Sarah's the author of several books and has a great, classic radio voice that sounds like no one else. Some of her most popular stories are in these episodes: 81, 104, 107, 118, 151.
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,...
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
An assault on the idea of wackiness. And then, an appreciation of wackiness, and an analysis of wackiness in American culture. Thirteen ways to describe wackiness.
What's frustrating about music lessons, what's miraculous about them, and what they actually teach us. This show was recorded in front of a live audience at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, with help from KQED-FM,...
For the July 4th holiday weekend, writer Sarah Vowell and her twin sister re-trace the "Trail of Tears" — the route their Cherokee ancestors took when expelled from their own land by President Andrew Jackson.
Stories of people's last words before death. Their one last shot at figuring things out, summing things up. One last moment of asserting the fact of our existence, at the moment of our annihilation.
Stories about seeing and being seen. Taped before a live audience in Town Hall in New York City in December 1998, this was a co-production with WNYC New York, featuring live music by the pop band They Might Be Giants and the This American...
There's a tourist monument called Four Corners, where Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico meet. In this episode, we try to tell the story of life in America through portraits of life on four different corners, in four different states...
A program taped before live audiences in Seattle (thanks to public radio station KUOW) and at HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. A taxonomy of different kinds of advice—and stories that illustrate why advice is so rarely taken.
A special Christmas edition of our show, with stories about Santa Claus—the many many different versions of Santa Claus. It was in America, in New York, that people started believing in the modern idea of Santa—a guy who comes down the...
Today's program is made all of stories from the New Hampshire primary. Voters want to find a candidate who inspires them. Candidates want to inspire. So where's the system failing? Why do most of us feel like the system doesn't produce...
Stories of people who are engaged in something that's both difficult and probably futile: Trying to control how they'll be seen by generations to come.
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....
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...
What is this thing? This thing called love, that is. For answers, we explore the romance novel industry, a $1.5 billion empire run almost entirely by and for women. Plus, relearning the rules of romance from the other side of the gender...
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.
A full-throttle, show-stopping, no-holds-barred Christmas Spectacular! Shedding the crusty old Christmas stories of yore, we bring you new holiday classics. With special musical guest Marah!
Stories recorded during our 2007 live tour. Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Dan Savage, and other favorite contributors went on the road with us to New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles; and performed brand-new...
It's the late 1960s, and in the new technology of cryonics, a California TV repairman named Bob sees an opportunity to help people cheat death. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it...