Alix Spiegel
Contributors List
Alix worked on the show from the very beginning, and went on to become a great reporter. Each of these led to a flood of email from listeners: 77, 204, 322.
43: Faustian Bargains
Inspired by a spate of new Chicago stage adaptations of the Faust story, This American Life brings you stories of people who made a deal with the devil.
52: Edge of Sanity
Stories about the border between mental health and mental illness.
58: Small Towns
Stories of small town life: the claustrophobia 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...
59: Fire
Stories about people who are not afraid of fire, though perhaps they should be.
77: Pray
Can the secular world and the religious world understand each other?
101: Niagara
During this hour, a special edition of our show: Stories about Niagara Falls, half of them from documentary producer Alix Spiegel, who went to the Falls and interviewed people living there; and half from playwright David Kodeski, who grew...
113: Windfall
What happens when you suddenly strike it rich. And the power money has over our lives, for good and bad.
120: Be Careful Who You Pretend to Be
Three stories of people pretending to be something they're not, and what happens to them.
142: Barbara
We hear the story of one African-American single mother. Barbara Clinkscales recorded her family's life over the course of seven months for This American Life. Her life defies—or makes irrelevant—most of our typical notions of inner-city,...
158: Mob Mentality
The pleasure of being in a rampaging, angry mob...and the terror of being in a rampaging, angry mob.
163: Can You Fight City Hall…If You Are City Hall?
Stories of a typically American kind of hero: The person who decides to fight city hall, who stands up alone for what's right, and damn the consequences.
183: The Missing Parents Bureau
Stories about the legacy of absent parents. We hear four cases from the files of the Missing Parents Bureau.
189: Hitler's Yacht
Nearly this entire show is devoted to the story of the boat known as "Hitler's Yacht." It's a modern-day fable about what happens when the free market, the media, the World War II buffs, the Neo-Nazis, and the Jews all collide over a huge...
204: 81 Words
The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.
215: Ask An Expert
Stories about people who turned to the experts and got horrible advice. One story is about people who went to therapists who made them sicker. Another is about how the hosts of Car Talkinadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) destroyed a...
317: Unconditional Love
Stories of unconditional love between parents and children, and how hard love can be sometimes in daily practice.
322: Shouting Across the Divide
A Muslim woman persuades her husband that their family would be happier if they left the West Bank and moved to America. They do, and things are good...until September 11. After that, the elementary school their daughter goes to begins...
391: More Is Less
An hour explaining the American health care system, specifically, why it is that costs keep rising. One story looks at the doctors, one at the patients and one at the insurance industry.
436: The Psychopath Test
Recently we heard about this test that could determine if someone was a psychopath. So, naturally, our staff decided to take it. This week we hear the results. Plus Jon Ronson asks the question: is this man a psychopath?
445: Ten Years In
In this show, we return to people who've been on This American Life in the last ten years, whose lives were drastically altered by 9/11, including Hyder Akbar, an Afghan-American teen who moved to Afghanistan after his father was tapped to...
