Act One
We’ve visited Albertville, Alabama many times now, to figure out exactly what happened when the population shifted from 98% white in 1990, to a fourth Latino twenty years later.
Act One: Dr. Strangelove.
A guy in Key West makes a series of grand gestures, each one more outrageous than the last. He goes so far that we need to say that this story, from Miki Meek, is not for kids.
Act One: South Florida
Two police officers who voted for Obama in 2008 explain to Producer Miki Meek why they went for Trump this time around.
Act One: Really Long Distance
Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a phone booth in Japan that attracts thousands of people who lost loved ones in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake. A Japanese TV crew from NHK Sendai filmed people inside the phone booth, whose phone is not connected to anything at all.
Act Two: Thank You for Smoking
People don’t have a lot of money in the refugee camps, and our producer Miki Meek went to see what that’s like at a camp that’s been built on the grounds of an abandoned psychiatric hospital. About 1,300 people are living there.
Act One: Field of Interrupted Dreams
One good place to see how this ad hoc response is working is at an abandoned baseball stadium in Athens. About a thousand Afghans are now living here.
Act One: Overboard
Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a father and the incredible, decades-long fantasy he created for his 12 children.
Act Three: The Haunted Becomes the Haunter
When someone stole Jessamyn Lovell’s ID, she became obsessed with the thief. Miki Meek tells what happened.
Act Three: Glacial Change
Zalena (pictured, right) lived in paradise. She grew up in American Samoa, hanging out on the beach, doing normal teenage things with her friends—until senior year, when her dad decided he was going to move the family to the exact opposite of everything she’d known—a tiny, isolated town in Alaska.
Act One: Inconvenience Store
Miki Meek reports on how bad things got for black residents of Miami Gardens, Florida – and why they got so bad – by telling the story of two men, a convenience store owner and one of his employees.
Act Two: This Is Just As Hard for Me as It Is for You
Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a man named Will Ream who is trying to figure out what is best for his children, and having some regrets about how things worked out. To tell this story we collaborated with songwriter Stephin Merritt.
Act Two: One Life To Live
Producer Miki Meek spent a week with a family in the midst of a difficult situation. A woman who got in a car accident and then was in a coma for 52 days, woke up having forgotten the last two years of her life — during which she'd divorced her husband.