Going for Broke

In this special episode, we’re sharing a conversation Ray had on the new podcast, Other People’s Pockets. On Other People’s Pockets, journalist Maya Lau asks people from all walks of life to get radically transparent about their personal finances in order to learn more about who we are and level the financial playing field along the way. Ray and Maya chat about how Ray found it difficult to find desirable jobs the older he gets … and he’s not afraid to admit he’s angry about it. If you like...

In this final part of our series, we’re talking about work — about the right to meaningful work, the search for jobs that pay enough to live, and what happens to people who look for work while also having a disability that’s invisible to most. Original Air Date: November 19, 2022 Guests: Andrea Dobynes Wagner — Angela Garbes — Rodrigo Toscano — Barbara Ehrenreich Interviews In This Hour: Do they need to know that I'm blind? — The work of care is vital. Why don't we pay like it is? — A sonne...

In the first of three episodes of "Going For Broke" all about the care economy, we're thinking about housing. Many of us would consider it a basic human right. But in America, it can be hard to come by. Original Air Date: November 05, 2022 Guests: Bobbi Dempsey — David Harvey — Annabelle Gurwitch — Justin Garrett Moore Interviews In This Hour: When the walk home from school keeps changing — Creating a compassionate geography — More supportive housing can start with sharing space. And upen...

During the pandemic, Jen Fitzgerald, a poet and teacher, became a statistic, forced to find an apartment under duress as the city closed down around her. The situation the fifth-generation New Yorker and single mom found herself in has everything to do with what has happened to her city—and other hyper-prosperous American metropolises—during the last decade. They are now built to exclude the poor and even the unstable middle class, and certainly most of the poets. In COVID lockdown, Fitzgeral...

Lisa Ventura is a housing case manager by day, but for years she's also been her family’s unofficial social worker by night. Lisa was just a kid when she learned to help her Spanish-speaking mother navigate the welfare system. It was a struggle, but she could handle it. But she wasn’t prepared for what it would feel like when her isolated father lost his job during the pandemic and needed her help filing for unemployment. Battling the bureaucracy during Covid on top of a troubled fa...

Ray Suarez never wanted to be the center of the story. He’s been a journalist of one kind of another all of his adult life, on radio, on television, in books and newspapers. He was the host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation, he was a senior correspondent for PBS NewsHour, and he had his own daily news show on Al Jazeera America. When that last network ceased operations in 2016, he figured it might take a while to find work, but he had a reputation and good connections that would eventuall...