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12.25.1998
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Stories from David Sedaris' book of Christmas stories, Holidays on Ice, read onstage by David, Julia Sweeney and actor Matt Malloy. |
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12.18.1998
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Stories about seeing and being seen. Taped before a live audience in Town Hall in New York City in December 1998, this was a co-production with WNYC New York, featuring live music by the pop band They Might Be Giants and the This American Life Orchestra. |
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12.11.1998
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The family table is stage on which many family dramas are played out. We hear three stories ... of three families ... at three meals. |
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12.04.1998
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11.27.1998
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For Thanksgiving, the time of year when poultry consumption is highest, we investigate turkeys, chickens, ducks—fowl of all types...and their mysterious hold over us. |
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11.20.1998
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A parable of politics and race in America. The story of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington (pictured), told two decades after his death. Washington died 20 years ago this month—on November 25, 1987. |
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11.13.1998
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Stories of the first day on the job, the first day in a relationship, the first day in school. On the first day, any first day, we're expected to live by the rules and customs of the culture we're entering, but we don't know those rules and customs just yet. These are stories of people trying to make the transition—and the difficulty of making the transition—in a new place—from outsider to insider. |
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11.06.1998
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Stories of hero worship, of people admiring someone from afar, and trying to get closer to them. |
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10.30.1998
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This description is actually for the '98 rebroadcast of the show, October 30, 1998.
Writer Jack Hitt goes on a search for a mysterious neighbor from his childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, and stumbles onto an epic story of the Old South, the New South, gender confusion, Chihuahuas, and changing values in American journalism. |
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10.23.1998
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Stories of people's last words before death. Their one last shot at figuring things out, summing things up. One last moment of asserting the fact of our existence, at the moment of our annihilation. |
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10.16.1998
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What happens when you suddenly strike it rich. And the power money has over our lives, for good and bad. |
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10.09.1998
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The darker side of the art world: petty jealousies, competitiveness, failure. And also what's great about art. David Sedaris with the story of his short-lived career as a performance artist. A master of balloon animals declares that artistic jealousies have ruined his life. The King of "Song Poems" and how his jazz snob son learned to love his music. Plus, tales from a locksmith. |
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10.02.1998
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Germs, and how they make us leave the world of rational thinking. |
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09.25.1998
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Americans who love their guns ... and the Americans who love them. |
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09.18.1998
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What happens when people with one common interest gather in monstrous, flourescent-lit halls for the weekend? Sometimes they drive each other crazy, sometimes they fall in love. |
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09.11.1998
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Two brothers set out with a friend to cross America on horseback. They take a tape recorder with them to make a kind of audio journal of their trip. What they find, who they meet, and what they learn in this experiment in 19th-century travel. Plus other stories. Visit the Turtle Island Preserve website; Eustace Conway, one of the riders in this show, is the director of this educational/retreat center in the Appalachian Mountains. And a note for extremely hardcore TAL fans: Eustace's story about crossing the country with his brother was originally supposed to be in the same show as Sarah Vowell's Trail of Tears story about crossing the country with her sister, retracing the route of the Cherokee genocide. The show would've had to have been nearly two hours long. |
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09.04.1998
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Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way—by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses. |
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08.28.1998
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Stories of summer camp. People who love camp say that non-camp people simply don't understand what's so amazing about camp. In this program, we attempt to bridge the gap of misunderstanding between camp people and non-camp people. |
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08.21.1998
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Three stories of people trying to forget the past and move on. |
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08.14.1998
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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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08.07.1998
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Two stories of children lying to themselves and others. A woman who'd been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis talks about the lies she told herself as a child. And Dan Gediman tells the story of how he was cast in the public TV show Zoom, which aired from 1972 to 1979, at the age of ten. Then he was cut from the cast, before the show ever went on the air. So for years, he lied about it. He let friends believe he was on Zoom. In this special half-hour story, produced by Jay Allison as part of his Life Stories series, Gediman tracks down the original Zoom cast members, to find out what his life would've been, if he had achieved his childhood dream of being on Zoom. |
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07.31.1998
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What could be more American than wanting to build your dreamhouse? Meema Spadola's dad moved the family to Maine to chase his dream. Four years later, the house wasn't built, and the family fell apart. Plus, David Beers about growing up in another kind of dreamhouse—in Northern California during the '60s aerospace boom. |
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07.24.1998
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Notes and stories about the Canadians among us. Are they in fact any different from red-blooded Americans? They claim they're not. Skeptical Americans put their position to the test. |
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07.17.1998
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A show about something most people have gone through. Friends get together to start a business, start a church, do political action together. And after a while, they start fighting and split up. We hear three true stories. |
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07.10.1998
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Writer David Sedaris recalls the days when his mother and sister played armchair detective—until a very odd crime wave hit within their own home. Plus, host Ira Glass goes out on surveillance with a real-life private eye. |
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07.03.1998
