Robert Smith
Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.
If that sounds a little dry, then you've never heard Planet Money. The team specializes in making economic reporting funny, engaging and understandable. Planet Money has been known to set economic indicators to music, use superheroes to explain central banks, and even buy a toxic asset just to figure it out.
Smith admits that he has no special background in finance or math, just a curiosity about how money works. That kind of curiosity has driven Smith for his 20 years in radio.
Before joining Planet Money, Smith was the New York correspondent for NPR. He was responsible for covering all the mayhem and beauty that makes it the greatest city on Earth. Smith reported on the rebuilding of Ground Zero, the stunning landing of US Air flight 1549 in the Hudson River and the dysfunctional world of New York politics. He specialized in features about the overlooked joys of urban living: puddles, billboards, ice cream trucks, street musicians, drunks and obsessives.
When New York was strangely quiet, Smith pitched in covering the big national stories. He traveled with presidential campaigns, tracked the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and reported from the BP oil spill.
Before his New York City gig, Smith worked for public radio stations in Seattle (KUOW), Salt Lake City (KUER) and Portland (KBOO). He's been an editor, a host, a news director and just about any other job you can think of in broadcasting. Smith also lectures on the dark arts of radio at universities and conferences. He trains fellow reporters how to sneak humor and action into even the dullest stories on tight deadlines.
Smith started in broadcasting playing music at KPCW in his hometown of Park City, Utah. Although the low-power radio station at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, likes to claim him as its own.
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What happens when you put someone who wants to close an agency, in charge of that agency? Today on the show, we find out. -
Once you get a satellite, you need to find a large tube filled with explosive fuel to take your satellite to space. Luckily, there is fierce competition among rocket makers to give you a lift. In the second of three-part series, Planet Money travels from California to New Zealand to see which rocket with blast their satellite to the stars.
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When he was a kid, writer Chris Grabenstein loved tourist towns, so he set novels in one of his favorites — the Jersey shore. He says one of the great joys of writing is coming up with an interesting place to drop the body, like a roller coaster or a tilt-a-whirl. -
The Beige Book — a big, official report — is mostly a bunch of stories gathered by talking to businesses around the country. -
A Stanford MBA who used to work for Google returned to Myanmar to be an Internet entrepreneur. But it's tough to start an Internet company in a country where the power goes out every day. -
The Fed has the power to create money. But it has another, critical power: The power of words. -
It's a strategy some countries have adopted to boost falling fertility rates. Here's why it often fails. -
One opera singer's illness is another's opportunity. Marlis Petersen jumped in at the last minute to take on a leading role at the Met, in New York, when the star soprano pulled out. The only catch was that she had to learn and rehearse the rarely performed opera in just 48 hours.
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His isn't the first name you'd expect to see on a list of great voices. But when you think of voice in the broadest sense of the word — a person communicating an idea with an audience — then Iggy Pop more than holds his own. He's proved that a voice doesn't have to charm or seduce someone; it can provoke. A vocal can be dangerous.
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Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement return for a second season of their music-driven comedy series, which follows two hapless New Zealanders trying to make it as a folk-pop band in New York City.
