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12.31.2004
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During this week in which words are failing on an international level, from Washington to Paris to Baghdad, we ask: Does talking about it really help? Stories where it does, and stories where it doesn't. |
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12.24.2004
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Stories about the intersection of Christmas and retail, including David Sedaris's story "Santaland Diaries", which was first broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition several years ago in a much shorter version. The diaries are about David's two Christmas seasons working as an elf in Macy's department store on New York's Herald Square. When it was first broadcast, it generated more requests for tapes than any story in Morning Edition's history except the death of Red Barber. Also, David Rakoff on playing Freud in the windows of Barney's department store. And other stories. |
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12.17.2004
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Two stories about love, and what people mean when they use the word love. Or, looked at differently, two modern-day reinterpretations of the Frog Prince story. One concerns a pretty man falling in love with an unlikely woman. Another story involves an unlikely woman falling in love with a pretty bird. |
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12.10.2004
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Stories about people who love their cars, for better or for worse. |
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11.26.2004
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Birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones of all sorts...and how they mean something whether we want them to or not. A live show taped for our fifth anniversary, back in 2000, when we went on the road to Boston, New York, Chicago, and L.A. A co-production with public radio stations WBUR, WNYC, WBEZ, and KCRW. |
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11.19.2004
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Stories about amateur spies — regular people who spy on other regular people, and the consequences of their spying. |
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11.12.2004
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Every crime scene hides a story. In this week's show, we hear about crime scenes and the stories they tell. |
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11.05.2004
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It's rare that a successful apology happens. One where you apologize to someone, not for selfish reasons, but because you're really sorry and you want them to know that, and when the person you're apologizing to really hears what you're saying. Three stories of people groping toward that moment. |
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10.29.2004
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A journey through the minds of undecided voters. For months — through the Swift Boat ads, the convention speeches, the debates — we tracked a few of these voters to find out why they just can't make up their minds. Plus, a story of someone courting undecided voters, and another about people trying to sabotage undecided voters (and everyone else). |
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10.22.2004
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Stories of people whose lives are transformed by music. |
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10.15.2004
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Ten years ago, when he was still a reporter for NPR's All Things Considered, host Ira Glass did a year-long series on a Chicago public school where things were getting better. Test scores were rising. Students were motivated. Last year, changes at the school dismantled some of the programs that had made for the school's success, and one of the best teachers in the school is thinking about quitting. We devote the whole hour to this story, about the rise and fall of school reform. |
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10.08.2004
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10.01.2004
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Stories of people climbing to be number one. How do they do it? What is the fundamental difference between us and them? Paul Feig is the recent author of the children's book, Ignatius
MacFarland: Frequenaut!. |
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09.24.2004
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Stories about people deciding whether to give it their all. There's one story about a person who hasn't, one story about someone who has — in a situation where success seems very unlikely — and one story about people who just can't help themselves. |
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09.17.2004
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Stories of very unusual pen pals. |
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09.10.2004
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Stories of the Republican Party, America's new majority party. Yes, they're still just barely the majority in the Senate ... and in the last Presidential race ... and in state legislatures around the country, where they hold just one percent more seats than Democrats nationwide. But Republican numbers are increasing. It's the Republicans who are on the rise. On today's program, we leave behind the official Republican talking points and ask them to speak instead about what they actually believe, and what they want for their party and for the country. The answers turn out to be way more complicated than you might think: It's not just Christians on one side of the party fighting with moderates on the other. |
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09.03.2004
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Stories about hitting the open road. Dishwasher Pete takes the bus with strangers, and Margy Rochlin explains her days on the road with George Burns. Plus, a roadtrip to save a marriage. |
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08.27.2004
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What is it about them, our mean friends? They treat us badly, they don't
call us back, they cancel plans at the last minute; and yet we come back
for more. We offer an inquiry into the phenomenon—and perhaps some
helpful hints on breaking the cycle. |
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08.20.2004
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08.13.2004
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Stories of what can and cannot be translated. A short, non-athletic, bespectacled East Asian studies major who couldn't make his high school basketball team finds himself in the NBA as the personal translator for the first-ever Chinese pro basketball superstar, Yao Ming. Plus, a Palestinian man teaches Hebrew classes in the Gaza strip to Palestinians eager to learn news from the other side of the checkpoint. |
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08.06.2004
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How, one might wonder, could a simple hunk of cheese drive a wedge between an aging aunt and her devoted niece? Sure, every family has its share of grudges, secrets and bad behavior. What's harder to understand is how those things end up changing family relationships in ways no one could have predicted. Three stories about family legends that have either been kicking around for years or been completely suppressed. |
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07.30.2004
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Starting at 5 am and going until 5 am the next morning, we document a day in a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple. We hear from the waitress who has worked the graveyard shift for over two decades, the regular customers who come every day, the couples working out their problems, assorted drunks, and—of course—cops. |
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07.23.2004
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For six months, Jack Hitt followed a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearsed and staged a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet. Shakespeare may seem like an odd match for a group of hardened criminals, but Jack found that they understand the Bard on a level that most of us might not. It's a play about murder and its consequences, performed by murderers living out the consequences. |
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07.16.2004
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Letting someone else take care of you can change everything. Three stories of couples in which one partner is trying to take care of the other, sometimes with more resistance, sometimes with less. |
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07.09.2004
