NPR Now

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi is a co-host and reporter for Planet Money, telling stories that creatively explore and explain the workings of the global economy. He's a sucker for a good supply chain mystery — from toilet paper to foster puppies to specialty pastas. He's drawn to tales of unintended consequences, like the time a well-intentioned chemistry professor unwittingly helped unleash a global market for synthetic drugs, or what happened when the U.S. Patent Office started granting patents on human genes. And he's always on the lookout for economic principles at work in unexpected places, like the tactics comedians use to protect their intellectual property (a.k.a. jokes).

He's reported from Iceland on the dramatic crash of the country's budget airline, from Denmark on the global trade for human sperm, and from Germany on the country's (uncannily familiar) obsession with returning the things they buy online. He also produced Planet Money's 2020 Murrow-award-winning collaboration with the NPR Ed Desk, the show's audiobook rendition of the Great Gatsby, as well as collaborative episodes with Pro Publica, and Gimlet Media's How to Save A Planet. Horowitz-Ghazi hails from Santa Fe, New Mexico, studied history at Reed College, and got his start in radio at Oregon Public Broadcasting. He was selected as a 2014 AIR New Voices Scholar and a 2019 Arthur F. Burns Fellow. He previously worked with Michel Martin's team at All Things Considered, where he produced breaking news and feature stories, led film coverage, and directed the live broadcast. At All Things Considered, Horowitz-Ghazi reported on how a national clown scare affected professional clowns, who was behind of a wave of succulent poaching on the California coastline, what happens to a musician's legacy after they die, and why his hometown burns a giant human effigy every year. He also pitched and produced "Brave New Workers," a series of profiles on people adapting to the changing economy, and has interviewed coal miners, rock climbers, coyote hunters, porn stars, cowboys, truck drivers, drone pilots, Carrie Brownstein, Werner Herzog, and George R.R. Martin, among many others. In his free time, he enjoys riding bicycles, playing squash (middlingly), and sleeping out of doors.

Amanda Aronczyk (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 October 2019.

Before that, she was a reporter at WNYC, New York Public Radio, where she contributed stories to Radiolab, On the Media, United States of Anxiety, The Brian Lehrer Show and more. Aronczyk covered science and health, and she fondly remembers collecting saliva from voters to measure stress, corresponding with the Unabomber and using nose swabs to solve a classic office mystery: who came to work sick? She was also the lead reporter on the award-winning 10-story companion series to PBS' "The Emperor of All Maladies," presented by NPR and WNYC.

Aronczyk also teaches audio journalism at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Anamaria Artemisa Sayre is co-host of Alt.Latino, NPR's pioneering radio show and podcast celebrating Latin music and culture since 2010.

As a multimedia producer for NPR Music, she is focused on elevating the diversity of sounds and stories that define Latinx culture. In addition to chismeando weekly on the mic with her co-host Felix Contreras, she spends her time curating Latin artists at the Tiny Desk. Sayre's producing credits include concerts from artists like Nicki Nicole, Camila Cabello, Camilo and Mon Laferte. 

In addition to her work at NPR Music, Sayre has appeared on many acclaimed NPR news shows and podcasts including Weekend Edition, Pop Culture Happy Hour, All Songs Considered and Code Switch.

Originally from southern California, she's an avid lover of mountains, beaches and stories that pair best with a cafecito in her abuela's backyard.

B.A. Parker is the co-host of NPR’s Code Switch, reporting stories such as racial trauma in horror films, honoring her ancestors and the myth behind self-care. Prior to joining Code Switch, she was co-host and lead producer at The Cut podcast with New York Magazine. Previously, Parker was a film professor at Morgan State University and Stevenson University, where she forced 19-year-olds to watch Point Break and Wong Kar-wai films. She, then, found her way to a production fellowship with the radio show This American Life. Parker has also been a guest host of NPR's It's Been a Minute, and has produced for NPR's Invisibilia, Gimlet's Heavyweight and WNYC's Nancy.

Erika Beras (she/her) is a reporter and co-host for NPR's Planet Money.

Prior to joining the team in 2021 she spent four years as a reporter at Marketplace.

As a freelancer, she was a regular contributor to Scientific American podcasts and filed stories for NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Latino USA. She also contributed to PRI's The World, the BBC and Monocle 24 Radio and wrote stories for National Geographic and NewYorker.com.

Before that, she spent a decade as a staff reporter for NPR Member station WESA and at The Miami Herald. Her reporting has taken her places as varied as The Democratic Republic of Congo, Switzerland and Erie, Pennsylvania.

She has been awarded grants, fellowships and awards from Radio Television Digital News Association, National Association of Science Writers, The International Center for Journalists, the International Women's Media Foundation, The Center for Health Reporting, The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, Third Coast International Audio Festival and others.

Beras is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer and a graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. A native Spanish speaker, she grew up in New York City and lives in Pittsburgh.

Felix Contreras is co-creator and co-host of Alt.Latino, NPR's pioneering radio show and podcast celebrating Latin music and culture since 2010.

In addition to his post behind the mic, Contreras programs music from the Latin diaspora for the acclaimed Tiny Desk concerts and appears regularly on NPR's award-winning newsmagazines, All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

A knowledgeable international ambassador for Latino heritage and arts, "Tio Felix" travels extensively in search of new talent and new music, and captures important legacy performers in jazz and Latin genres. Various national and international publications have quoted his expertise on the contemporary influences of Latin culture, music, and media.

He's a recovering TV journalist whose first post at NPR in 2001 was as a Producer/Reporter for the NPR News Arts Desk. He is also NPR's resident Deadhead and performs around the DC area with his Latin music Beatles cover band, Los Day Trippers.

Gene Demby is a founding member of NPRs Code Switch team, where he serves as a host of the show. In 2020, Code Switch was named Apple's inaugural Podcast Of The Year. Demby's essays for Code Switch have also earned him honors for commentary from the Online News Association. Prior to joining NPR, he served as the managing editor of HuffPost's BlackVoices. He began his professional journalism career at the New York Times, where he served in various roles.

Demby hails from Philadelphia and currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Jeff Guo (he/him) is a co-host and reporter for Planet Money, NPR's award-winning show that finds creative, entertaining ways to make sense of the complicated forces that move our economy. He joined the team in 2022.

Previously, Guo covered economics and policy for The Washington Post, where his work frequently blended reporting and data analysis. Ask him about tontines or the curse of the potato or why Christmas is probably not an "orgy of wealth destruction." His one rule is to always get the name of the cat. And really, he doesn't mind if you listen to him at double speed. Guo also served as NPR's first Ishiyama Transparency in Government legal fellow. As a lawyer, he helped reporters draft Freedom of Information Act requests and sue the government over unanswered requests.

Guo holds bachelor's degrees in math and economics from MIT, a J.D. from Yale Law School — and, occasionally, his two cats. He's from Maryland.

Jenn White is the host of 1A, a daily program from WAMU in Washington, D.C.

A seasoned journalist and podcast host, she has worked in public radio since 1999. She came to 1A from WBEZ in Chicago, where she held several on-air positions, as host of the station's local two-hour midday show, Reset with Jenn White, and before that as host of The Morning Shift.

She is also a familiar voice on several WBEZ podcasts, including Making Oprah, Making Obama and 16 Shots, which chronicled the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. Before WBEZ, White was the local host of All Things Considered at Michigan Radio.

White is also skilled as a public speaker and has moderated numerous on-air gubernatorial and mayoral debates. She is a native of Detroit and graduate of the University of Michigan.

Kenny Malone is a co-host for NPR's Planet Money. Before that, he was a reporter for WNYC's Only Human podcast. Before that, he was a reporter for Miami's WLRN. And before that, he was a reporter for his friend T.C.'s homemade newspaper, Neighborhood News.

Malone's stories have investigated everything from abuse in Florida's assisted living facilities to health hackers building their own pancreas to the origins of seemingly made-up holidays like National Raisin Day. Or National Golf Day. Or National Splurge Day.

His work has won the National Edward R. Murrow Award for Use of Sound, the National Headliner Award, the Scripps Howard Award, and the Bronze Third Coast Festival Award. He studied mathematics at Xavier University in Cincinnati and proudly hails from Meadville, PA, where the zipper was invented.

Award-winning journalist Lori Lizarraga is a co-host of NPR's Code Switch, the preeminent show about race and identity in America. Before joining NPR, she reported across the country in Texas, California, Colorado and internationally in Ecuador. She has a reputation for breaking news and a passion and energy for covering under-reported communities, civil rights and issues surrounding immigration and Latinos in the U.S.

When she's not telling stories alongside her co-hosts Gene Demby and B.A. Parker or traveling to Texas to see her best friends — her abuela, her four siblings, or her 2-year-old nephew, Liam — she is most likely eating soup dumplings, cooking something spicy, making friends wherever she goes or dancing to her latest playlist.

Manoush Zomorodi is the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour. She is a journalist, podcaster and media entrepreneur, whose work reflects her passion for investigating how technology and business are transforming humanity. TED Radio Hour won the 2023 Ambie award for Best Knowledge, Science, and Tech podcast.

Her book "Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Creative Self" (2017, St. Martin's Press) and her TED Talk (6+ million views) are guides to surviving information overload and the "Attention Economy."

