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288: Not What I Meant
May 6, 2005

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks to film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader about an anonymous love letter that turned out to be very different than it seemed.
558: Game Face
May 29, 2015

Act Three: Who Put the Face in Game Face?

Ira speaks with Mike Pesca, host of the sports podcast Hang Up and Listen and Slate's daily podcast The Gist about the whole concept of the game face in sports. What is it exactly? And who might be the best examples of athletes with incredible game faces? Then Ira speaks with writer David Dupuis about the athlete who may have the game face-iest game face in sports history – hockey goalie Terry Sawchuk.
816: Poultry Slam
Nov. 24, 2023

Act Four: Winged Migration

Kathie Russo's husband was Spalding Gray,  who was best known for delivering monologues onstage—like "Monster in a Box," and "Swimming to Cambodia." On January 10, 2004, he went missing. Witnesses said they saw him on the Staten Island Ferry that night.
289: Go Ask Your Father
May 13, 2005

Act Two: My Favorite Martian

Paul Tough’s father was a mild-mannered professor—until he suddenly left the family to pursue a lifelong quest: making contact with extraterrestrial life. For the first time, Paul joins him and asks the questions he’s long kept to himself about his father’s alien pursuits.
459: What Kind of Country
Mar. 2, 2012

Prologue

In the town of Nowthen, MN, residents held meetings to debate whether a police force is worth the cost. And in Springfield, IL, the state police motorcycle division has been cut, leading to an increase in highway fatalities.
225: Home Movies
Nov. 8, 2002

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks with filmmaker Alan Berliner, who for six years collected old home movies he found at thrift stores and garage sales. He says that almost all of them document either rites of passage, like birthdays and weddings, or moments of leisure—the beach is especially big.
180: Return to Childhood 2001
Mar. 23, 2001

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks with Kayla Hernandez, a seventh-grader who likes to reminisce about when she was a child, back in fifth grade. She visits Room 211 in her school, where her fifth grade class met, and looks at her old books, thinks about what happened there.
147: A Teenager's Guide to God
Dec. 17, 1999

Prologue

This American Life host Ira Glass and producer Susan Burton spent a week in August recording a suburban Chicago youth group at every stage of their very first mission trip. The teenagers were from Covenant Presbyterian Church in Chicago.
112: Ladies and Germs
Oct. 2, 1998

Act Two: 20th Century Germ

Germs were first understood at the turn of the 20th century and it turns out that the aesthetics of everyday life during this century—the way we dress, the way we groom ourselves, the way we make our homes—are all partly a response to this newfangled idea of germs.
65: Who's Canadian?
May 30, 1997

Passing

The true story of a dinner conversation in which several Americans came to realize how many iconic Americans are, in fact, Canadian. "If William Shatner's Canadian," one insists, "then I could be Canadian." Another opines that there should be a law against Peter Jennings, a Canadian, hosting a network news program.

Act Two: The World's Most Perfect Pneumatic Vacuum

Canadians not getting any respect in two locales: A town called Little Canada, Minnesota; and in Canada, where a guy doing a Canadian-heritage art project gets ribbed by his neighbors, who joke that there is no Canadian culture to celebrate. Then, Sarah Vowell speaks with Ian Brown, formerly the host of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's long-running program Sunday Morning. They arm wrestle over what it means to be a Canadian, what it means to be an American, and whether the two are the same.
179: Cicero
Mar. 16, 2001

Act Two: The Inevitable

In the 1970s and 1980s, a wave of non-white migration into Cicero begins, this one primarily Mexican-American. The head of the political machine is named Betty Loren-Maltese, whose husband, now deceased, was convicted for mob-related activity.
445: Ten Years In
Sept. 9, 2011

Act Five: Bad Teacher

Alix Spiegel revisits a story she reported in 2006 - which caused more listeners to email us than any other story we've broadcast. It was about a Muslim American girl named "Chloe," who was tormented at school after the students had a lesson on 9/11.
285: Know Your Enemy
Mar. 25, 2005

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks to Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, about one of the men in his book, a guy named Stetson Kennedy. In the 1940s, Kennedy, a Southerner, infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan.