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12.26.1997
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Stories of the difficult relationships between parents and their grown children, including two long stories from Sandra Tsing Loh about her father. |
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12.19.1997
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Stories from David Sedaris' book of Christmas stories, Holidays on Ice, read onstage by David, Julia Sweeney and actor Matt Malloy. |
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12.12.1997
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Three stories of how to get money from strangers. In every story, the money is made by people who make the strangers feel good about themselves, and about their nation. |
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12.05.1997
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Humans have turned chicken and turkey into what we want them to be. Which means that chickens and turkeys are a mirror of ourselves. |
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11.28.1997
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Host Ira Glass and playwright David Hauptschein took out advertisements in Chicago inviting people to come to a small theater with letters they've received, sent or found. People came for two nights and read their letters onstage. Some were funny. Some were poignant. They told a wide range of stories: a heartfelt letter from prison, a hilariously pretentious job letter sent to the New Yorker magazine, a wringingly sincere teenage "should we be more than friends" letter. Four hours of letters were recorded in all. These were edited down to an hour of letters, with a few unusual songs about letters thrown in. |
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11.21.1997
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A parable of politics and race in America. The story of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington (pictured), told two decades after his death. Washington died 20 years ago this month—on November 25, 1987. |
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11.14.1997
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Stories of outsiders who want to be insiders, and vice versa. |
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11.07.1997
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Though being gay no longer has much of a stigma in some parts of the country, being a sissy still does—even among gay men. In this show we have a number of surprising and unusual stories of sissies, their families, and why people still get so upset about them. |
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10.31.1997
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Stories of people who are haunted, not by ghosts or phantoms, but by other people. |
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10.24.1997
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Americans who love their guns...and the Americans who love them. |
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10.17.1997
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Stories of people engaged in a battle with nature, a battle they don't stand much chance of winning. Most of the show is Scott Carrier's story of trying for twelve years to chase down and catch an antelope by foot. |
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10.10.1997
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People stuck in the wrong decade, or simply carrying a lot of the props from another decade. |
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10.03.1997
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How bad is bad enough to count? To go to hell? |
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09.26.1997
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Can the secular world and the religious world understand each other? We ask that question while visiting Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Pastor Ted Haggard at the New Life Church has put in place a project to pray in front of the home of every person in the city, systematically, block by block and house by house. He's also helped organize a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year "prayer shield" over the city; all-night prayer vigils; and more. |
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09.19.1997
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The mob as portrayed in movies, and as it is in real life. And its hold over us. |
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09.12.1997
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Stories of the kindness of strangers, and where it leads. Also, the unkindness of strangers and where that can lead. All of today's stories take place in the city most people think of as the least kind city in America: New York. |
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09.05.1997
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Four stories about people struggling at the fringes of our nation's media/music/infotainment industry. |
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08.29.1997
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What happens when people with one common interest gather in monstrous, flourescent-lit halls for the weekend? Sometimes they drive each other crazy, sometimes they fall in love. |
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08.22.1997
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The darker side of the art world: petty jealousies, competitiveness, failure. And also what's great about art. David Sedaris with the story of his short-lived career as a performance artist. A master of balloon animals declares that artistic jealousies have ruined his life. The King of "Song Poems" and how his jazz snob son learned to love his music. Plus, tales from a locksmith. |
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08.15.1997
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Simulated worlds, Civil war reenactments, wax museums, simulated coal mines, fake ethnic restaurants, an ersatz Medieval castle and other re-created worlds that thrive all across America. |
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08.08.1997
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An idiosyncratic first-person travelogue about race relations and tourism from radio producer Rich Robinson and television producer Josh Seftel. Their radio story is about a trip they took to the new South Africa. Rich Robinson is black. Josh Seftel is white. The interracial pair travel through the still mostly-segregated society and have very different opinions about what they see, especially when it comes to some distant relatives of Josh's in South Africa. |
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08.01.1997
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Stories of people trying to do exactly what the doctors say they can't — or shouldn't. |
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07.25.1997
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When you read other people's mail, you can't help but try to fill in between the lines. You try to decipher the stories of the people who wrote the letters. We hear four stories of people who read other people's mail, and what happens to them once they get caught up in these other lives. |
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07.18.1997
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What could be more American than wanting to build your dreamhouse? Meema Spadola's dad moved the family to Maine to chase his dream. Four years later, the house wasn't built, and the family fell apart. Plus, David Beers about growing up in another kind of dreamhouse—in Northern California during the '60s aerospace boom. |
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07.11.1997
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Radio producer Scott Carrier quit his job at a low moment in his life. His wife left him and took the kids. And he got a job interviewing schizophrenics for some medical researchers. After doing it a while, he began to wonder if he was a schizophrenic himself. And more stories. |
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07.04.1997
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A show for July 4th weekend: We begin with perhaps the most moving, poetic inaugural speech in American history, and look at its legacy today. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln wondered aloud why God saw fit to send the slaughter of the Civil War to the United States. His conclusion: that slavery was a kind of original sin for the United States, for both North and South, and all Americans had to do penance for it. |
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06.27.1997
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Could it be more obvious? Stories in which someone's dream is someone else's nightmare. All of us get into these situations with strangers, with the people we love most, with our own parents, with our children. |
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06.20.1997
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Stories of people whose lives are transformed by music. |
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06.13.1997
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Ira's own father Barry Glass co-hosts this special father's day edition of the show. |
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06.06.1997
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Are people having experiences on the Internet they wouldn't have anywhere else? Several weeks ago, This American Life invited listeners to help answer that question. Several hundred listeners sent in samples of what they're finding on the Internet, including posting from Usenet groups, favorite web pages, and their own email. This American Life interviewed some of these people. Listeners who live in the Chicago area were invited to come to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, to read on stage (and on the air) their stories from the Internet. Chicago playwright David Hauptschein co-hosts. Hauptschein has hosted events like this (where people come onstage to read their letters and diaries) around Chicago for years. |
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05.30.1997
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Notes and stories about the Canadians among us. Are they in fact any different from red-blooded Americans? They claim they're not. Skeptical Americans put their position to the test. |
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05.23.1997
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Stories for the start of summer. We want summer to be this wonderful break, but so often it fails to deliver. We hear Ron Carlson's short story about a summer job delivering tanks of oxygen to the infirm, in which a young man changes from a decent person into a mildly malevolent one. Scott Carrier takes a river vacation. And other stories. |
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05.16.1997
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Stories about kids being mean to each other. |
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05.09.1997
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People whose lives are organized around one thing. This American Life gets a return visit from Evan Harris, the woman who used to believe that quitting was the one thing at the heart of all human existence. Beau O'Reilly tells the story of a man who tried to run for President as a utopian nudist. A gang kid who turns to Jesus with the same ferocity and dedication with which he served his old street gang. And more. |
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05.02.1997
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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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04.25.1997
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Stories of when things go wrong. Really wrong. When you leave the normal realm of human error, fumble, mishap and mistake and enter the territory of really huge breakdowns. Fiascos. Things go so awry that normal social order collapses. This week's show is a philosophical inquiry in the nature of fiascos — perhaps the first ever. |
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04.18.1997
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Usually we talk about death as a tragedy, a mystery, a hard-to-comprehend fact of life. But in addition to all that, for all sorts of people it's also ... a job. Stories of undertakers, homicide detectives, slaughterhouse workers, enunculators, autopsy pathologists, exterminators and others. Does their contact with death teach them something we should learn? |
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04.11.1997
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Stories about people who are not afraid of fire, though perhaps they should be. |
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04.04.1997
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Stories of small town life: the claustrophia and freedom people feel in small towns, the yearning people feel in small towns. And ... three teenagers in one of the harshest urban environments explain how the public housing projects are like a small town. |
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03.28.1997
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Stories made from old tapes found in various places, including a "letter on tape" found in a Salvation Army thrift store. Host Ira Glass with tapes of his father on the radio, circa 1956. And radio producer Nora Moreno with tapes of her father, a Spanish broadcasting pioneer in America. Her mother fell in love with him over the radio, with tragic results. |
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03.21.1997
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April first is the one day of the year when we're allowed to enjoy deceiving others. But April Fools' Day is for amateur deceivers. The real pros are the people who can't control their lying, who lie without even knowing what the truth is. Everyone's known someone like this, but it's a topic that's only rarely studied or discussed publicly. Journalist and TAL contributing editor Margy Rochlin co-hosts. |
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03.14.1997
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Stories about the delivery business and the people in it. UPS men, bike messengers, FedEx dispatchers. Includes a new radio play by David Sedaris, in which we give him one sound effects record and this assignment: His radio play can only use sound effects from this record, and it must use all the sound effects on the disc. Also, a story by Junot Diaz about delivering pool tables. And host Ira Glass goes to the Federal Express hub at Memphis to watch 1.2 million pieces of overnight mail get sorted in one night, and to talk to the adrenaline junkies in the FedEx Command Center |
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03.07.1997
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Stories of people changing their name, some to create a new identity, some to con people. Name changes are particularly American stories: they're the dream of starting over with a clean slate. They're Ellis Island and 12-step programs, the move westward and self help, Marilyn Monroe and Malcolm X and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, all rolled up in one. |
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02.28.1997
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A few months ago, radio producer Sandy Tolan was supposed to do a documentary about strippers with an aspiring writer — and stripper — named Susan. A few days before they were to begin working together, she disappeared, presumed dead. Sandy interviewed her friends and family, to make an unusual and powerful documentary about who she was, and about the world she inhabited. Following that is a story by therapist Lauren Slater about a case she had of a tough man, obsessed with porn, and how he changed. |
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02.21.1997
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Stories, tributes, and attempts to understand the Chairman of the Board. |
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02.14.1997
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Susan Bergman's father was a family man, head of the church choir, and, secretly, having sex with men. He died before his children had a chance to really talk to him about what they should make of his hidden life. When Bergman wrote a book about her family's experience, other gay men tried to explain her father's actions to her. That, and other stories of parents deceiving their children: |
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02.07.1997
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For Valentine's Day, stories about our parents falling in love. And troubles with their love. From Hilton Als, Scott Carrier, Julie Showalter, a magazine column called Men My Mother Dated and others. The idea for this show was inspired by Delmore Schwartz's classic 1937 work of American fiction about his parents courtship: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and Other Stories. |
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01.31.1997
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Stories about the border between mental health and mental illness. |
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01.24.1997
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Stories of people who handle dead animals. Don't worry — it's not as gross as it sounds. In fact, not disgusting at all. A story by George Saunders about an animal control man who falls in unrequited love. A woman who studies illuminated manuscripts, whose pages look like paper but are in fact animals. And other stories. |
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01.17.1997
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Kevin Kelly was in Jerusalem. For reasons too complicated to go into here, he ended up sleeping on the spot where Jesus was supposedly crucified. After Kevin awoke, the thought came into his head: Live as if you'll die in six months. So he did. He got rid of all his possessions. He visited his parents and brothers and sisters for the last time. That, and other stories of starting life over, including a visit to a courtroom in Los Angeles where people go to change their names. And other stories. |
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01.10.1997
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Stories about the animalness of animals, the irreducible ways in which they are not human. |
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01.03.1997
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Kitty Felde shows a side of the Yugoslav War Crimes Trials that hasn't been discussed anywhere: a portrait of Americans at the International Tribunal. They can't pronounce the names, can't read the maps, don't know the history, and are on an idealistic quest for justice that so far has not flowered. Also: Scott Carrier visits a courtroom where teenagers are tried and convicted by their teenaged peers in Arizona. And other stories. |
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