Spiegel grew up in
Baltimore, Maryland in a
secular Jewish household. Her father was the great-grandson of
Joseph Spiegel, the founder of the
Spiegel Catalog, and her mother is
Gabrielle Spiegel, former
American Historical Association president and renowned French medieval historian. Her great-aunt was civil rights activist
Polly Spiegel Cowan. She studied the
violin seriously from a very young age at the
Peabody Preparatory in Baltimore, but quit to go to college. After graduating from
Oberlin College, Spiegel moved to Chicago, where she saw an announcement in a newspaper about a fledgling local show for WBEZ called
Your American Playhouse: Documentaries About American Life. In 1995 Spiegel began correspondence with the show's producer,
Ira Glass, who took her on as an intern. In 2002, Spiegel won the
Livingston Award for episode #204 "
81 Words" about Spiegel's own grandfather, Dr.
John Patrick Spiegel, who had a hand in removing
homosexuality from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In 2007, she won the
Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award for the segment, "Which One of These is Not Like the Others?" for episode #322, "Shouting Across the Divide." During her years on NPR's science desk Spiegel covered psychology and human behavior, with an emphasis on looking at how ideas about emotions come into existence and evolve. In 2008 she won the
Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for her piece "Stuck and Suicidal in a Post-Katrina Trailer Park". In 2010 she won the
Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media. In 2021 she won a John B Oakes award from Columbia University for her environmental reporting. In 2022, after returning to This American Life, she was on the team that produced "The Pink House at the Center of the World", an episode about the overturn of Roe v. Wade that won a Peabody. Spiegel's science reporting has also been featured in
The New York Times and
The New Yorker. ==References==