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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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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As the classic children's television program celebrates its 40th anniversary, the producers of Sesame Street talk about how the show has changed.
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People need comedy during tough economic times, but during the great stock market crash of 1929 there was a problem. Large numbers of entertainers lost their shirts, too, and there didn't seem like much to laugh at. This week is the 80th anniversary of the big market crash.
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America — its presidents, its senators, its people — said a final goodbye to Sen. Edward Kennedy on Saturday. Mourners braved a downpour to attend the funeral Mass for the late senator at Boston's Our Lady of Perpetual Hope Basilica.
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Sen. Edward Kennedy's funeral will be held this week at Boston's Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The basilica is in a neighborhood with a rough reputation, but the church was dear to Kennedy, who prayed there every day while his daughter was battling cancer at a nearby hospital.
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Writer Gabriel Cohen bases his Detective Jack Leightner series in Brooklyn, where he says the neighborhoods "are not static at all. The lines where things are changing create conflict and sometimes create violence," which is reflected in his books. -
FBI agents fanned out across northern New Jersey today and made arrests in a corruption investigation that includes two mayors. Officials say politics and religion were used to cloak crimes and enrich the suspects.
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When South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford announced this week he'd had an extramarital affair, he joined several other high-profile politicians admitting infidelities, including Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign, David Vitter and John Edwards.
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When President Obama announced Sonia Sotomayor as his first nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, he laid out her life story in rich detail. Raised in a Bronx, N.Y., housing project by a single mother of Puerto Rican descent, an early Nancy Drew aficionado and a lifelong Yankees fan, Sotomayor went on to succeed at Princeton and Yale.
