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.
Check out This American Life on the web at www.thisamericanlife.org.
UPCOMING SHOWS
There's the thing you plan to do, and then there's the thing you end up doing. Most of us start off our lives with some Plan A which we abandon...switching to a Plan B, …
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RECENT SHOWS
After years of being stuck, the national conversation on climate change finally started to shift — just a little — last year. This week, stories about this new …
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Stories of kids being mean to each other...
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Stories of people who feel compelled to get out and go somewhere. Including one man who decides to take a trip from Philadelphia to San Francisco — by foot.
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What's frustrating about music lessons, what's miraculous about them,
and what they actually teach us. Recorded in front of a
live audience...
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Israeli soldiers take snapshots of Palestinian boys, one house at a time, in the middle of the night. This and other stories where the picture gives you the upper hand.
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Dr. Benjamin Gilmer gets a job at a rural clinic. He finds out he's replaced someone — also named Dr. Gilmer — who went to prison after killing his own father....
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We all play roles in life. Sometimes we're convincing. What happens when people take on unexpected roles? What happens when their audience believes them or doesn't?
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The phrase "finding your tribe" is a total cliche — but one that does apply to certain situations.
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The number of Americans receiving federal disability payments has nearly doubled over the last 15 years. Chana Joffe-Walt gives us a surprising view of the US economy.
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Stories of people starting over, sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to.
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Stories of people stuck in their own personal reruns—moments or episodes that they revisit over and over again.
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We asked listeners to send us their craziest, most memorable coincidence stories, and we got so many fun and delightful ones we decided to make a whole show about them.
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We pick up where we left off last week in our second hour of stories from Harper High School in Chicago.
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We spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. 29.
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Love makes us do crazy things. But usually not this crazy. We have stories of people going to extremes as they fall in love, chase love down, and try to make sense of it. …
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More Past Shows
Program Details
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
