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11.13.2009
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Stories of people starting over, sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to. |
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11.06.2009
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Stories about people who take the bait, and those who place it. Including the story of man who tries to investigate a neighborhood crime and ends up in jail himself. And the story of the pitfalls of luring customers to a make-believe pizza delivery place. |
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10.30.2009
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Stories of cheating, cheaters and the cheated. Writer James Braly with a story about temptation (performed and recorded at The Moth), Dani Shapiro on being the mistress, and more. |
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10.23.2009
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Stories of people who are trying to convince you that the Devil is there, whispering in your ear...and stories of people who try to deny he's there, against some very heavy evidence. |
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10.16.2009
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This week, we bring you a deeper look inside the health insurance industry. The dark side of prescription drug coupons. A story about Pet Health Insurance, which is in its infancy, and how it is changing human behaviors—for example, if you have the pet health insurance, you bring your pet to the vet more often, and the vet makes more money and...well, you can see the parallels. And insurance company jargon, frighteningly decoded.
This show was a co-production with NPR News. |
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10.09.2009
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An hour explaining the American health care system, specifically, why it is that costs keep rising. One story looks at the doctors, one at the patients and one at the insurance industry.
This program is a co-production with NPR News. |
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10.02.2009
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Stories of people who believe a book changed their life. It's a romantic notion, and one reason we believe it is because we want to believe our lives can be changed by something so simple as an idea — or a set of ideas contained in a book. |
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09.25.2009
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In which we mark the anniversary of the economic collapse and the anniversary of Planet Money: recapping some of the original episode, The Giant Pool of Money, and finding out what's happened to all those guys in the year since. You can check out all of our shows on the economy here. |
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09.18.2009
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This week we rerun a show from 2000 about a price fixing conspiracy and the executive who cooperated with the FBI in recording what are probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act. The executive then did some things that turned him from the best informant in FBI history into one of the most troubling. A screenwriter named Scott Burns heard this episode of our show on the radio, and—with Matt Damon and Steven Soderbergh—turned it into a film that opens this weekend, "The Informant!" Hear the amazing true story right here. |
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09.11.2009
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This week we bring you stories about friends. Or wait, enemies? How about both? Tales of estranged sisters, BFFs breaking up and making up and breaking up, and how reality stars walk the fine line between making friends and making a name for themselves. |
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09.04.2009
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Nine radio producers. Two days. One rest stop on the New York State Thruway. In this show, we’ll bring you stories of people who are just passing through, and people who are at the rest stop every day—working. One of them has worked there since 1969. A bunch of others came from Asia and eastern Europe to pour coffee for travelers. More images from this show here (or check out the map here). Podcast listeners! There's an extra, bonus story in the podcast this week. Reporter Sean Cole visits the farm stand at the Plattekill rest stop, meets one of the regular customers...and recklessly gets in the car with her and her "domestic partner." Do not try this at home. |
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08.28.2009
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Stories of the kindness of strangers, and where it leads. Also, the unkindness of strangers and where that can lead. All of today's stories take place in the city most people think of as the least kind city in America: New York. |
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08.21.2009
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Stories about kids being mean to each other. |
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08.14.2009
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Stories about people who take grand, sweeping approaches to solving problems of all sorts. Paul Tough reports on the most ambitious and hopeful solution to urban poverty in the country; his book about this is Whatever It Takes. If you want to donate to the Harlem Children's Zone, visit their website. The musician in Act Two of our show is David Berkeley. |
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08.07.2009
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The U.S. government spent two years on a sting operation trapping an Indian man named Hemant Lakhani, whom they suspected of being an illegal arms dealer. It's one of the first cases that went to trial in the War on Terror, and one the Justice Department pointed to as one of their big successes. In the end, they got Lakhani, red-handed, delivering a missile to a terrorist in New Jersey. The only problem was, nothing in the sting was what it appeared to be. Including the missile. |
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07.31.2009
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Shalom Auslander goes on vacation with his family, and suspects the beloved,
chatty old man in the room next door is an imposter—and sets out to prove
it. This and other stories about the pitfalls of making snap judgments about
others. The adoption agency used by the birth mother in this week's show is
called
Open Adoption & Family Services. It's a non-profit with offices in
Oregon
and Washington, but their services are available nationwide. To
learn more
about them, go to: www.openadopt.org. |
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07.24.2009
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Stories where the fine print changes everything, whether you read it or not.
