Robert Smith
Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.
If that sounds a little dry, then you've never heard Planet Money. The team specializes in making economic reporting funny, engaging and understandable. Planet Money has been known to set economic indicators to music, use superheroes to explain central banks, and even buy a toxic asset just to figure it out.
Smith admits that he has no special background in finance or math, just a curiosity about how money works. That kind of curiosity has driven Smith for his 20 years in radio.
Before joining Planet Money, Smith was the New York correspondent for NPR. He was responsible for covering all the mayhem and beauty that makes it the greatest city on Earth. Smith reported on the rebuilding of Ground Zero, the stunning landing of US Air flight 1549 in the Hudson River and the dysfunctional world of New York politics. He specialized in features about the overlooked joys of urban living: puddles, billboards, ice cream trucks, street musicians, drunks and obsessives.
When New York was strangely quiet, Smith pitched in covering the big national stories. He traveled with presidential campaigns, tracked the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and reported from the BP oil spill.
Before his New York City gig, Smith worked for public radio stations in Seattle (KUOW), Salt Lake City (KUER) and Portland (KBOO). He's been an editor, a host, a news director and just about any other job you can think of in broadcasting. Smith also lectures on the dark arts of radio at universities and conferences. He trains fellow reporters how to sneak humor and action into even the dullest stories on tight deadlines.
Smith started in broadcasting playing music at KPCW in his hometown of Park City, Utah. Although the low-power radio station at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, likes to claim him as its own.
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The U.S. and Europe have different car safety standards. Some of them are small while others are more dramatic. All car makers agree that the different standards are a pain. So why the difference?
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In a rematch of the finals at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, the U.S. and Canadian men's ice hockey teams met in the semifinals at Sochi. And the result was the same: Canada won.
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Bobsled used to be an all-male sport until 2002. Even now, the women only race two-man, not four-man bobsled. Team USA features 2 summer Olympians as brakemen. Lauren Williams is a gold and silver medalist in the sprint. Lolo Jones did the hurdles in Bejing and London.
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The U.S. has the best bobsledder in the world, Steve Holcomb. He races in the two-man on Monday.
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Team Russia — led by Alexander Ovechkin — and its fans talk constantly of the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" and the team's loss four years ago in Vancouver. On Saturday, they'll meet a young and "hungry" Team USA. -
American snowboarder Shaun White had hoped to win his third consecutive gold in these games. Instead, he's going home empty-handed. Not a single member of team USA was on the podium for the snowboard halfpipe event.
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Ole Einar Bjoerndalen is a biathlete competing for a record 13th medal — which would make him the most decorated athlete ever at the Winter Games. No one has ever been so good for so long in his sport. "He's 40 years old, and he's motivated like an 18-year-old," says one expert. -
The sport's biggest star says the slopestyle course in Sochi is too risky for him; several top athletes have already been injured. He will still compete in halfpipe, and hopes to pick up his third gold medal in the event. -
The X Games have changed the lineup and atmosphere of the Winter Olympics with the introduction of snowboarding, half-pipe and now slopestyle. But when a youth-lifestyle, punk-rock sport makes it to the Olympics, some things inevitably change. -
The Olympic sport is like gymnastics in the air, but in the final few rounds, aerialists can't use the same trick twice. Come go time, they have to figure out which trick to do, based on what their competitors have just done.
