When someone says "the economy is doing well"—what does that even mean? Like, for workers, for employers, for the country as a whole? According to what calculation? How do you put a number on it?
The world of economics is filled with all sorts of "measuring sticks." GDP. Inflation. Unemployment. Consumer sentiment. Over time, all kinds of government agencies, universities and private companies have come up with different ways to measure facets of the economy. These measures factor into all kinds of huge decisions—things like government policy, business strategies, maybe even your personal career choices or investments.
On today's show, we're going to lift the curtain on two of these yardsticks. We are going to meet the people tasked with sticking a number on two huge measures of our economic well being: the official U.S. government inflation report and the monthly unemployment and jobs numbers. Come along and see how the measures get made.
This episode was hosted by Darian Woods, Stacey Vanek Smith, and Wailin Wong. It was produced by Julia Ritchey and Jess Kung with help from James Sneed. Engineering by Gilly Moon and James Willetts. It was fact-checked by Michael He and Corey Bridges, and edited by Kate Concannon and Viet Le. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
Kesha is a singer and songwriter from Los Angeles. She put out her first song in 2009, and it was a huge #1 hit in the US and 13 other countries. She’s had 10 top-ten singles on the Billboard charts, and sold millions of albums. She got famous for songs that were about partying, and breaking the rules, and having fun. But this year, in May 2023, she put out the album Gag Order, which is a lot more raw and vulnerable. She made it with superstar producer Rick Rubin. And for this episode, I talked to Kesha about her song “Eat the Acid," which she wrote early on in the pandemic. I was really interested in the intense, distorted vocal sound that I’d heard in the track; and, as you’ll hear, it turns out most of that was a byproduct of the way she had to write and record when we were all in lockdown.
More than 60 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the days after Hamas' attack on southern Israel. Some of those deaths appear to be reprisal killings.
NPR's Leila Fadel visited the village of Qusra in the West Bank where some of these killings have taken place.
More than 60 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the days after Hamas' attack on southern Israel. Some of those deaths appear to be reprisal killings.
NPR's Leila Fadel visited the village of Qusra in the West Bank where some of these killings have taken place.
More than 60 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the days after Hamas' attack on southern Israel. Some of those deaths appear to be reprisal killings.
NPR's Leila Fadel visited the village of Qusra in the West Bank where some of these killings have taken place.
Cities like Chicago and New York have more migrants than they can handle. St. Louis says it would like more migrants to come to town. We get the story from Esther Yoon-Ji Kang, WBEZ race, class, communities reporter.
If you’ve been following our coverage at The Free Press, you’ve noticed that we’ve been covering the war in Israel nonstop since it began. We’ve never produced this much content in this short of a time about a single subject. Some of you might be thinking, why?
On October 7, we saw the single biggest massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. But unlike the Holocaust, in which Germans tried to hide their war crimes, here we have the terrorists streaming it in real time on every social media platform across the internet. When the reports, and the videos, started circulating, we thought: surely this amount of blood and horror will be enough to shake the world awake.
And yet it wasn’t. Internationally, some of the most educated people—including students, professors, and administrators at the most elite universities in the world—have either equivocated or remained silent in the face of mass atrocities. Others, by the tens of thousands, have taken to the streets to rejoice in the terrorist attack, screaming “resistance is justified” and “glory to the martyrs.”
That is why this story matters. Because this is not just a war in a faraway land. It’s a battle for civilization. As my friend Sam Harris recently said, “There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil in our world, but this is one of them.”
This war should matter to everyone—not just Jews—who care about the future of civilization. Because if there is one lesson from history, it’s that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. And societies in which the Jewish people are persecuted are societies in which no one is safe.
And that is why we will continue to report on this war with such urgency.
On today’s episode, we feature some of that reporting. You’ll hear just some of the stories of the more than three dozen Israelis we have spoken to. We talk to a woman, Shaked, who tells us that eleven of her family members—including her three- and eight-year-old niece and nephew—were taken hostage by Hamas. We talk to survivors of the Nova music festival, like Amit and Chen, who miraculously escaped—some by hiding in bushes for hours—as they watched their friends get killed, “like sheep to be slaughtered,” just next to them. We talk to a father whose son was kidnapped from the music festival, and to a mother whose daughter was killed there. We talk to a grandmother who hid in the safe room of her home for hours with her 10-day-old grandson as terrorists shot at the door.
These stories are difficult to hear. But we will keep reporting them.
TOP NEWS | On today’s Daily Signal Top News, we break down:
GOP House Speaker nominee Jim Jordan falls short of the 217 votes needed to win the position in the second vote Wednesday.
President Joe Biden lands in Israel and delivers remarks alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
U.S. intelligence shows the deadly blast at the Gaza hospital appeared to have been caused by terrorist Hamas militants.
Biden is expected to ask Congress for $100 billion in supplemental funding for Israel, Ukraine, and domestic issues that include border security.
The prestigious New York City based law firm Davis Polk has rescinds letters of employment to three students from Harvard and Columbia universities after the students signed onto letters backing Hamas and blaming Israel for the recent brutal violence.
We hear analysis from two important presidential visits. President Biden offers condolences and support on a visit to Israel. And President Putin displayed Russia's bonds with China in a meeting with the Chinese leader.
