The Builder

Between his third and fourth years at Oberlin, Ben Calhoun ’01 had an internship at public radio station WBEZ in Chicago and a job delivering pizza for Papa John’s. During a delivery one day, as he was listening to an episode of This American Life about business conventions, the brakes in his car stopped working. Then things got worse: Panicked, he touched the hot rotor on the brakes.

“I’m sitting in my car, my hand is burning, and I have to figure out what I’m going to do with all this pizza,” he says. “But all I wanted was to hear what happened next in a Nancy Updike story on that episode.”

Determined to learn how to create these compelling stories, Calhoun landed a job at WBEZ, where This American Life was then located, four days after graduation. “I was like, ‘I will do whatever work I need to do to be around the people who understand this craft so I can be exposed to it and learn the tools,’” he says, noting that one of his tasks was photocopying manuals for digital editing software.

Calhoun eventually became a news reporter at WBEZ and did documentary-style work like photo essays in galleries on the side before finally having a chance to hone his long-form audio storytelling skills on staff at This American Life. He was part of the team that won the first Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting.

Today, he manages the New York Times’ popular podcast The Daily and the team that creates the show. “The job does feel like a surprisingly fortuitous combination of the two things that I spent a lot of time trying to learn how to do,” he says. “[The Daily is] news, and it’s long-form storytelling that allows us to take a news moment and then place it into a narrative context, which is so powerful for people.”

Calhoun is generous with his praise for former This American Life colleagues who are also Obies, including producers Zoe Chace ’04 and Chana Joffe-Walt ’03, and founding producer Alix Spiegel ’94. And he sees a link between this job and his time at Oberlin, specifically his tenure at WOBC.

As station manager, he volunteered to fill in for any shift someone had to miss—meaning he spun indie rock, hip-hop, and jazz, or did talk radio—and implemented work groups to keep operations running smoothly; these teams built new shelves, organized music, and even rebuilt the live studio.

“[At WOBC] I discovered how much I enjoy getting the honor and the privilege to be at the center of a team that’s making something collectively—a true collective effort to build something in service of an idea or a show or a mission that feels larger than all of us,” Calhoun says. “That’s one of the things about my job that I love on a daily basis.”

This story originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine as part of the feature "A Pipeline to Podcasts."