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Act One: Roadrunner

Ira teaches Sarah Vowell how to drive with some advice from Tom and Ray Maggliozi, the hosts of NPR's Car Talk. It turns out that although we think of how-to's as the most rational thing in the world — follow the simple instructions and you'll learn — in real life, they're anything but simple.

Prologue

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.

Act Three: Phone As History

We think of our phone calls and phone messages as so transient. We have another example of phones recording personal history: this story from Barrett Golding in Bozeman, Montana, comprised of telephone messages about his father.

Prologue

When she began working as a temp secretary in San Francisco, learning the computers, wasting time, Andrea put together a graph with Microsoft Excel. Its title: My Love Life: A Ten Year Span. It made her feel good.

Act One: Corporate Culture

D. Travers Scott and his boyfriend spent six months gathering data on their own relationship and put together a report on it in the form of a corporate annual report.

Act Two: Paint By Numbers

Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want.

Act Four: The Salesman

Will Powers — his real name — decided to try to use all the tools of modern brand marketing to sell himself to his own wife. It turned out to help their marriage.