Alex Kotlowitz

Contributors List
Alex is the author of There Are No Children Here and other books. He specializes in deeply reported stories that are also emotional stories, character studies.

159: Mother's Day

Stories of moms: How they treat us, how we treat them.

170: Immigration

We live in a big enough country that there are lots of laws too obscure for most of us to have heard of...but which actually affect tens of thousands of lives in huge ways. This show deals with one of them: A 1996 immigration law that the...

179: Cicero

The story in a way of a town that time forgot, or more accurately, a town that tried to forget the times. A special broadcast co-hosted by award-winning journalist Alex Kotlowitz, author of the books There Are No Children Here and The...

246: My Pen Pal

Stories of very unusual pen pals, people whose relationship could not exist without the help of the postal service.

297: This Is Not My Beautiful House

It's the largest mass resettlement that America has seen since the Civil War, as over 400,000 people—victims of Hurricane Katrina—try to find a new place to live. From the Houston Astrodome to an abandoned New Orleans street, stories of...

298: Getting and Spending

How far will we go to get money? And once we've got it, what should we spend it on? The first half of this show is on making money, and the second half on spending it.

318: With Great Power

A family wishes for years that they could do something to stop their neighbor's shocking behavior. Suddenly they get the power to decisively change things forever...and they have to decide whether they will. This, and other stories of...

358: Social Engineering

Governments are always looking for ways to change behavior—stopping people from driving drunk, or encouraging them to recycle. This week, we have stories of social engineering on a smaller scale.

376: Wrong Side of History

Bernie Epton went down in history as the Other Guy: the white opponent who almost defeated the first black mayor of Chicago. But what's the real story of someone who ended up on the wrong side of history? That and other stories of people...