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07.17.2009
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Mike Birbiglia got used to strange things happening to him when he slept—until something happened that almost killed him. Mike's story and other reasons to fear sleep, including roaches, bedbugs, "The Shining," and mild-mannered husbands who turn into maniacs while asleep. Mike Birbiglia's story was recorded at The Moth, and was recently part of a one-man show called "Sleepwalk with Me." Mike's tourdates are here, his album Two Drink Mike is here, and his album My Secret Public Journal (Live) is here. |
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07.10.2009
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It's tempting to act as your own lawyer, to argue your own cause. Who better to defend your position than you? This week, stories of pro se defenses: some brilliant, some disastrous. A man fakes his way into an insane asylum by pretending to be crazy, and then can't argue his way back out. And another man uses vigilante justice to defend his sister's honor, using a strategy he didn't know he had in him. |
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07.03.2009
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On a summer day in 1951, two baby girls were born in a hospital
in small-town Wisconsin. The infants were accidentally switched, and
went home with the wrong families. One of the mothers realized the
mistake but chose to keep quiet. Until the day, more than 40 years
later,
when she decided to tell both daughters what happened. How the truth
changed two families' lives—and how it didn't.
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06.26.2009
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Sometimes when things go wrong, parsing out who all is to blame and taking them to task is just too complicated and haaaard! What's easy is pinning it all on one person and watching them go down in flames. This week Mike Birbiglia tells what it's like to be the fall guy for an entire high school. Also, Philip Gourevitch on the most infamous fall girl in recent history, and Shalom Auslander on fall dogs and fall grandmas. |
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06.19.2009
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This week we bring you little-known and surprising stories of how all sorts of institutions—from a controversial legal precedent to a Hollywood teen dance flick—began. In one story, a man tries to set the record straight about his life's achievements, which he says include inventing thumb wrestling and popularizing the eating of shrimp in the New York area. And the story of a seven-year-old old boy trying to figure out where he comes from. |
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06.12.2009
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In this show, sons and daughters get to find out the one thing they've always wanted to know about their father. The answers aren't always what they hope for. |
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06.05.2009
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One of the biggest questions about this financial crisis gripping our economy: How did it happen? Wasn't someone supposed to watching things? Making sure people were acting prudently? Stopping, say, the largest insurance company in the world from making a 185 billion dollar bet that it couldn't make good on? This week, we hear the stories of the people who were supposed to be overseeing things. You can check out our other shows on the economy here, and the Planet Money podcast here. |
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05.29.2009
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In this show we take the classifieds from one Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times and one edition of the local alternative weekly Chicago Reader, and fill a program with stories that come from the ads. Through the jobs offered, the missed connections, the crap that people sell each other and the musicians' ads we get a portrait of a whole city. |
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05.22.2009
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A well-known activist—an anarchic, revolutionary activist—is accused of spying on other activists for the FBI. The strangest thing about the rumor is, it's true. How Brandon Darby transformed from cop-hater to federal witness. Plus, a story by Etgar Keret, about a boy who betrays his people with a pair of shoes. |
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05.15.2009
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Stories of people who find themselves in situations far from the beaten path, where there are no guidelines and no useful precedents, including the return of Squirrel Cop. |
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05.08.2009
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Stories about getting back together with your spouse, your country, your...Brahman bull. And how it never goes the way you think it's going to. |
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05.01.2009
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Ira Glass hosts an episode of the radio program, in front of a live
audience...and records it for those who couldn’t attend to hear. The show is
performed onstage by some of our favorite contributors: Dan Savage, Starlee
Kine, and Mike Birbiglia tell stories. Plus a very special appearance by
Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer! |
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04.24.2009
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A special show, composed entirely of stories from just one This American Life contributor: Scott Carrier, whose strange and compelling stories sound like nothing else on the radio. |
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04.17.2009
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Stories of people forced to let go of their firmly held beliefs. When the daughter of a pro-choice activist concludes that abortion is murder, her mother goes to extraordinary lengths to persuade her daughter to switch sides. And after a woman loses her faith, a football coach—whom she's never met—tries to restore it. |
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04.10.2009
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It's the late 1960s, and in the new technology of cryonics, a California TV repairman named Bob sees an opportunity to help people cheat death. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it sounds. Harder still was admitting to the family members of people Bob had frozen that he'd screwed up. Badly. |
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04.03.2009
