Browse our archive by

There are 45 results

Prologue

Host Ira Glass speaks with Columbia University professor Peter Coleman, who shares some surprising details about the battle surrounding the abortion debate in Boston during the 1990s. We learn what secret meetings between the warring groups could accomplish, and what they couldn't.

Prologue

Ira Glass talks with Scharlette Holdman, who works with defense teams on high profile death row cases, and who has not talked to a reporter in more than 25 years. Why did she suddenly end the moratorium on press? Because her story is about something important: Namely, a beautiful chicken.

Act One: Witness for the Barbecue-tion

Scharlette Holdman's story continues, in which she and the rest of a legaldefense team try to save a man on death row by finding a star witness — achicken with a specific skill.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass revisits some interviews done with Penn State students in 2009, long before the sex abuse scandal that's engulfed the football team and led to the resignation of its legendary coach, as well as the university's President. Back in 2009, students said that the best thing about Penn State football is the high moral standard upheld by the team and its coaches.

Act Two: Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's 2009

We hear excerpts from our 2009 episode that was recorded at Penn State. Though the focus of that episode was student drinking and partying, we hear how much of the culture of the school is organized around football and how deeply people loved the team and Coach Joe Paterno.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks with science writer Paul Hoffman about a mathematician named Frank Nelson Cole, who demonstrated a groundbreaking idea at a conference in 1903. Paul explains that in addition to their celebrated breakthroughs, many of the greatest thinkers in history have entertained some very crazy ideas.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass interviews a 14-year old named Annie, who emailed us asking if we would do a show about middle school. She explains why exactly the middle school years can be so daunting.

Act Two: Stutter Step

We sent several correspondents straight to the epicenters of middle school awkwardness: School dances. Producers Lisa Pollak and Brian Reed, plus reporters Eric Mennel, Rob Wildeboer and Claire Holman spoke with kids across the country during the nervous moments leading up to the dances.

Act One: Life in the Middle Ages

In an effort to understand the physical and emotional changes middle school kids experience, Ira speaks with reporter Linda Perlstein, who wrote a book called Not Much Just Chillin' about a year she spent following five middle schoolers. Then we hear from producer Alex Blumberg, who was a middle school teacher in Chicago for four years before getting into radio.

Prologue

We sent a reporter named Dan Grech to the Hundred Year Starship Public Symposium, which aims to tackle the technological problems related to interstellar space travel. And as host Ira Glass explains, Dan found this gathering to be way more adventurous than your average scientific conference.

Prologue

It's hard to give things up. Host Ira Glass tells the story of Walter, a three-year-old boy who had to give up his pacifier, and then, wanting comfort, asked all the adults around him to tell the stories of when they gave up their pacifiers.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass talks to someone who escaped from the twin towers with a minute to spare and someone who lost her husband on 9/11. Both say they try to avoid 9/11 commemorations.

Act Two: In the Garden of the Unknown Unknowns

Marian Fontana, whose husband was a firefighter who died on 9/11, originally appeared on our show in 2005. Ira talks with Marian today, about what has changed for her over the last 10 years.

Act Four: What's Arabic for Fjord?

The podcast and stream versions of the show include a story here that is not included in broadcast. It catches us up with an Iraqi translator named Basim, who fled the country to Norway after his life was threatened because he aided the American forces.

Act Six: Clutter

On 9/11, Lynn Simpson escaped from the 89th floor of the World Trade Center. Ira talks with her about what's changed since she first appeared on the show, just a week after the attacks in 2001.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass walks through a Kansas City Missouri amusement park called Worlds of Funwith Cole Lindbergh, who had a season pass to the park as a little kid,starting working there summers at 14, and then just stayed. Now he's afull-time, year-round employee, running the games department.

Act One: Gameboy Grows Up

Ira continues with Cole Lindbergh and the hundred teenagers who work for himin the games department at Worlds of Fun. We watch them compete againsteach other to see who can do the most business, in Cole's Sweet Sixteenbracket tournament, which pits all 32 games in the park against each other.

Act Two: Great Adventures

We asked for your stories about amusement parks. Three hundred of youcalled in, with stories of fear, floating carnies and, um, vomit.

Prologue

Host Ira Glass tells the story of Florencia de Benito Juarez, a small town in Mexico where a new drug gang recently took over. They promised peace and tranquility, and for the most part, they're making good on those promises.

Prologue

There's a derogatory term in Silicon Valley for companies that amass huge troves of patents and make money by threatening lawsuits: "patent trolls." When Jeff Kelling's Internet company Fototime was sued - along with more than 130 other companies - for violating someone's patent, he wondered if it was a troll (which the company denies), and then settled out of court.

Prologue

A few years back, when he and his family were driving home from a vacation in Texas, John Nova Lomax realized that the police were aggressively tailing him. And he was definitely not prepared for the reason they pulled him over.