|
|
| |
12.31.1999
|
One thing that makes our country different from most others is this idea that you can recreate yourself as someone you'd prefer to be. But what if you're too good at it? We devote this entire episode to the story of Keith Aldrich, whose life is a history of most of the major cultural shifts in the second half of the Twentieth Century. |
|
|
|
|
|
12.24.1999
|
A special Christmas edition of our show, with stories about Santa Claus — the many many different versions of Santa Claus. It was in America, in New York, that people started believing in the modern idea of Santa — a guy who comes down the chimney with a sack of goodies. But America has invented a few other Santas as well. |
|
|
|
|
|
12.17.1999
|
Oh faithless and perverse generation? How long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you? — Matthew 17.
It's an odd fact of religious life in America that in this country founded by Christians, in which a majority of people say they believe in God and identify themselves as Christians, that so many religious Christians feel they're an oppressed minority. They say the media doesn't share their values. That secular institutions undermine their beliefs. And the job of raising Christian children, they'll tell you, is like trying to do God's work from behind enemy lines. This week we're devoting our whole show to the kids they're struggling to bring up. This American Life host Ira Glass and producer Susan Burton spent a week in August recording a suburban Chicago youth group at every stage of their very first mission trip. The teenagers were from Covenant Presbyterian Church in Chicago. They went to West Virginia, to fix up someone's house, and to witness about their faith to strangers. The goal: that they mature from a child's kind of faith to an adult's. There's a boom in mission trips like this right now, a boom that crosses denominations. |
|
|
|
|
|
12.10.1999
|
Stories of nature creeping into man-made environments. Of nature sneaking in places where its very presence is a rebuke to the notion that we as a species have things under control. |
|
|
|
|
|
12.03.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
11.26.1999
|
For Thanksgiving, the time of year when poultry consumption is highest, it's our annual program about turkeys, chickens, fowl of all types, and their mysterious hold over our imaginations. This show includes favorite stories from previous Poultry Shows, and some new stories. |
|
|
|
|
|
11.19.1999
|
When you read other people's mail, you can't help but try to fill in between the lines. You try to decipher the stories of the people who wrote the letters. We hear four stories of people who read other people's mail, and what happens to them once they get caught up in these other lives. |
|
|
|
|
|
11.12.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
11.05.1999
|
One reason we tell stories is to explain things to ourselves that cannot, in the end, always be explained. When someone we're close to dies, we struggle for a way to get our minds around the fact of their absence. And often — the stories we invent aren't quite up to the job. In this week's show, people struggle to invent words adequate to cope with death. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
10.29.1999
|
Simulated worlds, Civil war reenactments, wax museums, simulated coal mines, fake ethnic restaurants, an ersatz Medieval castle and other re-created worlds that thrive all across America. |
|
|
|
|
|
10.22.1999
|
We've all heard occasional news stories about how some of the drug laws enacted in the last 15 years may have gone too far. First time offenders get locked up for decades. Judges — even Republican appointees — say that mandatory minimum sentences prevent them from making fair rulings. But have sentences really gone too far? This hour examines the areas where a consensus is growing on the problems in federal drug laws, and it explains the areas where drug laws seem to be administered fairly. |
|
|
|
|
|
10.15.1999
|
We hear the story of one African-American single mother. Barbara Clinkscales recorded her family's life over the course of seven months for This American Life. Her life defies — or makes irrelevant — most of our typical notions of inner-city, black single mothers. |
|
|
|
|
|
10.08.1999
|
Stories of people whose lives are transformed by music. |
|
|
|
|
|
10.01.1999
|
Stories of people who are trying to make invisible worlds visible, and what happens when you make them visible. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
09.24.1999
|
Stories of family businesses, and what happens when the tension of family dynamics collides with the pressure of capitalist market forces. |
|
|
|
|
|
09.17.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
09.10.1999
|
The mob as portrayed in movies, and as it is in real life. And its hold over us. |
|
|
|
|
|
09.03.1999
|
As we head into another Presidential primary season filled with candidates that few people find very inspiring, This American Life broadcasts stories of political idealists, stories designed to provide some small sense of hope about American politics. Most of these were first broadcast during the 1996 Presidential race. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
08.27.1999
|
Stories of people drawn to some idea, some picture, some "thing" that they just want to be. How some people imitate this "thing" innocently, some less innocently, and how easy it is to slip from one to the other. |
|
|
|
|
|
08.20.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
08.13.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
08.06.1999
|
Three stories, three people, and three sets of maps. Stories of people trying to figure out where they are in the world in the most literal and least literal ways possible. We explore what it's like to be lost — how we all struggle in that moment not to give ourselves over to fear but try to enjoy it. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
