Alex Goldmark
Alex Goldmark is the senior supervising producer of Planet Money and The Indicator from Planet Money.His reporting has appeared on shows including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Radiolab, On The Media, APM's Marketplace, and in magazines such as GOOD and Fast Company. Previously, he was a senior producer at WNYC–New York Public Radio where he piloted new programming and helped grow young shows to the point where they now have their own coffee mug pledge gifts. Long ago, he was the executive producer of two shows at Air America Radio, a very short term consultant for the World Bank, a volunteer trying to fight gun violence in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and also a poor excuse for a bartender in Washington, DC. He lives next to the Brooklyn Bridge and owns an orange velvet couch.
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Buying a lottery ticket is a bad deal. The odds are against you, even with a giant pot. But there was one time someone figured out how to flip the odds in his favor by buying all the tickets.
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Five reporters go to the New York Produce Show and Conference, each on a mission. -
Planet Money built a stock trading Twitter bot. The big puzzle is figuring out which company to buy or sell, and how to get a computer to tell the difference between Apple the company and the fruit.
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Planet Money tries to make a program that reads Donald Trump's tweets and then trades stocks. The first step is training the program to interpret the tweets using something called sentiment analysis.
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Big investment firms on Wall Street are replacing human stock pickers with computer programs. That has created a big demand for data to feed into the computer programs.
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During the campaign, Trump said he wants to keep lobbyists out of his administration, but it isn't so easy. President Obama tried. Most people agree, running a government without lobbyists isn't easy.
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It's pretty easy to buy a tank of gasoline. It's not so easy to buy a tanker of crude oil. Here's what happened when a team of radio reporters tried it. -
The idea of giving away nearly $60 million to tiny businesses seemed crazy. But that's what Nigeria did in a contest that might just be the best development plan in history. -
There's a phone scam going around where an intimidating caller pretends to be from the IRS, demanding money immediately. There is also an anti-scam going on. At check cashing outlets, employees are dealing with terrified victims demanding to send money to fake IRS agents. Intervening requires awareness, compassion, and a script, just like the scammers use.
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It's especially hard for developing countries to create jobs and foster small businesses to promote growth. But Nigeria took a risk on a massive national contest to find thousands of people with ideas for businesses and did something radical. It gave away millions of dollars to thousands of people who asked for it — and it worked. It is a rare success story for bold economic development programs.
