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FYI
Check out This American Life on the Web at www.thisamericanlife.org.Our Sunday broadcast is a rebroadcast of the program that aired 8 days earlier.
Our Sunday broadcast is a rebroadcast of the program that aired 8 days earlier.
This American Life
Join veteran NPR producer Ira Glass as he pushes the envelope of radio performance with a show that's part journalism, part arts, and entirely compelling and unique. Each week, This American Life chooses a theme. Glass does a story or two, and he invites a variety of writers and performers to take a whack at the theme, with stories, monologues, short radio plays, miniature documentaries, "found recordings" and original works for radio.
RECENT SHOWS
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.
The Mall Show
This American Life spends several days in a mall in suburban Tennessee, to see what people are buying in this grim financial mood, and how stores are coping. Also, a rift in the national association of real-bearded Santas (yes, there is such an association).
Ruining It for the Rest of Us
When they decided not to vaccinate their son against measles, two San Diego parents thought they were making the best decision for their child. But when the 7-year old came home from an overseas trip suffering from the disease (see measles virus above), his family's personal decision became a whole community's problem.
20 Acts in 60 Minutes
Instead of the regular "each week we choose a theme, and bring you three or four stories on that theme" business, this week we throw all that away and bring you twenty stories -- yes, twenty -- in sixty minutes. Inspiration for this week's show came from the Neo-Futurists, whose long-running Chicago show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind promises 30 Plays in 60 Minutes every single weekend.
Heretics
The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who cast aside the idea of Hell, and with it everything he'd worked for over his entire life...
Poultry Slam 2008
A man in Pakistan wants to break his friend out of prison. He buys him an amulet that supposedly has the power to protect anyone from harm. But just to be on the safe side, he decides to test the amulet by trying it out first...
Music Lessons
What's frustrating about music lessons, what's miraculous about them, and what they actually teach us. This show was recorded in front of a live audience at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, with help from KQED-FM, during the 1998 Public Radio Conference.
Who Do You Think You Are?
This week we bring you stories of privilege, and the lengths some will go to to maintain it. A teenager with a prominent father helps cover up a crime and struggles to deal with the aftermath. And one woman's fight to stop a celebrity from breaking her city's parking laws.
And the Call Was Coming from the Basement
For Halloween, scary stories that are all true. Kidnappings, zombie raccoons, haunted houses—real haunted houses!—and things that go "EEEEK!!!" in the night. Plus, a new story by David Sedaris, in which he walks among the dead.
Ground Game
This American Life goes to Pennsylvania, a battleground within a battleground, to figure out why, and how, McCain and Obama both think they can win there. And we get to know the ordinary people who've become the candidates' most forceful foot soldiers.
A Better Mousetrap
Stories of people tackling old problems with creative solutions --- solutions that sometimes cause problems of their own. For instance, a mother doesn't want her son's disability to hold him back, so she decides not to tell him that he has one. Which seems to work fine.
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. They'll explain what happened this week, including what regulators could've done to prevent this financial crisis from happening in the first place...
Going Big
Stories about people who take grand, sweeping approaches to solving problems of all sorts.
Enforcers
Three guys who go by the names Professor So and So, Jojobean and YeaWhatever spend part of each day running elaborate cons on Internet scammers. They consider themselves enforcers of justice, even after they send a man 1400 miles from home, to the least safe place they can bait him: the border of Darfur...
Something for Nothing
Stories of people trying to get rich quick, or otherwise make something for nothing. As everyone knows, there's no such thing as something for nothing. You always pay a price.
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Host
Ira Glass
This American Life host and producer Ira Glass started working in public radio in 1978 when he was 19 and over the course of the next 17 years, he worked on nearly every NPR news show, and did nearly every production job they had. This American Life went on the air in November of 1995.
Schedule
Live
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