07.30.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
07.23.1999
|
We think of crime as a kind of monolithic, menacing presence. But there are many kinds of crimes and many kinds of criminals. Through our crimes, we express who we are. Today we hear of three different criminals and three different kinds of crimes. |
|
|
|
|
|
07.16.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
07.09.1999
|
Stories about what happens when we don't do something. It turns out that not falling in love, not doing our jobs, not spending time with our families is every bit as vivid and complicated an experience as doing something. |
|
|
|
|
|
07.02.1999
|
An idiosyncratic first-person travelogue about race relations and tourism from radio producer Rich Robinson and television producer Josh Seftel. Their radio story is about a trip they took to the new South Africa. Rich Robinson is black. Josh Seftel is white. The interracial pair travel through the still mostly-segregated society and have very different opinions about what they see, especially when it comes to some distant relatives of Josh's in South Africa. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
06.25.1999
|
Consider for a moment all the art forms that began in America: jazz, the blues, musical theater, rock n' roll, phonograph recordings, television, motion pictures, video games. But the art form in which America leads the world—more than any other—is the art of selling. In this show: case examples to prove the point. |
|
|
|
|
|
06.18.1999
|
For Father's Day, stories about fathers going out of their way to protect their kids, and kids going out of their way to protect their fathers. |
|
|
|
|
|
06.11.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
06.04.1999
|
Stories in which young people take matters into their own hands: students who become political activists, students who pull pranks, violent students. Broadcast for the tenth anniversary of the crackdown at Tiananmen Square. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
05.28.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
05.21.1999
|
Stories of people going home to places they've never been before. |
|
|
|
|
|
05.14.1999
|
A program taped before live audiences in Seattle (thanks to public radio station KUOW) and at HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. A taxonomy of different kinds of advice — and stories that illustrate why advice is so rarely taken. |
|
|
|
|
|
05.07.1999
|
Variations on what it means to be a girl and what it means to be a woman. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
04.30.1999
|
There's a tourist monument called Four Corners, where Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico meet. In this episode, we try to tell the story of life in America through portraits of life on four different corners, in four different states across the nation. |
|
|
|
|
|
04.23.1999
|
Stories about kids being mean to each other. |
|
|
|
|
|
04.16.1999
|
This entire show is devoted to just one story. A former pimp tells how he and three childhood friends became pimps in the 1970s in Oakland, California. He explains all the elaborate "rules of the game" among pimps and prostitutes of that era. He didn't have the stomach for the violence of pimping, and failed as a pimp because of that. Tamar Brott reports. |
|
|
|
|
|
04.09.1999
|
Stories of people trying to do good: Why they often fail and why they occasionally succeed. |
|
|
|
|
|
04.02.1999
|
Stories of the end of the world. More people believe it's more imminent than you probably realize. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
03.26.1999
|
April first is the one day of the year when we're allowed to enjoy deceiving others. But April Fools' Day is for amateur deceivers. The real pros are the people who can't control their lying, who lie without even knowing what the truth is. Everyone's known someone like this, but it's a topic that's only rarely studied or discussed publicly. Journalist and TALcontributing editor Margy Rochlin co-hosts. |
|
|
|
|
|
03.19.1999
|
Stories of people moving to this country: what they see and hear about America that those of us who were born here don't necessarily see. |
|
|
|
|
|
03.12.1999
|
Stories about those moments when someone tries to tell you a little bit more about themselves than you'd really rather know. |
|
|
|
|
|
03.05.1999
|
Four stories about people struggling at the fringes of our nation's media/music/infotainment industry. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
02.26.1999
|
Stories of people who choose not to live every moment to the fullest or smell the roses, and instead choose to withdraw from life, to make themselves numb. |
|
|
|
|
|
02.19.1999
|
How should we react to people who are in non-monogamous relationships? What should we think of these struggles with monogamy? |
|
|
|
|
|
02.12.1999
|
For Valentine's Day, stories of impossible love and heartbreak. |
|
|
|
|
|
02.05.1999
|
Stories from acclaimed storyteller Spalding Gray and others. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
01.29.1999
|
One thing that makes our country different from most others is this idea that you can recreate yourself as someone you'd prefer to be. But what if you're too good at it? We devote this entire episode to the story of Keith Aldrich, whose life is a history of most of the major cultural shifts in the second half of the Twentieth Century. |
|
|
|
|
|
01.22.1999
|
Three stories of people pretending to be something they're not, and what happens to them. |
|
|
|
|
|
01.15.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|
01.08.1999
|
With the number of prisoners in the United States rising rapidly, we present stories of their lives and the lives of their families and children. |
|
|
|
|
|
01.01.1999
|
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. |
|
|
|
|
|