planetmoneyshirt

Photo by Alice Gribbin

Here’s me, sitting in the Frank Conroy Reading Room in my NPR Planet Money t-shirt. I started listening to the Planet Money podcast, an economics podcast started by some of the producers of This American Life, right when it started in 2008. For years they’ve wanted to produce a t-shirt and track how it moves through the global economy, from cotton to yarn to cloth to clothes to consumers. Now, people who backed their Kickstarter are starting to get their shirts, and everyone can learn the details about how these objects came to be on a page where they’ve aggregated their reporting. It’s been a fascinating story to follow, with everything from large-scale investigations of the history of international trade to personal stories about individual factory workers.