Adam Davidson
Contributors List
In the early years of our show, Adam was on the program quite a bit, thanks to an unusually large pool of funny, radio-friendly stories from his own life. Later, he and Alex Blumberg formed our Planet Money team.
88: Numbers
Numbers lie. Numbers cover over complicated feelings and ambiguous situations. In this week's show, stories of people trying to use numbers to describe things that should not be quantified.
94: How To
What happens during a "how-to," and what our how-to's say about us. Most how-to's promise that you'll not only learn skills, you'll be transformed.
109: Notes on Camp
Stories of summer camp. People who love camp say that non-camp people simply don't understand what's so amazing about camp. In this program, we attempt to bridge the gap of misunderstanding between camp people and non-camp people.
123: High Cost of Living
Stories of people who choose not to live every moment to the fullest or smell the roses, and instead choose to withdraw from life, to make themselves numb.
129: Advice
A program taped before live audiences in Seattle (thanks to public radio station KUOW) and at HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. A taxonomy of different kinds of advice—and stories that illustrate why advice is so rarely taken.
133: Sales
Consider for a moment all the art forms that began in America: jazz, the blues, musical theater, rock n' roll, phonograph recordings, television, motion pictures, video games. But the art form in which America leads the world—more than any...
171: Election
Stories for the eve of the Presidential election, in which we try to evade, sidestep or look beneath the candidates' soundbites.
190: Living the Dream
There's a deep impulse in American culture that says that you can make yourself into anyone. Today, three stories about people who tried to do just that.
217: Give It to Them
It's been two years since the Mideast peace process collapsed, two years in which each side has done terrible things to the other side. We wanted to understand what that has done to people living in Israel and the West Bank, and to see if...
222: Suckers
Some people have a rather dark worldview that divides people into two groups: Suckers and non-suckers. We hear their stories.
227: Why We Fight
Stories about why we should go to war versus stories of why we shouldn't.
240: I'm In Charge Now
Stories of people putting themselves in charge in very unlikely, unpromising circumstances.
324: My Brilliant Plan
An American reporter in Iraq decides to rent a house in a residential Baghdad neighborhood rather than live in a hotel and be an easy target for insurgents. And an eleven-year-old boy figures out an ingenious way to see his dead father...
351: Return to Childhood 2008
Seventh-grader Kayla Hernandez likes to reminisce about when she was a child, back in fifth grade. She visits her school, where her fifth grade class met, and looks at her old books, thinks about what happened there.
355: The Giant Pool of Money
A special program about the housing crisis produced in a special collaboration with NPR News. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall Street? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans...
365: Another Frightening Show About the Economy
Alex Blumberg and NPR's Adam Davidson—the two guys who reported our Giant Pool of Money episode—are back, in collaboration with the Planet Money podcast.
366: A Better Mousetrap 2008
Stories about people trying to find new solutions to age-old problems—solutions that sometimes cause problems of their own. Alex Blumberg returns (in collaboration with the Planet Money podcast) with the latest in the financial crisis.
373: The New Boss
Stories about what happens when someone new takes over—someone with a vision of how things ought to be. Including international economics correspondent Adam Davidson of the Planet Money podcast on how Obama's new stimulus plan might...
375: Bad Bank
The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes.
376: Wrong Side of History
Bernie Epton went down in history as the Other Guy: the white opponent who almost defeated the first black mayor of Chicago. But what's the real story of someone who ended up on the wrong side of history? That and other stories of people...
384: Fall Guy
Sometimes when things go wrong, parsing out who all is to blame and taking them to task is just too complicated and haaaard! What's easy is pinning it all on one person and watching them go down in flames.
390: Return To The Giant Pool of Money
In which we mark the anniversary of the economic collapse and the anniversary of Planet Money: Recapping some of the original episode, The Giant Pool of Money, and finding out what's happened to all those guys in the year since.
392: Someone Else's Money
This week, we bring you a deeper look inside the health insurance industry. The dark side of prescription drug coupons. A story about Pet Health Insurance, which is in its infancy, and how it is changing human behaviors—for example, if you...
395: Middle of the Night
Stories of people who are up while the rest of us are sleeping—some for work, some for play, and some for a free sandwich. Including the story of a woman walking alone at night, who encounters another woman walking alone at night, for the...
397: 2010
At the start of a new year, journalistic outfits put out lots of mealy "perhaps oil prices will rise or perhaps they won't" predictions for the coming year. Instead of that, we asked our contributors to predict real events that will happen...
399: Contents Unknown
Stories of filling in the blank. A man finds himself in a train station in India, with no idea how he got there or who he is. His memory gone, he has no choice but to let other people—police, doctors, friends, family—create an identity for...
408: Island Time
Unprecedented amounts of money have been pledged to Haitian relief in the last few months. American households have given over $1 billion and in March, 120 countries pledged over $9 billion(!) to rebuild. The only problem is that—...
415: Crybabies
Crybabies are annoying. They whine, they complain, sometimes they ruin it for the rest of us. But being a crybaby can be a really effective tactic. We have stories of crybabies in sports, in politics, on Wall Street, on the streets of...
435: How To Create a Job
It seems like every politician has a plan for putting people back to work. But we and the Planet Money team couldn’t help but wonder…how do you create a job? Can politicians truly create many jobs? Is it possible the whole thing is just...
