Hey there, hope you had a great week. We have a fun newsletter to kick off your weekend, with stories about apple-picking, analog tech and audiobooks , plus easy-to-understand explanations about the gobs of new data just out about the economy.

First though, I want to thank everyone who stepped up to support Marketplace during our fall fundraising drive. This newsletter is always free — free of paywalls, AI summaries and clickbait — but it’s not free to make. Marketplace relies on listener donations to keep us going, and I really truly appreciate every one of you. If you weren’t able to donate this drive, it’s not too late! Just click here. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

Every year, Allison Hall comes out to Patterson Fruit Farm, about a half hour east of Cleveland.

“It's no different from my childhood,” she said. “Fruit farms were just a thing that you did.”

These days she comes with her husband and her five-year-old son, who’s a big fan of the farm’s tractor ride.

Agritourism includes corn mazes, farm stays, petting zoos, wine tours, and other things that attract the public to visit and spend money at working farms.

Patterson’s has been a farm since the mid-19th century, but the tractor rides, slide barn, and tire swings started showing up in the 1990s when the on-site farmer’s market got a little too crowded.

“Our market was flooded with people, and we said, ‘OK, how do we move some people out of the market?’” said Bill Patterson, who’s part of the sixth generation to own the farm. “So we took 50 straw bales, and we put them in a pile, and there were hundreds and thousands of kids crawling on 50 straw bales. And we're like, ‘Huh, there's something here.’”

Today, Patterson said about a fifth of the farm’s revenue comes from its ticketed “fun fest” area, weddings, and the pick-your-own apple orchards. The rest is sales in the market on the property, or in local grocery stores.

“Agriculture prices are going down, there are issues with weather, and also input costs are rising. Diesel prices are in the news at the moment,” said Claudia Schmidt, who teaches agricultural economics at Penn State.

The USDA gathers data on agritourism every five years. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of farms in Ohio that do it in some way went up 27%. The number of people who are paying to visit those farms has gone up too, by 33%.

In September, the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.2%. That’s slightly higher than the August rate, which Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh said was “running basically consistent with full employment.”

But what does “full employment” mean?

“I guess I think of it more as like a bathtub that you're filling with water,” said Alicia Sasser Modestino, a labor economist at Northeastern University. “There's a certain level of water that is ideal, so that when you get in the bathtub it doesn't overflow. But you also want to be in a bathtub where there's enough water that you're going to enjoy that bath, right?”

Modestino explained that, effectively, the labor market works in a similar way.

“And so we can think about workers moving through the labor market where new workers are getting poured in, some workers are leaving for a variety of reasons,” she said. “But we always want to have a nice steady level, warm temperature — not too hot, not too cold — labor market.”

A labor market that’s just right. So, even at full employment, there are still some people without jobs.

“Zero unemployment is actually the world where wages are increasing a lot, prices are increasing a lot — nobody actually wants to live in that world,” said Eliza Forsythe, economist at the University of Illinois.

A new audiobook edition of “The Odyssey” came out this June, capitalizing on the summer blockbuster. The narrator was actor Michael Caine — or at least, an AI recreation of his voice — along with a cast of AI-voiced characters. Listen to a preview.

The company behind the audiobook, ElevenLabs, specializes in AI voices. It’s one of a couple brands hawking AI as the future for audiobooks. 

According to the Pew Research Center, 26% of adult Americans said they listened to an audiobook in the past year. That share more than doubled since 2015. The Audio Publishers Association annual survey reported that audiobook sales reached $2.43 billion in 2025.

AI can simplify the audiobook-making process. Human-narrated audiobooks require around six months and thousands of dollars to make. AI audiobooks take hours or days and roughly $200 or $300. 

Regardless of ease, audiobook narrator Will Damron is adamant that AI can’t do his job.

“It’s a very decent mimic,” Damron said. “It's like a well-trained parrot. And to a lot of people, I do think it sounds convincing enough … if you're listening to small snippets of text. What we do is long-form narrative acting.”

Will listeners agree?