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12.29.2006
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A girl signs up for a class. A couple hires an accountant. A group of co-workers decides to pool their money and buy a couple of lottery tickets. In the beginning, they're full of hope and optimism ... and then something turns. Stories of good ideas gone bad. |
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12.22.2006
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A full-throttle, show-stopping, no-holds-barred Christmas Spectacular! Shedding the crusty old Christmas stories of yore, this year we bring you brand new holiday classics. With special musical guest Marah! |
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12.15.2006
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A Muslim woman persuades her husband that their family would be happier if they left the West Bank and moved to America. They do, and things are good...until September 11. After that, the elementary school their daughter goes to begins using a textbook that says Muslims want to kill Christians. This and other stories of what happens when Muslims and non-Muslims try to communicate, and misfire. |
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12.08.2006
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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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12.01.2006
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Stories of people who are in over their heads and trying to stay afloat. |
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11.24.2006
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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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11.17.2006
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Carlton Pearson's church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in the city, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the reverend. He didn't have an affair. He didn't embezzle lots of money. His sin was something that to a lot of people is far worse: He stopped believing in Hell. |
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11.03.2006
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Recently, the British medical journal The Lancet published an study which updated their estimate of the number of Iraqis who've died since the U.S. invasion. With that in mind, we revisit a show we did in 2005 about the earlier study published in Lancet estimating the number of Iraqi deaths. That study was mostly ignored in the U.S. Alex Blumberg revisits the original study and looks at the new one. |
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10.27.2006
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For Halloween, scary stories that are all true. Kidnappings, zombie raccoons, haunted houses—real haunted houses!—and things that go "EEEEK!!!" in the night. Plus, a new story by David Sedaris, in which he walks among the dead. |
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10.20.2006
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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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10.13.2006
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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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10.06.2006
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A family wishes for years that they could do something to stop their neighbor's shocking behavior. Suddenly they get the power to decisively change things forever...and they have to decide whether they will. This, and other stories of everyday people who get saddled with great power—and the great sense of responsibility that goes with it. |
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09.29.2006
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Stories about being sucked into something against your will. In one story, a 9/11 widow finds herself having to comfort another distraught woman on national TV. And in a story by Nick Hornby, a boy is forced to play soccer to save his nation. |
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09.22.2006
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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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09.15.2006
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Stories of unconditional love between parents and children, and how hard love can sometimes be in daily practice. |
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09.08.2006
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How far will we go to get money? And once we've got it, what should we spend it on? The first half of this show is on making money, and the second half on spending it. |
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09.01.2006
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Stories about how easy it is for communication to go awry, and what the consequences can be after it does. |
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08.25.2006
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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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08.18.2006
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True stories that follow the plotline of the old kid's song "The Cat Came Back." It's the simplest plot in the world: something you thought was gone forever keeps returning, against all odds. |
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08.11.2006
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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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08.04.2006
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Stories of people and institutions who are worried about what the world thinks of them, and who take action ... decisive action. |
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07.28.2006
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Stories of very unusual pen pals. |
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07.21.2006
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Original stories from David Sedaris, Jonathan Goldstein, and others, on two animals who don't even seem like they should know each other, much less appear on the same radio show. |
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07.14.2006
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In this show, sons and daughters get to find out the one thing they've always wanted to know about their father. The answers aren't always what they hope for. |
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07.07.2006
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After four lawyers fail to get an innocent man out of prison, his friend takes on the case himself. He becomes a do-it-yourself investigator. He learns to read court records, he tracks down hard-to-find witnesses, he gets the real murderer to come forward with his story. In the end, he's able to accomplish all sorts of things the police and the professionals can't. |
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06.30.2006
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Stories about getting back together with your spouse, your country, your...Brahman bull. And how it never goes the way you think it's going to. |
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06.23.2006
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A grown man tries to get to the bottom of why his schoolmates threw him in a lake 20 years earlier. And a woman buys a house on the cheap, with the understanding that the seller will soon vacate. Ten years later, she's still waiting. These and other stories of things that never seem to come to an end. |
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06.16.2006
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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. |
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06.09.2006
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When comedienne Julia Sweeney and her brother both got cancer, she decided to tell the story the best way she knew how: in a comedy club. It might seem like a strange choice, but what resulted is halfway between standup comedy and true-life diary entries. |
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06.02.2006
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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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05.26.2006
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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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05.19.2006
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Stories about kids who actually want their parents looking out for them. |
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05.12.2006
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In this show we return to two radio programs originally broadcast in 1996 and 1997. In one show, listeners came onstage with their letters, which they read aloud. In another, listeners from around the country talked about all the brand new sorts of experiences they were having with this new technology that had entered everyone's lives, the Internet. Each show, in its way, is a kind of time capsule. |
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05.05.2006
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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. |
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04.28.2006
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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. |
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04.21.2006
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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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04.14.2006
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Stories about people trying to find new solutions to age-old problems—solutions that sometimes cause problems of their own. |
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04.07.2006
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Stories of people trying to love their neighbors ... and failing. |
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03.31.2006
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Stories of people starting over, sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to. |
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03.24.2006
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Stories of people who try simple mind games on others, and then find themselves way in over their heads. |
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03.17.2006
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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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03.10.2006
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The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country's legal tradition longer than we've actually been a country. But the War on Terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that prisoners should not be covered by habeas—or even by the Geneva Conventions—because they're the most fearsome enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes? |
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03.03.2006
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Stories about people who are remembered very differently than they'd wished. The ghost of a kindly, distinguished philanthropist supposedly plays pranks on guests at a Ramada hotel in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. A dying mother makes a tape for her developmentally disabled daughter, hoping she'll watch it someday, knowing she might not. |
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02.24.2006
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Stories about the kinds of chase games that just never end. From the high California desert to a high-end furniture showroom. |
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02.17.2006
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Stories of people living without. Nubar Alexanian explains what fish can do for him that his own ears cannot. Sarah Vowell explains the cheerful journalism of deprivation. And other stories. |
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02.10.2006
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In honor of Valentine's Day, This American Life brings you stories of how love blossoms, even when (perhaps) it shouldn't. |
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02.03.2006
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Stories that take place on the edge of civilization, just out of sight. |
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01.27.2006
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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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01.20.2006
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Sometimes, getting your big break isn't all it's cracked up to be. A comedy duo lands the gig that can make them famous—the Ed Sullivan Show at the height of Sullivan's popularity—and they bomb. A third-grader gets his big chance to please his mother and push his drunken father out of the picture. And other stories. |
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01.13.2006
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A girl signs up for a class. A couple hires an accountant. A group of co-workers decides to pool their money and buy a couple of lottery tickets. In the beginning, they're full of hope and optimism ... and then something turns. Stories of good ideas gone bad. |
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01.06.2006
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Stories about people who love their cars, for better or for worse. |
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