"A trip to the underworld of debt collection, where bankers team up with ex-burglars and few rules apply Bad Paper is a riveting expose;, a moving story of an unlikely friendship, and a gritty narrative of how scrappy entrepreneurs profit from our debts. Jake Halpern introduces us to a former banking executive and a former armed robber who become partners and go in quest of "paper"--the uncollected debts that are sold off by banks for pennies on the...

A journalist visits five of America's disaster-zone towns and the devoted residents who chose to stay despite hellish conditions. As a young reporter, Jake Halpern became obsessed with stories about "some outlandish and often hellish place inhabited by a handful of stalwarts who refused to leave." His fellow reporters joked with him and nicknamed him the Bad Homes Correspondent. But, the more he learned about these people, the more he was drawn to...

"After escaping a Syrian prison, Ibrahim Aldabaan and his family fled the country to seek protection in America. Among the few refugees to receive visas, they finally landed in JFK airport on November 8, 2016, Election Day. The family had reached a safe harbor, but woke up to the world of Donald Trump and a Muslim ban that would sever them from the grandmother, brothers, sisters, and cousins stranded in exile in Jordan. Welcome to the New World tells...

Jake Halpern introduces us to a former banking executive and a former armed robber who become partners and go in quest of 'paper' - the uncollected debts that are sold off by banks for pennies on the dollar. As Halpern shows, the world of consumer debt collection is a wild and unregulated shadowland, where operators may misrepresent a debtor's situation, make illegal threats, and even lay claim to debts that are not theirs to collect in the first...