Nobel-Winning Economist; The Toll of Shipping Boxes; Learning from the Germans; NY Accents; Kids Food

On this Day-After-Christmas, first day of Kwanzaa, fourth day of Hanukkah, and Boxing Day, here are some of our favorite recent conversations:

• Esther Duflo, recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, professor of poverty alleviation and development economics at MIT, and co-author of Good Economics for Hard Times (PublicAffairs, 2019), discusses the work which led to her recent Nobel Prize award in economics.
• Nicole Nguyen, tech reporter for BuzzFeed News, and Ken Bensinger, investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News, talk about the often unseen and underreported environmental and emotional costs of Amazon's enormous, decentralized, next-day delivery network.
• Susan Neiman, Berlin-based director of the Einstein Forum, moral philosopher and the author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), talks about what the U.S. can learn from Germany's post-war reckoning.
• WNYC reporter Arun Venugopal and Kara Becker, associate professor of Linguistics at Reed College, break down the facts and myths about New York accents and whether there really is a difference between boroughs.
• Bettina Elias Siegel, food policy activist and author of Kid Food: The Challenge of Feeding Children in a Highly Processed World (Oxford University Press, 2019), talks about how children's food has taken a nutritional nose dive and how parents and educators can work around it.

These interviews originally aired earlier this year. Links to the unedited audio are here:

• Nobel Prize for Poverty (November 11, 2019)
• The Human and Environmental Costs of Next Day Shipping (September 6, 2019)
• What Germany Can Teach Us About Facing the Past (October 18, 2019)
• Does the New York Accent Still Exist? (October 24, 2019)
• Why Is 'Kid' Food so Unhealthy? (November 18, 2019)