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Stories of people starting over, sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to. |
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07.02.2004
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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. |
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06.25.2004
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Three stories about people who decide to try out a new life — the kind of life their parents never wanted for them. |
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06.18.2004
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Stories of people who are lost, histories that are lost, and things that are lost. This show was recorded onstage in front of audiences on a five-city tour in May 2003. The cities: Boston, Washington DC, Portland Oregon, Denver and Chicago. Thanks to the public radio stations who presented the show in those cities: WBUR in Boston, WAMU in DC, Oregon Public Broadcasting/OPB in Portland, Colorado Public Radio in Denver, and Chicago Public Radio in our hometown. |
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06.11.2004
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Perhaps there was a time when the rules of polite society were clear. No longer. This week, we bring you stories of people forced to try to figure out how to maintain their dignity — and decency — in some very unsettling situations. |
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06.04.2004
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Today's show is devoted to just one story. Contributing editor Nancy Updike went to Iraq to try to figure out what it's like to be a private citizen working in the middle of a war zone. Private contractors are a part of this war in unprecedented numbers, but we don't know that much about the people doing these jobs — why they chose to come to Iraq, and what they're seeing that we can't. |
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05.28.2004
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While the seniors danced at Prom Night 2001 in Hoisington, Kansas—a town of about 3,000—a tornado hit the town, destroying about a third of it. When they emerged from the dance, they discovered what had happened, and in the weeks that followed, they tried to explain to themselves why the tornado hit where it did. Plus other stories that happen on Prom Night. |
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05.21.2004
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Stories of people trying to drag science where it doesn't belong. |
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05.14.2004
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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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05.07.2004
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We love it when we get it, but is it ever really fair? A defense of special treatment, by people who receive it and people who give it. |
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04.30.2004
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Stories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire. |
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04.23.2004
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Our entire show this week is one long story, sort of a real-life Hardy Boys mystery. More than most of our shows, this one lends itself to a Hollywood-style tagline. Perhaps: "You Might Break In ... But You'll Never Forget." Or "Dead Letters Tell No Tales."
See more images from this week's episode here. |
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04.16.2004
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Stories of people stuck in unfixable situations who try desperate measures. Sometimes these are inventive, sometimes they're ingenious, sometimes they even work. |
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04.09.2004
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(Audio is from the updated 2004 broadcast) |
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04.02.2004
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People looking for miracle cures, some from above, others from abroad. A son tries to help his mom in a faraway place defy the laws of medical science. A daughter tries to help her dad by going to a faraway place to defy the laws of the United States of America. |
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03.26.2004
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Stories trying to understand what actually happens in marriages during this time when the definition of marriage is up in the air. Music throughout the hour by a real wedding band, a good one: The Doug Lawrence Orchestra. |
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03.19.2004
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We try to define the peculiar relationship between humans and animals. One story about a love triangle among two people and a cat. David Sedaris with a retrospective on his family's pets through the ages. And Brady Udall with a tale of love, redemption, and armadillos. They have more in common than you might think. |
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03.12.2004
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There's what happened, and there's the story that gets told about what happened. Sometimes the two things don't match up very well. This week, two case examples — ripped, as they say, from today's headlines — of the story that's told becoming the truth, even though the facts don't back it up. |
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03.05.2004
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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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02.27.2004
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Americans who love their guns...and the Americans who love them. |
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02.20.2004
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Fans of movie musicals might know about something called the "I Wish" number. In many movies and Broadway shows, it's the main character's first song, in which they express the hope that will set the story in motion. Host Ira Glass explains it, and plays a few examples. (7 minutes) |
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02.13.2004
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This week we rerun a show from 2000 about a price fixing conspiracy and the executive who cooperated with the FBI in recording what are probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act. The executive then did some things that turned him from the best informant in FBI history into one of the most troubling. A screenwriter named Scott Burns heard this episode of our show on the radio, and—with Matt Damon and Steven Soderbergh—turned it into a film that opens this weekend, "The Informant!" Hear the amazing true story right here. |
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02.06.2004
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Stories of babysitters, and what goes on while mom and dad are away that mom and dad never find out about. |
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01.30.2004
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Stories of people leaving the situation they're used to and striking off for something less familiar. Including the secret history of Jerry Springer: before he was the king of trash TV, he was an inspiring and talented politician. Plus, a group of nuns leaves the Catholic Church...only to find themselves essentially remaining nuns. |
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01.23.2004
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All the stories in this week's show center on personal recordings that one person made for just one other person. |
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01.16.2004
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People return to the scene of the crime where they should have spoken clearly, plainly, forcefully ... to review what the hell went wrong, and in a few cases, to fix it. Jonathan Goldstein tries to stop time. Charles Monroe tries to figure out how to teach a lesson to the President of the United States. |
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01.09.2004
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Stories of people living without. Nubar Alexanian explains what fish can do for him that his own ears cannot. Sarah Vowell explains the cheerful journalism of deprivation. And other stories. |
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01.02.2004
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Birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones of all sorts...and how they mean something whether we want them to or not. A live show taped for our fifth anniversary, back in 2000, when we went on the road to Boston, New York, Chicago, and L.A. A co-production with public radio stations WBUR, WNYC, WBEZ, and KCRW. |
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