families have told us at weddings and family gatherings would be "perfect for the show"...and...
405: Inside Job
For seven months a team of investigative journalists from ProPublica looked into a story for us, the inside story of one company that made hundreds of millions of dollars for itself while worsening the financial crisis for the rest of us.
410: Social Contract
Richard Ravitch has helped fix three governmental crises, including when New York City nearly went bankrupt in 1975. What's changed, to make it so much harder for him to solve the state's current financial crisis? (Photo: stress balls in...
415: Crybabies
Crybabies are annoying. They whine, they complain, sometimes they ruin it for the rest of us. But being a crybaby can be a really effective tactic. We have stories of crybabies in sports, in politics, on Wall Street, on the streets of...
441: When Patents Attack!
Why would a company rent an office in a tiny town in East Texas, put a nameplate on the door, and leave it completely empty for a year? The answer involves a controversial billionaire physicist in Seattle, a 40 pound cookbook, and a war...
448: Adventure!
Sometimes you choose the adventure and sometimes the adventure chooses you. This week, stories that pinpoint when people's boring old lives turn into something wildly unfamiliar. Including a story of one young man's time served in a...
