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April 25, 2014

Death and Taxes

It is a peculiar feeling to know with certainty that something big is about to happen to you. This week we watch people go right up to the edge of inevitable change. We hear from preteens about the terrifying knowledge that puberty is about to happen...any minute now. And true to the death and taxes saying, we found it unavoidable to include a story about each one of those things.

Daniel Arnold

Note: In the Internet version of Act One, we leave some curse words un-bleeped. You can find a bleeped version here.

Prologue

When you are a preteen you walk around every day with the knowledge that your body is about to change. You don’t know exactly when or how. All you know is that it will happen and you will come out the other side a different person. We hear from kids who are reluctantly facing puberty … any minute now. (4 1/2 minutes)
Act One

Death

By

Nancy Updike
This American Life producer Nancy Updike takes some personal questions about death and dying to a place where they're happening all the time. (36 minutes)
Act Two

Taxes

Al Drucker used to work for the IRS doing tax enforcement. One thing he found really helpful in the job was when someone from the public would give a tip on who he should look into. So when Al retired from the IRS five years ago, he created taxsqueal.com, a website where you can anonymously rat out your neighbors, exes and friends to the IRS. (13 1/2 minutes)

Song:

“Taxman” by Junior Parker

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Act One

Over the course of his life, Keith Aldrich was a child of the Depression in Oklahoma; a preacher-in-training in booming California; an aspiring Hollywood actor; in the 1950s, a self-styled Beat writer, and then a man in a gray flannel suit; in the 1960s, a member of the New York literati, and then a hippie; in the 1970s, a denizen of the suburbs with a partying, Ice Storm kind of life. Then in the 80's, when the moral majority helped put Ronald Reagan in office, he became a born-again Christian.

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