90: Telephone
Jan 16, 1998
Stories of who we are on the phone, of things we learn on the phone, and of things that happen on the phone that don't happen anywhere else.
- Host Ira Glass explains why some old answering machine messages from a decade ago have such power for him: there's a special power to recordings of phone conversations. The phone is intimate — more intimate than a photograph. Even when the person on the phone is a public figure like Lyndon Johnson. He plays some tapes from the Simon & Schuster audiobook of Johnson phone tapes, Taking Charge, The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964, by Michael Beschloss, to demonstrate. (7 minutes)
