The holidays are stressful so we booked a seasonal pick-me-up: an hour of comedy.

Stories about people who feel compelled to keep going, especially when everyone else has given up.

Stories of neighbors watching out for each other, for better and worse.

The rise and fall of a school maintenance man in Schenectady, New York who terrorized his staff and got away with it for decades.

Reporters from Planet Money bought a toxic asset that turned out to be an encyclopedia of the financial crisis.

Two best friends get tired of yelling at their TVs and decide to form a Tea Party chapter to effect political change.

We spend a month in Iraq talking to Iraqis and Americans about the war that tore the country apart.

Stories of crybabies in sports, in politics, on Wall Street, on the streets of California.

A New York police officer secretly records his supervisors ordering officers to do all sorts of things that police aren't supposed to do.

Nine of us go to small towns in Georgia to ask around until we find stories.

Michael Larson made the most money ever on the game show Press Your Luck. And it was no accident.

Stories of first encounters with unknown and distant beings—girls, foreigners, and perhaps even aliens.

Richard Ravitch has helped fix three governmental crises, so what makes it so much harder for him to solve the state's current financial crisis?

Stories of people held captive — by criminals, by paperwork, and in one man's case, his own body — and the ways they try to cope.

Blanketing a country in aid and money has never really worked so well. Is there a chance things could be different in Haiti?

Stories of bridges from three different countries, including one in China that's famous for its massive size and its high suicide rate.

Can a rat crawl through your plumbing and end up in your toilet?

The inside story of one company that made hundreds of millions of dollars for itself while worsening the financial crisis for the rest of us.

Living behind enemy lines, among the enemy, it's sometimes hard to remember why you're fighting in the first place.

A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry.

Stories about one person single-handedly taking charge of a situation gone wrong.

A chimp is raised twice—once as a human child, and again as a chimp.

We try to turn their random ideas into actual stories.

A man finds himself in a train station in India, with no idea how he got there or who he is. That, and other stories of filling in the blank.

Stories of people betting on something with very bad odds.

We asked our contributors to predict real events that will happen to them and the people they know in 2010.