Arun Rath
Beginning in October 2015, Arun Rath assumed a new role as a shared correspondent for NPR and Boston-based public broadcaster WGBH News. He is based in the WGBH newsroom and his time is divided between filing national stories for NPR and local stories for WGBH News.
In this role, Rath's reporting beat covers the science of learning, exploring how the brain functions – how we experience emotions, making errors or boredom – and how we respond to different styles of learning. The beat dovetails well with several of WGBH News' core regional coverage areas, bolstering its reporting on higher education (On Campus), innovation (Innovation Hub) and science (Living Lab from WGBH and WCAI in Woods Hole on Cape Cod).
Previously he served as weekend host of All Things Considered. In that role, every Saturday and Sunday, Rath and the All Things Considered team offered an hour-long exploration of compelling stories, along with in-depth interviews, breaking news, cultural reviews and reports from NPR bureaus throughout the U.S. and around the world.
Over his career, Rath has distinguished himself in public media as a reporter, producer and editor, including time as a senior reporter for the PBS series Frontline and The World® on WGBH Boston. He began his journalism career as an NPR intern at an NPR call-in program called Talk of the Nation, eventually joining the staff and becoming the show's director after working on several NPR News programs during the 1990s. In 2000, he became senior producer for NPR's On the Media, produced by WNYC, where he was part of a team that tripled its audience and won a Peabody Award. He spent 2005 as senior editor at the culture and arts show Studio 360 from PRI and WNYC. Rath moved to television in 2005 to report and manage radio partnerships for Frontline; he also reports on culture and music for the PBS series Sound Tracks. At Frontline and The World®, Rath specialized in national security and military justice. He reported and produced three films for Frontline, the latest being an investigation of alleged war crimes committed by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq.
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Despite President Obama's executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, dozens of detainees from the war on terrorism are still there. -
Harry Selker has spent his life trying to come up with better ways to keep people from dying of heart attacks. Now he's intent on figuring out if a simple, cheap medication could be a game changer. -
Defense attorneys in the military commissions of the alleged 9/11 plotters are throwing up roadblock after roadblock to increase the chances of saving their clients from the death penalty. The government could make the case go a lot quicker, they say, if prosecutors took that danger off the table.
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A new report from the office of the Massachusetts Attorney General's office details egregious misconduct and extensive drug use on the job by a former employee of the state crime lab.
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Student protesters calling themselves Reclaim Harvard Law School say a recommendation that a slavery-tainted symbol be retired is not enough to end their occupation of a student center. -
Harvard Law School is considering changing its official seal, which currently honors a slaveholder who was an early donor to the school. That's in response to student protests.
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Residents of Lexington, Mass., want to lead the fight against rampant gun violence.
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When a body goes unclaimed in Boston, it may receive a burial at a city cemetery. Students at a nearby boys' school are among those who volunteer to be pallbearers for people they've never met. -
Urban foragers don't just pick their meals from the trash; many eat only the finest, freshest produce — picked from city trees. The League of Urban Canners harvests fruit from trees to make jam. -
Geoff Sobelle calls his new one-man play "a meditation on our relationship to things." On a visit to the show, NPR's Arun Rath gathers a lesson in the meaning of stuff-- and the memories it can bear.
