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12.28.2001
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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. |
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12.21.2001
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12.14.2001
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Birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones of all sorts...and how they mean something whether we want them to or not. A live show taped for our fifth anniversary, back in 2000, when we went on the road to Boston, New York, Chicago, and L.A. A co-production with public radio stations WBUR, WNYC, WBEZ, and KCRW. |
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12.07.2001
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In this time of war, when we're all feeling a heightened sense of "us" and "them," we wanted to take up the problem of "them." Some people need a good "them." Other people tend to see all "thems" as more like us. And so we bring you three stories of people misperceiving the them-miness of them. |
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11.30.2001
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Of all the wars to win, perhaps the propaganda war is the hardest. In this show, we bring you stories of propaganda wars past and present, by those who fought them and those who survived them. |
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11.23.2001
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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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11.16.2001
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Our entire show this week is one long story, sort of a real-life Hardy Boys mystery. More than most of our shows, this one lends itself to a Hollywood-style tagline. Perhaps: "You Might Break In ... But You'll Never Forget." Or "Dead Letters Tell No Tales." |
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11.09.2001
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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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11.02.2001
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Stories of people climbing to be number one. How do they do it? What is the fundamental difference between us and them? Paul Feig is the recent author of the children's book, Ignatius
MacFarland: Frequenaut!. |
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10.26.2001
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There's the time when you know something is happening, but you're not sure exactly what. The illness before it's diagnosed. The era, before it's been given a title. And something changes when the name is given. Stories of that transformation ... between what it is now, and what it was before it had a name. |
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10.19.2001
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Starting at 5 am and going until 5 am the next morning, we document a day in a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple. We hear from the waitress who has worked the graveyard shift for over two decades, the regular customers who come every day, the couples working out their problems, assorted drunks, and—of course—cops. |
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10.12.2001
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Can the secular world and the religious world understand each other? We ask that question while visiting Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Pastor Ted Haggard at the New Life Church has put in place a project to pray in front of the home of every person in the city, systematically, block by block and house by house. He's also helped organize a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year "prayer shield" over the city; all-night prayer vigils; and more. |
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10.05.2001
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In the movie Rashomon, one story is told from four different points of view. The story changes dramatically depending on who's telling it. This week, the events of September 11th, and how their meaning changes depending on who you talk to. |
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09.28.2001
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We try to sort out what the coming war will be like, and what our lives will be like during this war. |
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09.21.2001
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Stories in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. |
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09.14.2001
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In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a collection of stories in which people try to make sense of loss. |
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09.07.2001
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Every crime scene hides a story. In this week's show, we hear about crime scenes and the stories they tell. |
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08.31.2001
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The story of one man's journey from obscurity to international professional celebrity—aided only by his own hard work, a sneaker commercial, and mad handles. And other stories of amateurs hurtling themselves at the pros whose jobs they covet. |
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08.24.2001
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Many Americans have dreamy and romantic ideas about Paris, notions which probably trace back to the 1920s vision of Paris created by the expatriate Americans there. But what's it actually like in Paris if you're an American, without rose-colored glasses? |
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08.17.2001
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Stories for the stultifying, torpor-inducing, hottest heat of summer. |
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08.10.2001
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Stories of people whose lives are transformed by music. |
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08.03.2001
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There's a deep impulse in American culture that says that you can make yourself into anyone. Today, three stories about people who tried to do just that. |
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07.27.2001
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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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07.20.2001
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Stories about the animalness of animals, the irreducible ways in which they are not human. |
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07.13.2001
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Nearly this entire show is devoted to the story of the boat known as "Hitler's Yacht." It's a modern-day fable about what happens when the free market, the media, the World War II buffs, the Neo-Nazis, and the Jews all collide over a huge Nazi tourist trap. The boat arrived in America after World War II, and though there's no evidence that Hitler ever set foot on the decks, the name was attached to the vessel in the 1950s, and it stuck. Reporter Alix Spiegel describes the story of the vessel as "the biography of a collective fantasy." |
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07.06.2001