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For the July 4th holiday weekend, writer Sarah Vowell and her twin sister re-trace the "Trail of Tears" — the route their Cherokee ancestors took when expelled from their own land by President Andrew Jackson. On the way, Sarah and her sister visit the land they would have grown up in had the Cherokees not been expelled, Andrew Jackson's home; and the land in Oklahoma where the Cherokee nation settled (and where Sarah and her sister were born). They reflect on their own American-ness and Cherokee-ness, and on the more difficult question: What's history good for, anyway? "History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy. The second time as farce. The third time as tourist trap." Karl Marx, paraphrased |
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06.26.1998
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Are people having experiences on the Internet they wouldn't have anywhere else? Several weeks ago, This American Life invited listeners to help answer that question. Several hundred listeners sent in samples of what they're finding on the Internet, including posting from Usenet groups, favorite web pages, and their own email. This American Life interviewed some of these people. Listeners who live in the Chicago area were invited to come to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, to read on stage (and on the air) their stories from the Internet. Chicago playwright David Hauptschein co-hosts. Hauptschein has hosted events like this (where people come onstage to read their letters and diaries) around Chicago for years. |
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06.19.1998
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For this Father's Day, stories in which fathers and their kids sit down and try to have an honest moment together. And stories about fathers who aren't close with their kids. |
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06.12.1998
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Two stories of people who try to cross the color line, and why it's still so hard. We hear the story of a failed interracial marriage, and the story of a teenager from a poor inner city neighborhood who ends up at an Ivy League University — and how he barely survives there. |
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06.05.1998
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What's frustrating about music lessons, what's miraculous about them, and what they actually teach us. This show was recorded in front of a live audience at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, with help from KQED-FM, during the '98 Public Radio Conference in San Francisco. |
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05.29.1998
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An NPR reporter leaves her three-year-old son and heads to Omaha — for cancer treatment — a last chance to save her life. After years of covering stories about medicine, Rebecca Perl enters the hospital as a patient. She moves from the world of healthy people into the world of sick ones. What she sees and what she learns. This piece, which was produced by Dan Collison for Long Haul Productions, received the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) in the summer of '99. It got a perfect score, with one judge saying it was the best documentary he'd ever heard. |
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05.22.1998
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Stories about hitting the open road. Dishwasher Pete takes the bus with strangers, and Margy Rochlin explains her days on the road with George Burns. Plus, a roadtrip to save a marriage. |
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05.15.1998
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Stories made from old tapes found in various places, including a "letter on tape" found in a Salvation Army thrift store. Host Ira Glass with tapes of his father on the radio, circa 1956. And radio producer Nora Moreno with tapes of her father, a Spanish broadcasting pioneer in America. Her mother fell in love with him over the radio, with tragic results. |
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05.08.1998
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Stories of when things go wrong. Really wrong. When you leave the normal realm of human error, fumble, mishap and mistake and enter the territory of really huge breakdowns. Fiascos. Things go so awry that normal social order collapses. This week's show is a philosophical inquiry in the nature of fiascos — perhaps the first ever. |
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05.01.1998
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During this hour, a special edition of our show: Stories about Niagara Falls, half of them from documentary producer Alix Spiegel, who went to the Falls and interviewed people living there; and half from playwright David Kodeski, who grew up in the town of Niagara Falls. |
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04.24.1998
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For the 100th episode of This American Life, a radio show about the pleasures of radio. About what makes radio so great ... and what makes it so terrible. |
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04.17.1998
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Stories, tributes, and attempts to understand the Chairman of the Board. |
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04.10.1998
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Variations on what it means to be a girl and what it means to be a woman. |
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04.03.1998
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Stories of people trying to get rich quick, or otherwise make something for nothing. As everyone knows, there's no such thing as something for nothing. You always pay a price. |
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03.27.1998
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Stories about what it means to be a person who throws the first punch ... and how hard it is to give up. |
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03.20.1998
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An assault on the idea of wackiness. And then, an appreciation of wackiness, and an analysis of wackiness in American culture. Thirteen ways to describe wackiness. |
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03.13.1998
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People who left their private lives and were seized by some huge historical moment. |
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03.06.1998
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How should we react to people who are in non-monogamous relationships? What should we think of these struggles with monogamy? |
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02.27.1998
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What happens during a "how-to," and what our "how-to's" say about us. Most how-to's promise that you'll not only learn skills: you'll be transformed. |
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02.20.1998
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Kevin Kelly was in Jerusalem. For reasons too complicated to go into here, he ended up sleeping on the spot where Jesus was supposedly crucified. After Kevin awoke, the thought came into his head: Live as if you'll die in six months. So he did. He got rid of all his possessions. He visited his parents and brothers and sisters for the last time. That, and other stories of starting life over, including a visit to a courtroom in Los Angeles where people go to change their names. And other stories. |
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02.13.1998
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Stories about couples that all take place decades after that moment their eyes meet. |
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02.06.1998
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Stories about those moments when someone tries to tell you a little bit more about themselves than you'd really rather know. |
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01.30.1998
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Stories of people trying to escape the box of their own lives, and create new lives. |
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01.23.1998
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Stories about the animalness of animals, the irreducible ways in which they are not human. |
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01.16.1998
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Stories of who we are on the phone, of things we learn on the phone, of things that happen on the phone that don't happen anywhere else. |
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01.09.1998
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Stories about people who are destined to fight: brothers and sisters. |
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01.02.1998
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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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