David Kestenbaum

It's one of the most popular items, but often it seems to be as far as humanly possible from the entrance. The Planet Money team looks at two very different theories about why that is.

The electric car company Tesla recently announced it was putting its patents in the public domain. Our Planet Money team looks at what would happen if we got rid of patents all together.

Ikea plans to raise its minimum hourly wage for retail workers to $10.76, and it's betting that the raise will pay for itself.

An economic indicator commonly called the VIX, volatility index, is also known as the fear index. Whatever you call it, the index is hitting lows not seen since before the financial crisis.

One hungry reporter goes on a quest to find out why his package of Peanut Butter M&M's weighs 0.06 ounces less than a package of Milk Chocolate M&M's.

It's hard to find anything in a store that costs 1 penny. There is one place where people still dream of 1 cent sales: the Internet. NPR's planet money team reports on the value of the virtual penny.

How much of what we think of as the beautiful sound of a Stradivarius is the instrument itself — and how much is the brand?

People from China are considered the world's top tourists, spending more on average than people from other countries.

This week, the television networks announced their new season lineups. NPR's TV critic, Eric Deggans, talks with host Audie Cornish about some of the new shows and the trends that they reveal.

If you've ever driven up the East Coast, you may have driven over the Tappan Zee Bridge. The span — north of New York City — was built in the spot that seems to make the least economic sense. Why?

You can trace 4,000 years of economic growth through the history of light. The ways we got from a candle, made from of animal fat, to the LED lights we have today tell a lot about our modern economy.

Buying insurance doesn't always feel like it makes economic sense, especially for young healthy people. So why are they still willing to pay?

We all know .com and .edu, but now hundreds of new Internet domain names like .fish and .xyz are available. If all these new domains take off, what will become of .com?

Greece's economy is expected to rebound this year. But for one couple living in Athens, things don't feel better.

Multiple economists have studied the fast-food industry to answer the question. They've found very different answers.

Ben Horowitz is a big-time venture capitalist. His firm invested in Facebook and Twitter. More recently, his firm invested some $50 million in startups related to bitcoin, the virtual currency that works like online cash. Ben thinks bitcoin is going to change the way ...

For more on what bitcoin is and how it works, see our story "What Is Bitcoin?"

Gavin Andresen is chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation. I first talked with him about bitcoin, the virtual currency, back in 2011. I checked back in with him ...

For more of our reporting on this story, please see our work in The New York Times Magazine and on This American Life.

A couple of months ago, we reported on a charity called GiveDirectly that's trying to help poor people in the developing ...

Earlier this week, I bought a Treasury bill.

Everybody calls Treasury bills T-bills, and they work like this: The government promises to pay holders of T-bills a specific amount on a specific day in the near future. For the T-bill I bought, the government promised to pay $1,000 on Oct. ...