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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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06.29.2001
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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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06.22.2001
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Stories of kids using perfectly logical arguments, and arriving at
perfectly wrong conclusions. Plus, a story by Michael Chabon from his
book Werewolves in Their Youth,
about the opposite: an act of kid logic that succeeds where adult logic
fails. |
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06.15.2001
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For Father's Day, stories of dads who are utterly human in scale. |
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06.08.2001
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While the seniors danced at Prom Night 2001 in Hoisington, Kansas—a town of about 3,000—a tornado hit the town, destroying about a third of it. When they emerged from the dance, they discovered what had happened, and in the weeks that followed, they tried to explain to themselves why the tornado hit where it did. Plus other stories that happen on Prom Night. |
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06.01.2001
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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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05.25.2001
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Stories of people worshipping false idols ... and if that's always a bad thing. |
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05.18.2001
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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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05.11.2001
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Stories of people trying to love their neighbors ... and failing. |
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05.04.2001
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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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04.27.2001
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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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04.20.2001
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Stories about absent parents and the consequences for their children. In one, a woman writes letters to the missing father of her adolescent son about how the son is doing without him. In another, women using sperm donors wrestle with how much information they—and their future children—ought to know about their fathers. |
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04.13.2001
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Stories that make us cringe, and an investigation into just what, exactly, makes some stories capable of forcing this physical reaction out of us when other stories don't. We hear tales of personal humiliation, romance gone wrong, and people who profoundly misjudge how they're perceived by others. |
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04.06.2001
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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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03.30.2001
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Stories of the end of the world. More people believe it's more imminent than you probably realize. |
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03.23.2001
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Stories of people who try to revisit their childhoods. What they find. And what they do not find. |
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03.16.2001
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The story in a way of a town that time forgot, or more accurately, a town that tried to forget the times. A special broadcast of This American Life, co-hosted by award-winning journalist Alex Kotlowitz, author of the books There Are No Children Here and The Other Side of the River. It's the story of what at one time was one of most notoriously racist and corrupt suburbs in America. In the 1920s, Cicero was reputedly run by Al Capone, and federal indictments against organized crime there continued steadily all the way through the 1990s. In the 1960s, Cicero residents reacted so violently to threats of integration that officials told Martin Luther King, Jr.'s supporters that marching there would be a suicide mission. Today, two-thirds of the population is Mexican-American, but the political machine from decades past still holds power. A parable of racial politics in America, of white Americans not wanting change, not wanting to let in the outside world, and what happens when they have no choice. |
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03.09.2001
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We try to define the peculiar relationship between humans and animals. One story about a love triangle among two people and a cat. David Sedaris with a retrospective on his family's pets through the ages. And Brady Udall with a tale of love, redemption, and armadillos. They have more in common than you might think. |
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03.02.2001
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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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02.23.2001
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We answer the following questions about superpowers: Can superheroes be real people? (No.) Can real people become superheroes? (Maybe.) And which is better: flight or invisibility? (Depends who you ask.) |
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02.16.2001
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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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02.09.2001
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Stories of people living completely outside the grid of American life. Americans in Paris. Chinese in America. West Virginians in treehouses. Mexican-Americans in Rochester. |
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02.02.2001
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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. |
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01.26.2001
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Some people are born to deceive, some achieve deception, and some have deception thrust upon them. This week, an example of each scenario—including one from David Sedaris. |
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01.26.2001
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In the wake of the recent election debacle in Florida, the two political halves of this country seem angrier at each other than they have in decades. This week we bring you tales of the widening rift. Democrats explain why they're having trouble getting over it, and Republicans explain why this is so infuriating. And other stories of Florida and its likely legacy. |
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01.19.2001
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01.12.2001
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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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01.05.2001
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Stories of babysitters, and what goes on while mom and dad are away that mom and dad never find out about. |
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