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Stories about people who are remembered very differently than they'd wished. The ghost of a kindly, distinguished philanthropist supposedly plays pranks on guests at a Ramada hotel in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. A dying mother makes a tape for her developmentally disabled daughter, hoping she'll watch it someday, knowing she might not. |
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03.27.2009
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The economy works in mysterious ways. This week, we highlight the
unusual circumstances our economic drought has left us in, and
the newly hatched plans being made to survive it: including a
partially-renovated condo building in Chicago, whose developers have
abandoned it—though they didn’t bother to tell the 19 unit owners
who still live there, paying their mortgages. And a story which
tracks the FDIC during its most covert operation: taking over an
unsuspecting bank. |
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03.20.2009
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Two stories that are worst case scenarios for any parent. In each story, when you take apart what happened and how it happened, it's hard to see how anyone could've prevented things from going bad. |
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03.13.2009
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Bernie Epton went down in history as the Other Guy: the white opponent who almost defeated the first black mayor of Chicago. But what’s the real story of someone who ended up on the wrong side of history? That and other stories of people with wildly popular or unpopular views for one moment in time, and how those views stand up years, decades, even centuries later. |
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03.06.2009
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The true story of little-known rooms in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there instead of their classrooms. No reason is usually given. When they arrive, they find they've been put on some kind of probationary status, and they must report every day until the matter is cleared up. Plus other stories of the uneasy interaction between humans and their institutions. |
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02.27.2009
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The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes. Our crack economics team—the guys who explained the mortgage
crisis, Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Adam Davidson—are back to help all of us understand the news. For instance, when we talk about an insolvent bank, what does it actually mean, and why are we giving hundreds of billions of dollars to rich bankers who screwed up their own businesses? Also, two guys go to New Jersey to look at a toxic asset.
Other shows on the financial crisis: Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show About the Economy. And you can get daily updates about the financial crisis on Alex and Adam's Planet Money podcast and blog. |
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02.20.2009
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There's the thing you plan to do, and then there's the thing you end up doing. Most of us start off our lives with some Plan A which we abandon...switching to a Plan B, which becomes our life. |
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02.13.2009
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Of all the 6 and a half billion people in the world, what are the odds that
any two people are a real match? Stories from people who know they’ve beat
the odds, and the lengths they’ve gone to do it—including an American
professor who sings Chinese opera for anyone who'll listen, to get one step
closer to his mate, and two kids who travel halfway around the country to
find each other and become best friends. |
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02.06.2009
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In 1912 a four year-old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing in a swamp in Louisiana. Eight months later, he was found in the hands of a wandering handyman in Mississippi. (The picture at left was taken just days later.) In 2004, his granddaughter discovered a secret beneath the legend of her grandfather's kidnapping, a secret whose revelation would divide her own family, bring redemption to another, and become the answer to a third family's century-old prayer. We devote our entire episode to the story. |
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01.30.2009
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Stories about what happens when someone new takes over—someone with a vision of how things ought to be. Plus,
NPR international economics correspondent Adam Davidson of the Planet Money podcast on how Obama's new stimulus plan might actually be the
first ever test of a very, very old theory. |
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01.23.2009
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Sometimes, getting your big break isn't all it's cracked up to be. A comedy duo lands the gig that can make them famous—the Ed Sullivan Show at the height of Sullivan's popularity—and they bomb. A third-grader gets his big chance to please his mother and push his drunken father out of the picture. And other stories. |
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01.16.2009
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On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, we sent reporters out all over the country to talk to people about how they're feeling about this new president. Do they believe things will change? Do they think there'll be changes in their own lives? From dozens of hours of interviews, at a Marine Corps base and a button factory, at a New Orleans bar and a Florida town that used to be a stronghold for the Ku Klux Klan, we hear opinions about what's going to happen in America after the ceremony on January 20th, 2009. You can check out our web extra of additional kids' letters to President Obama here. |
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01.09.2009
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Sabir, a young man in Afghanistan, thought he'd found true love but he couldn't afford a wedding. So two foreign aid workers, friends of his, decide to come to his rescue. They soon find out making a lasting love match isn't as simple as writing a check. This and other stories of people matching others up—with wives, with toys, with body parts. |
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01.02.2009
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Numbers lie. Numbers cover over complicated feelings and ambiguous situations. In this week's show, stories of people trying to use numbers to describe things that should not be quantified. |
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