Make Me Smart

It’s our the fifth Explainathon, the semi-biannual challenge when Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood try to answer as many of your questions as possible. This one has everything: Privacy regulation! Social Security! 5G! The college admissions scandal! The dark web! We tackle it all.

Plus, we have some very exciting news for fans of public media and merch: When you donate $5 a month or $60 to Marketplace, you can get an exclusive Make Me Smart notebook! Hurry, this offer’s only good until April 10.

It’s our the fifth Explainathon, the semi-biannual challenge when Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood try to answer as many of your questions as possible. This one has everything: Privacy regulation! Social Security! 5G! The college admissions scandal! The dark web! We tackle it all.

Plus, we have some very exciting news for fans of public media and merch: When you donate $5 a month or $60 to Marketplace, you can get an exclusive Make Me Smart notebook! Hurry, this offer’s only good until April 10.

Taxes are due in less than two weeks, and some of us have extra stress around that … because things are different this year. It’s the first time most people are feeling the 2017 tax overhaul, the biggest change in the tax code for three decades. It raised the standard deduction and gave most folks a small tax cut. Refunds are generally lower, which is technically good news, but might feel like bad news for people who rely on that spring windfall. Taxes are the beat for Marketplace reporter Marielle Segarra, and she gets us smart this week. (She still files her returns by snail mail!)

Here are links to the articles in Vox and The Guardian we talked about this week, and don’t forget you can watch this and other episodes of Make Me Smart on our YouTube channel.

Today’s show is sponsored by Panopto, Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage and Cort.

Taxes are due in less than two weeks, and some of us have extra stress around that … because things are different this year. It’s the first time most people are feeling the 2017 tax overhaul, the biggest change in the tax code for three decades. It raised the standard deduction and gave most folks a small tax cut. Refunds are generally lower, which is technically good news, but might feel like bad news for people who rely on that spring windfall. Taxes are the beat for Marketplace reporter Marielle Segarra, and she gets us smart this week. (She still files her returns by snail mail!)

Here are links to the articles in Vox and The Guardian we talked about this week, and don’t forget you can watch this and other episodes of Make Me Smart on our YouTube channel.

Today’s show is sponsored by Panopto, Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage and Cort.

Opioid overdoses are killing about 50,000 Americans a year, more than car accidents and guns. Marketplace’s documentary podcast, The Uncertain Hour, is digging into drug epidemics in its latest season: why people buy and sell drugs, how law enforcement tries to stop them and how an epidemic eventually ends. Reporter and producer Caitlin Esch spoke with Kai and Molly about going back to Wise County, Virginia, a sort of ground zero of the current opioid epidemic, and about how the stories told by some of her sources speak to wider issues in the crisis. Just a note: there is one swear word in this episode, around 8 minutes in.

You can subscribe to The Uncertain Hour here, and don’t forget you can watch this and other episodes of Make Me Smart on our YouTube channel.

Today’s show is sponsored by Panopto, Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, Alliance for Lifetime Income  and Mailchimp

Opioid overdoses are killing about 50,000 Americans a year, more than car accidents and guns. Marketplace’s documentary podcast, The Uncertain Hour, is digging into drug epidemics in its latest season: why people buy and sell drugs, how law enforcement tries to stop them and how an epidemic eventually ends. Reporter and producer Caitlin Esch spoke with Kai and Molly about going back to Wise County, Virginia, a sort of ground zero of the current opioid epidemic, and about how the stories told by some of her sources speak to wider issues in the crisis. Just a note: there is one swear word in this episode, around 8 minutes in.

You can subscribe to The Uncertain Hour here, and don’t forget you can watch this and other episodes of Make Me Smart on our YouTube channel.

Today’s show is sponsored by Panopto, Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, Alliance for Lifetime Income  and Mailchimp

The United Kingdom voted for Brexit almost three years ago, but there’s still no deal in place to politically and economically untangle itself from Europe. The official deadline is next week. Maybe you’ve heard a bit about how messy this process has been, but you’d be forgiven for finding it hard to follow and harder to care. Brexit truly does have huge implications on both sides of the pond, so this week Ros Atkins, host of BBC’s “Outside Source,” is here to help us sort it all out.

Here’s a link to Molly’s “Marketplace Tech” podcast about online radicalization and Rep. Devin Nunes’ lawsuit against Twitter. Today’s show is sponsored by Panopto, Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage and “The Good Fight” on CBS All Access.

Do you use social media? Or does social media use you? That’s a question we all had to confront last year when it came out that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal information from more than 50 million Facebook accounts, using the data to target political ads in the 2016 election. What’s changed a year after the biggest leak in Facebook’s history? Here to help us sort through the data mining we live with and what comes next is Shoshana Zuboff. She’s a professor emerita at Harvard Business School and the author of the book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.”

This episode is sponsored by Mailchimp, Molekule, Panopto and Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage.

We’re taking a break from politics and the culture wars to get into some weird science: quantum computing. It’s not super easy to explain, but going quantum allows computers to operate by a totally different set of rules that could change some major things, like national security and medical breakthroughs. President Donald Trump recently signed the National Quantum Initiative Act, calling for a $1.2 billion investment in quantum computing. What’s that mean for Big Tech, the economy or the regular consumer? UC Berkeley’s Steven Weber breaks it down.

Links from today’s show: Both studies about who’s really paying tariffs and The New York Times Magazine story about mondegreens.

This episode was brought to you by Mailchimp, Care/of, Indeed and “The Good Fight” on CBS.

No mainline American politician would touch socialism a decade ago. Now, a Gallup poll shows young people are more positive about that term than they are about capitalism. President Donald Trump will likely make socialism a villain in his 2020 campaign, while democratic socialists have gained a popular figurehead in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in addition to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who plans another presidential run. This week, we zoom out to discuss the many faces of socialism and how they might show up in the election. Joining us is Sam Sanders, host of NPR’s podcast “It’s Been a Minute.” He spent much of 2015 and 2016 embedded in the Bernie Sanders campaign.

This episode is brought to you by Mailchimp and Bill.com. Here’s a link to the teacher pay study Molly Wood mentioned and the study on millennials and climate change.