Host Ira Glass walks through possible next steps with a pro-life activist who worked on the Texas SB8 bill, that set a precedent for enforcement of abortion bans throughout the country.
Rebecca Grant introduces us to an abortion pill smuggler, who walks us through her undercover operation to mail pills to people who want medication abortions in places where it's hard to get them.
When Executive Editor Emanuele Berry’s friend pitched her a show about Black Lives Matter activists, she was not sure. He made it anyway and it’s really good. Today we are featuring some of Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr.’s reporting from the podcast Resistance. He’s captured a story about Black Lives Matter that has always been there but nobody ever tells. (4 minutes)You can hear Resistance from Gimlet, a Spotify company.
When Saidu’s friend Marcus-David Peters was killed by police, he wanted to figure out what to do with the weight of that loss. He began following three men who began protesting after the murder of George Floyd. They seemed to know what to do when faced with police violence. Saidu tells the story of their lives after they began protesting with the Warriors in the Garden.
We continue our story about three members of Warriors in the Garden. After a summer of protest, the Warriors have to figure out what to do when their activism draws the attention of the police. (25 minutes)
Benjamen Walker of the podcast Theory of Everything tells guest host Sean Cole about an Uber drivers strike he came across in Kenya. The guys who didn’t join the strike and kept driving for Uber made extra money since there were fewer cars on the road.
Before the war in the East Ramapo, New York school district, there was a truce. Local school officials made a deal with their Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbors: we'll leave you alone to teach your children in private yeshivas as you see fit as long as you allow our public school budget to pass.
Ira tells the story of Meron Estefanos, a freelance journalist who in 2011 got a troubling tip: A group of Eritrean hostages was being tortured and held for ransom in the Sinai desert. Along with the tip was a phone number.
Ira plays audio from a YouTube video made by Jonathan Perez. In it, 24 year old Jonathan, an undocumented immigrant, walks straight into a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, tells an officer he doesn’t have papers, and gets himself arrested.
Reporter Michael May tells the story of activists from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance who intentionally got arrested for being undocumented. They believed if they could get inside the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, they could prevent lots of the immigrants there from being deported.
Producer Ben Calhoun tells the story of a former Congressional Representative from South Carolina, Bob Inglis. Inglis is a conservative Republican who once doubted climate science.
Host Ira Glass tells the story of writer turned activist Bill McKibben. McKibben is trying to reinvent progressive politics when it come to climate change.
Camas Davis tells a true story about a rabbit kidnapping that saves some rabbits' lives, kills those same rabbits' babies, and leaves students in a Portland rabbit-butchering class scratching their heads.
Producer Jonathan Menjivar tells the story of John Smid, a gay man who did not want to be gay, and who tried to get other gay people to suppress their urges as well. Then...John changed.
Host Ira Glass has a lot of questions for Mike Daisey, beginning with why Daisey lied to Ira and This American Life producer Brian Reed about how they could fact-check his story with Cathy Lee. Ira also explains This American Life's fact-checking process, in general.
Producer Sarah Koenig continues the story Terry Engelder and Dan Volz, their rival calculations about natural gas in Pennsylvania, and how each was treated by his university. She explains how Pennsylvania's universities, politicans and industry have united to develop natural gas.
Ira talks with reporter My Thuan Tran of The Los Angeles Times about how San Jose City Councilwoman Madison Nguyen went from being the "golden child" of the Vietnamese community to someone who faced weekly protests and a hunger striker. Turns out red-baiting is alive and well in the Vietnamese-American community.
Brandon Darby was a radical activist and one of the founders of the incredibly effective relief organization Common Ground. Michael May reports on how Darby changed from a revolutionary who wanted the overthrow of the U.S. government into an informant working with the FBI against his former radical allies.