David Kestenbaum
David Kestenbaum is a correspondent for NPR, covering science, energy issues and, most recently, the global economy for NPR's multimedia project Planet Money. David has been a science correspondent for NPR since 1999. He came to journalism the usual way — by getting a Ph.D. in physics first.
In his years at NPR, David has covered science's discoveries and its darker side, including the Northeast blackout, the anthrax attacks and the collapse of the New Orleans levees. He has also reported on energy issues, particularly nuclear and climate change.
David has won awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
David worked briefly on the show This American Life, and set up a radio journalism program in Cambodia on a Fulbright fellowship. He also teaches a journalism class at Johns Hopkins University.
David holds a bachelor's of science degree in physics from Yale University and a doctorate in physics from Harvard University.
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David Kestenbaum of NPR's Planet Money tells the story of the first stock ever shorted. It's a tale of intrigue, lies, sabotage and a life of exile.
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Most people don't bet that stocks will fall in value, and we wondered why. So we decided to short something ourselves.
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Our Planet Money team has a story about a man who realized at the time that he was the only person in the world with his job. It was a job selling something almost no one wanted.
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Members of OPEC meet this week. It used to be the world held its breath when this happened, worried what the meeting would mean for oil prices. But experts say times have changed.
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The price of new textbooks has gone through the roof. But what students spend on books has barely budged.
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The 1964 World's Fair showcased jet packs and other miracles of science. Here's how people back then thought the future would look (and how it actually turned out).
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With online health-insurance markets set to open this week, it's still unclear whether healthy people will sign up. Yet the success of the program depends on them.
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Oil sits under a pristine swath of the rainforest. Ecuador promised to leave the forest untouched — if the rest of the world would pay up.
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The tortuous negotiations involved in the "fiscal cliff" talks are like a chess game. To shed some light on the kinds of negotiation techniques that members of Congress might be using, we asked two negotiation experts to walk us through examples from their everyday lives.
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In the early 1990s, Colombian drug cartels had a problem: They had more money than they knew what to do with. So a pair of federal agents created an offshore bank.