Kenny Malone
Kenny Malone hails from Meadville, PA where the zipper was invented, where Clark Gable’s mother is buried and where, in 2007, a wrecking ball broke free from a construction site, rolled down North Main Street and somehow wound up inside the trunk of a Ford Taurus sitting at a red light.
Malone graduated from Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH as a mathematics major and economics minor. He took an un-ironic oath to use mathematics for good not evil. Per that oath, Malone has taken on a wide array of non-evil numbers-based reporting endeavors -- everything from proving the existence of a home-field heat advantage for the Miami Dolphins to explaining South Florida’s economy in terms of automobiles on I-95 to exposing the extraordinary toll the densest cluster of assisted living facilities in the state had on both local authorities and the residents of those facilities in Lauderhill, FL.
Malone’s work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition as well as APM’s Marketplace and The Story. His work has won national awards for religion, financial, crime and investigative reporting as well as three Best in Show Green Eyeshade Awards, the National Edward R. Murrow Award for use of sound, the National Headliner and PRNDI awards for series reporting, and the Scripps Howard Award for In-Depth Radio Reporting.
Malone lives in Miami Beach with his scruffy dog, Sir Xavier Charpentier III.
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Todd Olson is CEO of a Minneapolis manufacturer that played a key role in a project to help General Motors make ventilators for the pandemic. He calls the effort "our biggest moment." -
Interest in running the New York City Marathon far outnumbers available slots. Yet the organization behind the race has devised a system that, overall, keeps people from being upset at not making it.
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A career in baseball is a gamble. A few guys make a ton of money, and most make very little. Some baseball players are taking advantage of that imbalance and entering into "income pooling" agreements.
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James Holzhauer is destroying records on Jeopardy. He's also dominating a battle with Kenny Malone of NPR's Planet Money podcast.
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President Trump has taken several actions that could be seen as trying to influence the economic decision-making of the Federal Reserve board. He is not the first president to test their independence.
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Seattle tried an experiment to increase citizen participation in elections by mailing out thousands of vouchers good for donating to local campaigns. How did the Democracy Vouchers work out?
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With talk of new agricultural subsidies, our Planet Money podcast team looks back at the tale of government cheese for lessons on the unintended consequences of government subsidies.
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The Social Security number was never meant to be a form of national identification. And yet, here were are: Nine digits that rule our lives and ruin our lives if they wind up in the wrong hands.
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D'Wayne Edwards created the Pensole Footwear Design Academy to try and diversify the sneaker business. Edwards was one of the first black designers in the business and created the academy, in part, because of how difficult it was for him to get started.
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The hottest ticket on Broadway is for a one-of-a-kind, one-man-show. For a limited time, Bruce Springsteen is playing songs and telling stories in a 960-seat theatre. And those lucky fans are now learning a valuable, Nobel Prize Winning economics lesson. Something called: The Endowment Effect.
