If you're heading out for a long driving trip, we have some podcast suggestions, along with a hello from our surveyors in Burkina Faso, who also rode out recently during rainy season.

• Chris Blattman, David McKenzie and others on Planet Money about randomizing a nationwide business plan competition in Nigeria.
• Another really good episode about why U.S. housing subsidies are given out at random instead of by need, and only to a tiny fraction of the people who need them. Many social safety net programs were originally designed to support the industries providing them (builders for housing, farmers for food assistance), rather than for supporting people.
• An economist helped food banks solve big problems with sharing food, on Planet Money and Econ Talk (more detail).
• FiveThirtyEight on why they failed on predicting Trump’s winning and what it means for data journalism (a long article from Nate Silver goes into it).
• Hidden Brain had Uber behavioral economist Kieth Chen on what he learned from working with Uber about people's riding preferences (for example people are more likely to take ride at surge price of 2.1x the regular fare than just at 2.0x).
• If anybody in your car needs an intro to the "replication crisis", Hidden Brain did a fairly reasoned one on that also.
• Ezra Kleins’ interviews with Jim Kim of the World Bank, and with Economist Alice Rivlin, first director of the Congressional Budget office (iTunes, online).
• On my list but haven’t gotten to yet: Tyler Cowen and Jon Haidt.

If for some reason you’re tired of econ/research (???) some others:

• Stuff You Missed in History Class episodes are friendly and move fast
• Dave Zirin’s interview with Michael Sam (the first openly gay player in the NFL)
• Propublica interviewed the reporters who uncovered how much commercial fishing is done with slave labor and ultimately led to changes in U.S. law.
• Radiolab episode on Surya Bonaly, a “controversial” figure skater.

Thanks to Rohit Niampally and David Batcheck for those last ones.  

And some road trip advice from our Burkina crew: