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12.27.2002
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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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12.20.2002
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Stories about why we should go to war in Iraq versus stories of why we shouldn't. |
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12.13.2002
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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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12.06.2002
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Stories of people stuck in their own personal reruns — moments or episodes that they revisit over and over again. |
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11.29.2002
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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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11.22.2002
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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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11.15.2002
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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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11.08.2002
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Home movies are often all the same — kids on the beach, people getting married, birthday parties — so why do we make and watch so many of them? Maybe it's because the story they show and the story they tell are different. In this show, we bring you five stories that all start with a fairly typical home movie but go on to tell a unique story. |
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11.01.2002
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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. |
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10.25.2002
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In this week's show, we celebrate the oft-beleaguered and misrepresented middleman. "Cut out the middleman! Death to the middleman!" the angry hordes cry. Not us. We say, "Hi, middleman. Here's three splendid acts to toast your subtle virtues." |
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10.18.2002
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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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10.11.2002
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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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10.04.2002
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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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09.27.2002
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Some people have a rather dark worldview that divides people into two groups: suckers and non-suckers. We hear their stories. |
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09.20.2002
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Stories of people traveling under fake papers, false identities, not for power or personal gain, but for their own deeper personal reasons. |
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09.13.2002
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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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09.06.2002
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Stories of people trying to love their neighbors ... and failing. |
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08.30.2002
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Stories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire. |
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08.23.2002
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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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08.16.2002
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Stories of innocent people fleeing from dangerous men in cars who shoot at them. Unlike in the movies, the pursuers aren't foreign agents or rogue CIA agents, but drunk off-duty policemen and small-town teenagers. Real-ife high-speed chases: who gets chased ... and who does the chasing. |
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08.09.2002
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For six months, Jack Hitt followed a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearsed and staged a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet. Shakespeare may seem like an odd match for a group of hardened criminals, but Jack found that they understand the Bard on a level that most of us might not. It's a play about murder and its consequences, performed by murderers living out the consequences. |
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08.02.2002
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It's been two years since the Mideast peace process collapsed, two years in which each side has done terrible things to the other side. We wanted to understand what that has done to people living in Israel and the West Bank, and to see if anyone is feeling hope. Host Ira Glass, along with This American Life contributors Adam Davidson and Nancy Updike, recently spent a week in Israel and the West Bank to put together this special program of stories about what life is like there these days ... with Palestinians stuck indoors for weeks under curfew and many Israelis trying to ignore the conflict. Though that, of course, isn't easy. |
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07.26.2002
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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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07.19.2002
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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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07.12.2002
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Stories of people who go to great lengths to give people what they want, and how they're rewarded sometimes, misguided other times. |
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07.05.2002
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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. |
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06.28.2002
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Though being gay no longer has much of a stigma in some parts of the country, being a sissy still does—even among gay men. In this show we have a number of surprising and unusual stories of sissies, their families, and why people still get so upset about them. |
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06.21.2002
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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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06.14.2002
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Stories about people who turned to the experts and got horrible advice. One story is about people who went to therapists who made them sicker. Another is about how the hosts of Car Talk inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) destroyed a car belonging to one of their own employees. |
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06.07.2002
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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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05.31.2002
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We take the stately laws of physics — laws which mathmaticians and scientists have spent centuries discovering and verifying — and apply them to the realm of human relationships, to see if they shed useful light on our daily lives. |
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05.24.2002
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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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05.17.2002
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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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05.10.2002
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Stories about what happens when a new guy comes on the scene, and changes the way everyone who was already there relates to each other. |
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05.03.2002
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Stories about what happens when you name names. When you turn someone over to the authorities, it can set into motion lots of huge, unintended consequences. A reporter turns over an interviewee to the FBI. A group of teachers turn in their principal. A director turns in his Communist colleagues to the United States Congress. |
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04.26.2002
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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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04.19.2002
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After a decade in which DNA evidence has freed over 100 people nationwide, it's become clear that DNA evidence isn't just proving wrongdoing by criminals, it's proving wrongdoing by police and prosecutors. In this show, we look at what DNA has revealed to us: how police get innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit and how they get witnesses to pin crimes on innocent people. There have always been suspicions that these kinds of things take place. With DNA, there's finally irrefutable proof. |
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04.12.2002
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Stories of people trying to do good: Why they often fail and why they occasionally succeed. |
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04.05.2002
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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. |
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03.29.2002
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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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03.22.2002
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Stories of people who tell a lie and then believe the lie more than anyone else does. In other words: stories about people pulling hoaxes ... on themselves. |
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03.15.2002
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Stories of high drama from our nation's workplaces. They turn out to be surprising, emotional places, with all the greed, jealousy, and ambition of real politics. |
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03.08.2002
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Stories about people who were told that they're different. Some of them were comfortable with it. Some didn't understand it. And some understood, but didn't like it. |
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03.01.2002
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Life aboard the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea that's supporting bombing missions over Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Only a few dozen people on board actually fly F-18s and F-14s. It takes the rest of the crew — over 5,000 people — to keep them in the air. One person stocks vending machines, twelve hours a day. Hundreds prepare food and do laundry. There are several different garage bands, each with its own following. This American Life producers Wendy Dorr, Alex Blumberg and Ira Glass visited the Stennis in January of 2002, about six weeks into its deployment. The entire hour is devoted to this one story. |
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02.22.2002
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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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02.15.2002
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In the hospital, we give up our normal schedule and sleep patterns; we give up our normal food and clothing; we're in a place that has its own rules and its own language and its own customs. And in the midst of all this, there's this complicated human interaction we have to negotiate: We have to deal with doctors and nurses to get the care we need. In this show we hear stories of those delicate and sometimes not-so-delicate negotiations. |
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02.08.2002
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Stories about couples that all take place decades after that moment their eyes meet. |
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02.01.2002
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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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01.25.2002
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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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01.18.2002
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For decades, the entry on "Sexual Deviations" in the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association contained 81 words. And for decades, homosexuality was included. We devote this entire episode to the story of the behind-the-scenes campaign to change the definition. |
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01.11.2002
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All the stories in this week's show center on personal recordings that one person made for just one other person. |
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01.04.2002
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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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