The fiscal cliff, for all its grand theater, really comes down to people in a room trying to come to an agreement. People doing whatever it takes to get what they want from the other side.
On today’s show, three professional negotiators walk us through techniques that members of Congress may be using right now. They explain these techniques not with textbooks, but with examples from their everyday lives.
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The race for ever-faster trades has "absolutely no social value," says a billionaire who helped bring computers to financial markets.
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Instapaper is a little app that started out as a side project. Now it’s a thriving one-man business. We talk to Marco Arment, Instapaper’s founder and sole employee, about the app economy.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/31/146152273/the-tuesday-podcast-the-app-economy
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Botanist Nicholas Money’s book Mushroom takes readers inside the world of the fungal organisms that appear overnight on lawns, are occasionally poisonous and appear in everything from Alice in Wonderland to some lifesaving medications.
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/18/145339196/the-man-who-studies-the-fungus-among-us
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You rarely see lard on menus. There aren’t shelves and shelves of it in every supermarket. In this country, we’ve sort of lost touch with the once beloved pig fat.
On today’s podcast, we ask — who killed lard? Was it Upton Sinclair? His novel, The Jungle, contained this memorable passage about the men who cook the lard:
"…and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,— sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!"
Or should we blame William Procter and James Gamble? It was their company which created a new alternative to lard — the "pure and wholesome" Crisco.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/06/144806987/the-friday-podcast-who-killed-lard
New York Times columnist Mark Bittman talks about taxing unhealthy foods. His article in the Times’ Sunday Review on July 24, “Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables,” looks at why it’s so difficult to market healthy foods successfully.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24bittman.html?_r=1
An airline, the price of oil and the financialization of the global economy. On today’s show, author and former banker Satyajit Das talks about his career and the trouble with the rise of finance.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/09/30/140954343/the-friday-podcast-how-money-got-weird
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In the 16th century, coffee shops prominently displayed coin boxes with the phrase "to ensure prompt service" written on the side. If you wanted your coffee in a hurry, you dropped a little something extra in the box, and made sure the waitress saw you do it.
This, according to at least one version of history, is where tipping began.
But today, we tip after we get served, not before. And, according to one expert we talk to on today’s podcast, the quality of service we perceive makes a tiny difference in how much we tip. (The weather has a comparable influence on tip size.)
It turns out it’s really hard for a small team of public radio employees to turn themselves into a cutting-edge apparel company.
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Economist editor Tom Standage says if you want to get a good picture of world history, you should look at spices.
In his book, An Edible History of Humanity, Standage writes about how tall tales of carnivorous birds and flying snakes let Arab middleman charge Europeans inflated prices for cinnamon and pepper for years. Standage says it wasn’t until an Indian ship went adrift in the Red Sea that the Europeans realized there was an easier route to get all those spices they had been craving.
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