Karen Duffin
Karen Duffin (she/her) is a co-host and reporter for Planet Money, NPR's award-winning podcast that finds creative, entertaining ways to make sense of the big, complicated forces that move our economy. She joined the team in March 2018.
Before that, she was a producer at This American Life. She also worked for several years as an independent producer, reporting stories for shows like Radiolab, More Perfect, Reply All, The Moth, Pop-Up Magazine, On the Media, and others. Karen has also been a Moth story coach and mainstage storyteller, and has taught radio at the Columbia, NYU, and CUNY Graduate Schools of Journalism.
Her stories blend in-depth reporting with narrative storytelling about everything from the death penalty to the world's largest treehouse, America's first major interrogation program, the Patriot Act, and San Francisco's "Spider-Man" burglar.
Before becoming a journalist, Karen spent several years as a speechwriter, working in more than 20 countries.
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The scramble is on to manufacture new ventilators fast. Our Planet Money team sees what it takes for a company that normally makes auto parts to turn on a dime and make pistons for a ventilators.
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More and more digital billboards are popping up around the U.S. Many are tracking us through our cell phones — similar to what happens online. Here's a close look at one in Times Square.
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How much does where you live affect your shot at the American Dream? An overlooked government program from the nineties tried to answer that question. Recently, it has been getting new attention.
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A vigilante in a strip mall parking lot in Salt Lake City is causing problems that reveal the Wild West nature of parking lot rules. And how to exploit them for profit.
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When Iraqi photojournalist Kamaran Najm was kidnapped by ISIS in 2014, his journalist friends and his conservative religious family had to work together to try to find him.
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Bad policing can get expensive when it leads to lawsuits and settlements. For smaller cities, that can lead to serious pressure to change things from the people who help foot the bill: insurers.
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A Norwegian plane that made an emergency landing in Iran is stranded, due to unintended effects of U.S. sanctions. The plane needs new engine parts, but importing them is prohibited by the sanctions.
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Many websites make a business of posting mugshots, then charging those people to take them down, but it's hard to stop. The reasons have to do with how First Amendment freedoms are protected.
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Two economics reporters drive the length of an event known as The World's Longest Yard Sale — stretching from Alabama to Michigan — in search of economic wisdom. They discover a truth of behavioral economics and a couple French records, too.
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As the Supreme Court is set to rule on two gerrymandering cases, NPR's Planet Money looks at how one political consultant changed the national maps by investing in state elections.