In 2018, Zomorodi founded Stable Genius Productions, where she produced and hosted, among other shows, ZigZag: TED's business podcast about being human. From 2013-2018, she hosted the interactive podcast Note to Self with WNYC Studios, which was named Best Tech Podcast of 2017 by the Academy of Podcasters. Prior to WNYC, Zomorodi reported and produced around the world for BBC News and Thomson Reuters.

Manoush was named one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business for 2018 and has received various accolades for her work, including The Gracie for Best Radio Host in 2014 and 2018, and a Webby for Best Podcast Host in 2020.

She received a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University in English and Fine Arts.

Manoush is half-Persian and half-Swiss and was born in New York City, where she lives with her family.

Marielle Segarra is a reporter and the host of NPR's Life Kit, the award-winning podcast and radio show that shares trustworthy, nonjudgmental tips that help listeners navigate their lives.

Segarra joined NPR from Marketplace, where she helped people understand how the ins and outs of the economy are relevant to their lives. Over the years, she reported stories on Amazon's counterfeit problem, the lack of paid family leave in the U.S., the origin story of the song of the summer, the role of makeup during a pandemic, and the jarring experience of returning to an office in August 2020.

And as a host, she talked about U.S. refugee policy, green energy, the war in Ukraine, the movie "Encanto," cauliflower smoothies, hairless cats, inflation, mental health, honoring her ancestors, sea glass hunting in Puerto Rico and a lot more.

Before Marketplace, Segarra worked at WHYY in Philadelphia. She has also taught audio journalism at Columbia University, and she coaches reporters and producers on how to write and deliver scripts that sound like them.

Segarra is a graduate of Brown University, where she studied nonfiction writing and British literature and spent a semester talking about Shakespeare and drinking tea in Edinburgh.

She has lived in New York for much of her life, but somehow still hasn't visited the Statue of Liberty.

Mary Childs (she/her) is a co-host for NPR's Planet Money and the author of the bestselling book, “The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All.” Before joining the team in 2019, she was a senior reporter at Barron's magazine, where she covered the alternatives industry, the bond market and capitalism. Before that, she worked at the Financial Times and Bloomberg News. She's written about the pioneering of new asset classes like time, billionaire's proposals to solve inequality and diversity and discrimination in the finance industry. Before all that, she was also a Watson Fellow, spending a year traveling the world painting portraits. She graduated from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, with a degree in business journalism and an honors thesis comparing the use and significance of media sting operations in the U.S. and India.

Nick Fountain is a reporter and co-host of Planet Money, where he covers the cracks in our economy that explain how the world works.

At Planet Money, he's driven the world's longest yard sale, bought and sold a truckload of Christmas trees, uncovered a global postal conspiracy, run the stairs of Fenway Park with hot dog vendors, figured out exactly why your printer is the worst and convinced the inventor of self-checkout machines to admit he hates his invention, among many other stories.

Fountain started as a producer on the show in 2015. Before that, he worked as a producer and director of NPR's flagship show Morning Edition.

He cut his teeth at KUSP, a community radio station in Santa Cruz, California, where he went to college. Then he worked at KQED in San Francisco, and WBUR in Boston. He lives in dreamy Ventura, California, with his wife, daughter, and dog.

Ramtin Arablouei is co-host and co-producer of NPR's Throughline, a show that explores history through creative, immersive storytelling designed to reintroduce history to new audiences.

Arablouei got his start at NPR in 2015 with a three-week contract to produce a pilot for How I Built This with Guy Raz, and now produces, reports, mixes, and writes music for such top-rated podcasts as TED Radio Hour, Hidden Brain, Embedded, Invisibilia, The Indicator, Code Switch, Radio Ambulante, and the Center for Investigative Reporting's Reveal.

A trained audio engineer, Arablouei spent most of his early twenties in recording studios. He contributed sound design and music for films and commercials, including the IMAX trailer for 300: Rise of an Empire. He's written music for many award-winning podcasts including "Los Cassettes del Exilio" (Radio Ambulante) and the "All Work. No Pay" episode of Reveal, which won the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi award for investigative reporting.

Born in Iran, Arablouei emigrated to the U.S. with his family as a child. He graduated from St. Mary's College of Maryland with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and history.

Rund Abdelfatah is the co-host and producer of Throughline, a show that explores the history of current events. In that role, she's responsible for all aspects of the production, including development of episode concepts, interviewing guests, and sound design.

Abdelfatah joined NPR in 2014 as an intern and went on to become a producer on a number of NPR's most popular podcasts, including How I Built This, TED Radio Hour, NPR Politics Podcast, Code Switch, and Pop Culture Happy Hour.

The concept for Throughline, launched in February 2019, was developed by Abdelfatah and her co-host, Ramtin Arablouei.

