Karen MacDonough of Quincy, Mass., was enjoying her tea one morning in the dining room when she sees something odd outside of her window: A group of p...
Why do video game workers offer labor at a discount? How can you design a video game for blind and sighted players? Does that design have lessons for...
Today on the show, the story of the modern consumer movement in the U.S. and the person who inspired it: Ralph Nader. How Ralph Nader's battle in the...
(Note: This episode originally ran in 2021.)Millions of American workers in all sorts of industries have signed some form of noncompete agreement. The...
About thirty years ago, Yagya Kumar Pradhan woke up to the news that the temple he and his clan used had been broken into. The temple had been ransack...
(Note: This episode originally ran in 2023.)Union membership in the U.S. has been declining for decades. But, in 2022, support for unions among Americ...
For the last year and a half, the story of FTX has focused largely on the crimes and punishment of Sam Bankman-Fried. But in the background, the actua...
What's going on with consumers? This is one of the trickiest puzzles of this weird economic moment we're in. We've covered a version of this before un...
TikTok, and other apps like it, are filled with financial advice. Some of it is reliable, some... less so. There are videos about running a business,...
This episode originally ran in 2015.About one hundred years ago, a scientist and statistician named Francis Galston came upon an opportunity to test h...
Last month, Japan's central bank raised interest rates for the first time in 17 years. That is a really big deal, because it means that one of the spo...
In 2019, Mike Ketchmark got a call. Mike is a lawyer in Kansas City, Missouri, and his friend, Brandon Boulware, another lawyer, was calling about a c...
There's been a lot of disagreement in Congress and in the country about whether the U.S. should continue to financially support the wars in Ukraine an...
(Note: This episode originally ran in 2020.)In the restaurant game, you need to make the most of every table every minute you are open. And you need t...
It is rare that a new e-commerce company has such a meteoric rise as Temu. The company, which launched in the fall of 2022, has been flooding the Amer...
Steel manufacturing was at one point the most important industry in the United States. It was one of the biggest employers, a driver of economic growt...
When you buy a bottle of rum in the United States, by law nearly all the federal taxes on that rum must be sent to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Isl...
The wind power business is a bit contradictory right now. It's showing signs of boom and bust seemingly all at once. The story of wind energy markets...
When you sit down to watch the Oscars, what you are really watching is the final battle in a months-long war of financial engineering and campaign str...
Dynamic pricing is an increasingly common phenomenon: You can see it when Uber prices surge during rainy weather, or when you're booking a flight at t...
