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12.26.2003
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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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12.19.2003
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The vexing difficulty of finding the perfect gift, illustrated in three acts. |
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12.12.2003
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In early 2003, we brought you a special show about a California teenager, Hyder Akbar, who traveled to Afghanistan, his family's homeland, for the first time. His father had moved back to work for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Hyder brought along a tape recorder, and his audio diary, produced by Susan Burton, won the Silver Award for Best Documentary at the 2003 Third Coast International Audio Festival. This summer, Hyder returned to Afghanistan, to the rural province of Kunar, where his family is from and where his father is now governor. In this new audio diary, Hyder has amazing access to all sorts of things few reporters get to see: U.S. forces interrogating a suspected terrorist, soldiers trying to mediate between the new Afghan government and local people, and more. His recordings were produced for radio by Susan Burton, with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. |
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12.05.2003
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Stories from faraway, hard-to-get-to places, where all rules are off, nefarious things happen because no one's looking, and there's no one to appeal to. |
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11.28.2003
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During the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's — the highest turkey consumption period of the year — we bring you an annual This American Life tradition: stories of turkeys, chickens, geese, ducks, fowl of all kinds, real and imagined, and their mysterious hold over us. |
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11.21.2003
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Biblical fables ripped from today's headlines. In his ongoing effort to write his own version of the Bible, Jonathan Goldstein retells the story of Cain and Abel. Finally we hear Cain's side of the story. Plus: neighbors in a small town in Illinois wonder if they could have stepped in — as their neighbors' keepers — to prevent a brutal triple murder. And the story of a man who lives his life among his political enemies, feeling responsible for the problems he believes they're creating for everyone. |
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11.14.2003
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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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11.07.2003
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Why is it always harder than you think it'll be? We explore several case examples of the annoying gap between theory and practice. |
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10.31.2003
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We make what's usually invisible, visible: the world of trash. We follow the trash from the sanitation men on the street, to the mob guys who controlled the hauling business, to the people who actually live in dumps. |
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10.24.2003
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Some stories we make happen, others happen to us. Extremes from the latter category, where people let things happen to them and don't act, even when maybe they should. David Rakoff guest hosts. |
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10.17.2003
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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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10.10.2003
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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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10.03.2003
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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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09.26.2003
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09.19.2003
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What is this thing? This thing called love, that is. For answers, we explore the romance novel industry, a $1.5 billion empire run almost entirely by and for women. Plus, relearning the rules of romance from the other side of the gender line. And Sarah Vowell tells the story of the Greatest Romance of the 20th Century. |
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09.12.2003
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Stories of very unusual pen pals. |
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09.05.2003
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What is it about them, our mean friends? They treat us badly, they don't
call us back, they cancel plans at the last minute; and yet we come back
for more. We offer an inquiry into the phenomenon—and perhaps some
helpful hints on breaking the cycle. |
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08.29.2003
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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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08.22.2003
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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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08.15.2003
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In real life, we usually never get to invent ingenious solutions, like the guy in the old TV series MacGyver. Today, four real stories in which real people invent amazingly clever solutions to their problems. |
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08.08.2003
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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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08.01.2003
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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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07.25.2003
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Stories about what the passage of time can do to someone. When each story starts, the world's aligned one way. Years pass — or sometimes just months — and everything's different. |
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07.18.2003
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Living behind enemy lines among the enemy, it's sometimes hard to remember why you're fighting in the first place. |
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07.11.2003
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Instead of the regular "each week we choose a theme, and bring you three or four stories on that theme" business, this week we throw all that away and bring you twenty stories—yes, twenty—in sixty minutes. Inspiration for this week's show came from the Neo-Futurists, whose long-running Chicago show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind promises 30 Plays in 60 Minutes every single weekend. |
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07.04.2003
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Four stories about people struggling at the fringes of our nation's media/music/infotainment industry. |
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06.27.2003
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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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06.20.2003
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Stories of people putting themselves in charge in very unlikely, unpromising circumstances. |
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06.13.2003
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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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06.06.2003
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Stories of people who are lost, histories that are lost, and things that are lost. This show was recorded onstage in front of audiences on a five-city tour in May 2003. The cities: Boston, Washington DC, Portland Oregon, Denver and Chicago. Thanks to the public radio stations who presented the show in those cities: WBUR in Boston, WAMU in DC, Oregon Public Broadcasting/OPB in Portland, Colorado Public Radio in Denver, and Chicago Public Radio in our hometown. |
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05.30.2003
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Stories of what can and cannot be translated. A short, non-athletic, bespectacled East Asian studies major who couldn't make his high school basketball team finds himself in the NBA as the personal translator for the first-ever Chinese pro basketball superstar, Yao Ming. Plus, a Palestinian man teaches Hebrew classes in the Gaza strip to Palestinians eager to learn news from the other side of the checkpoint. |
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05.23.2003
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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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05.16.2003
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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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05.09.2003
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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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05.02.2003
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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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04.25.2003
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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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04.18.2003
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Sure, John Kerry got in trouble for using the phrase, but we have no fear. Because we know that regime change, like charity, begins at home. This week: stories of regime change in everyday life — people switching jobs, people switching families, businesses dying and new ones starting in their place. |
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04.11.2003
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(Audio is from the updated 2004 broadcast) |
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04.04.2003
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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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03.28.2003
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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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03.21.2003
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03.14.2003
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During this week in which words are failing on an international level, from Washington to Paris to Baghdad, we ask: Does talking about it really help? Stories where it does, and stories where it doesn't. |
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03.07.2003
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Stories of people starting over, sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to. |
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02.28.2003
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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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02.21.2003
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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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02.14.2003
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It's been said that truth is the first casualty of war. In this week's show, we try to get the real stories from three very different wars. |
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02.07.2003
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Stories of people trying to save the world one person at a time, and stories of sudden truths delivered by complete strangers. |
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01.31.2003
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Teenage Embed, Part One. In January 2002, the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, spoke at Georgetown University. There he urged Afghan-Americans, especially young ones, to move back to Afghanistan. It's possible that the very first teenager to heed his invitation was Hyder Akbar, 17, from Concord, California. In the summer of 2002, he travelled with his father to live in their home country. As luck would have it, he met a radio producer named Susan Burton before he left, and she gave him a tape recorder to take along. This show is devoted to his extraordinary recordings. In Kabul, Akbar learns to use a Kalashnikov and spends his days with his one-eyed war-hero uncle. By the end of the summer his father is appointed the official spokesman for the new Afghan government, which gives him insider's access to everything important that happens in Kabul. He meets warlords and sees the President. Hours after a bomb explodes in a market, he walks through the bloody, glass-strewn marketplace. A year later, in the summer of 2003, Hyder returned to Afghanistan and recorded stories that are, if anything, even more amazing than the ones in this show. That show, Teenage Embed, Part Two, takes place in Kunar province, where Hyder's dad was appointed governor. Susan Burton produced Hyder's audio diaries for the radio. Funding for her story came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. |
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01.24.2003
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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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01.17.2003
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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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01.10.2003
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01.03.2003
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Two stories about love, and what people mean when they use the word love. Or, looked at differently, two modern-day reinterpretations of the Frog Prince story. One concerns a pretty man falling in love with an unlikely woman. Another story involves an unlikely woman falling in love with a pretty bird. |
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