A Night With NPR's Planet Money
The Planet Money podcast team shares stories from 10+ years of economic reporting, joined by UChicago economists. Book and tote included with ticket.
Why we picked this
Planet Money has spent more than a decade making economics legible to a general audience without dumbing it down. Having the reporters and the academics in the same room is a good test of how well that translation actually holds up.
Planet Money has been one of the most influential podcasts in American journalism since it launched during the 2008 financial crisis. The show set out to explain economics not through abstraction but through specific, reported stories about how money actually moves through the world. Alex Mayyasi and Wailin Wong are among the reporters who have carried that approach across more than a decade and hundreds of episodes.
This Chicago Humanities Festival event pairs the Planet Money team with University of Chicago economists Adriana Robertson and Greg Kaplan, bringing together the practitioners of economic storytelling with the academic researchers whose work often underpins it. The evening covers stories from across the podcast’s run and opens up questions about what economic journalism can and can’t do.
A book and tote are included with the ticket price. The Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture is a fitting venue, with a long history of serious public programming in Chicago and an audience that expects to engage with complex material.