Abdelfatah got her start in journalism covering local and domestic politics at the Washington bureau of the BBC. She previously earned a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology, with a minor in Spanish, from Princeton University.

Sarah Gonzalez is a host and reporter with Planet Money, NPR's award-winning show that finds creative, entertaining ways to make sense of the big, complicated forces that move our economy. She joined the team in April 2018.

Before joining Planet Money, Sarah was a reporter with WNYC in New York City, where she dug deep into data and documents to uncover stories of inequality.

Sarah's reporting uncovered that the Department of Homeland Security was apprehending undocumented teens on Long Island, based on flimsy claims that they were affiliated with the MS-13 gang. Dozens have since been released from detention after being held for months.

For her five-part investigation into how New Jersey prosecutes minors, Sarah received the 2017 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, awarded to a public media reporter under age 35, and was a finalist for the 2017 Livingston Award for young journalists. Sarah found that teenagers were serving prison sentences that amount to life despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting life sentences for minors. And she uncovered that 90 percent of minors tried as adults in the state were black or Latino. She was part of the WNYC reporting team awarded an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for the podcast, Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice.

Sarah has served as a fill-in host for The Takeaway and WNYC's live two-hour call-in news show, The Brian Lehrer Show.

Her investigation into Florida charter schools turning away students with severe disabilities received an Online News Association award for Innovative Investigative Journalism. She has received a national Edward R. Murrow award for Excellence in Innovation, and national awards from Public Radio News Directors Inc., the Society of Professional Journalists and the Education Writers Association for her investigative and feature reporting.

Prior to WNYC, Sarah was an NPR Kroc Fellow in 2010 and was a state education reporter with NPR's StateImpact Florida from 2011-2013.

She graduated from Mills College in Oakland, CA, and grew up on the San Diego-Tijuana, Mexico border.

Tonya Mosley is a co-host of Fresh Air. She's also the host of the award-winning podcast Truth Be Told, and a correspondent and former host of Here & Now, the midday radio show co-produced by NPR and WBUR.

Prior to Here & Now, Mosley served as a host and the Silicon Valley bureau chief for KQED in San Francisco. Her other experiences include television correspondent for Al Jazeera America and a television reporter in several cities including Seattle, Wash., and Louisville, Ky.

In 2015, Mosley was awarded a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, where she co-created a workshop for journalists on the impacts of implicit bias on reporting and co-wrote a Belgian/American experimental study on the effects of protest coverage. Mosley has won several national awards for her work, including an RTDNA award for her public radio series "Black In Seattle" and an Emmy Award in 2016 for her televised piece "Beyond Ferguson."

Jeremy Hobson is a trusted journalist to public radio listeners and stations, having spent ten years hosting Marketplace Morning Report, Here & Now, and NPR Special Coverage of major news events.

He started in public radio at age 9, working on a show called Treehouse Radio on station WILL in his hometown of Urbana, Illinois. He interned for All Things Considered at 17, and spent years working as a producer and reporter, before becoming the youngest national host in public radio’s history in 2010. He’s so excited to bring more voices from the middle into the national conversation.

Rachel Martin is the co-creator and host of Wild Card, an interview game show about life's biggest questions. She invites notable guests to play a card game that lets them open up about the memories, insights, and beliefs that have shaped their lives.

Martin spent six years as a host of Morning Edition, and was the founding host of NPR's award-winning morning news podcast Up First. She previously hosted Weekend Edition Sunday.

She served as National Security Correspondent for NPR, where she covered both defense and intelligence issues, and also worked as a NPR foreign correspondent, where she covered the London terrorist attacks, issues surrounding immigration and shifting cultural identities in Europe.

Martin worked extensively in Afghanistan, covering the reconstruction effort after the U.S. invasion and the country's first democratic presidential election. She also reported from Iraq, where she covered U.S. military operations and the strategic alliance between Sunni sheiks and the U.S. military in Anbar province. She traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2015 to report on women's rights, and in 2022, she reported from Ukraine's border with Belarus in the leadup to the Russian war.

Martin was part of the team that launched NPR's experimental morning news show, The Bryant Park Project, a live two-hour daily multimedia program that she co-hosted with Alison Stewart and Mike Pesca.

Martin also previously served as NPR's religion correspondent. Her piece on Islam in America was awarded "Best Radio Feature" by the Religion News Writers Association in 2007. In 2011, her story on racial discrimination in Hollywood won a Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and her series on the effects of the opioid epidemic on children won a Gracie award in 2019. She started her career at public radio station KQED in San Francisco as a producer and reporter. 

She holds an undergraduate degree in political science and an honorary doctorate from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., and a Master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University.

She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, two sons and dog named Lola F. Bear, Esq.