These selected episodes of This American Life emphasize the soft sciences and humanities as explored through oral history, texts, and primary sources. See below for a more detailed explanation of what I mean. If you regularly partake of This American Life via airwave radio or streaming telephonics-based radio, I encourage you to donate so that others may benefit. This is primarily a list and most of the text is straight “ctrl-c, ctrl-v” [com-c, com-v] directly from the TAL “Radio Archive” with little to no commentary.
Whole episodes are just under an hour. If portions of episodes were selected, the act’s duration is declared.
Click HERE for a link to the This American Life “Radio Archive” and select episodes/acts using the year and episode number provided here.
532–Magic Words (2014)
Prologue:
“Ira talks to reporter Jake Halpern about a scene he saw take place in a Georgia courtroom where a couple uttered some magic words that seemed to make their debt disappear completely. Jake describes the scene in his new book, Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall St. to the Underworld. (10 minutes)”
Act 1:
“When Jonathan Goldstein was 11, his father gave him a book called Ultra-Psychonics: How to Work Miracles with the Limitless Power of Psycho-Atomic Energy. The book was like a grab bag of every occult, para-psychology, and self-help book popular at the time. It promised to teach you how to get rich, control other people’s minds, and levitate. Jonathan found the book in his apartment recently and decided to look into the magical claims the book made. (17 minutes)”
514—Thought That Counts (2013)
Act 2:
“Starlee Kine tells the story of hundreds of boxes left behind by the late Andy Warhol. The boxes, an art project he titled “Time Capsules,” includes hundreds of thousands of objects from all parts of his life. It’s taken museum staff at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh decades to sort it all out, and try to make sense of what’s included. (11 minutes)”
509—It Says so Right Here (2013)
“Everyone knows you can’t always believe what you read, but sometimes even official documents aren’t a path to the truth. This week we have stories of people whose lives are altered when seemingly boring documents like birth certificates and petitions are used against them. And a family wrestles with a medical record that has a very clear, but complicated diagnosis.”
496—When Patents Attack (2013)
Act 2 in particular; listen to the whole episode for context:
“The dramatic conclusion to Laura and Alex’s search for information about Intellectual Ventures, and the inventor they claimed they were helping, Chris Crawford. The story turns out to be different than the one Intellectual Ventures originally told. (22 minutes)”
479—Little War on the Prairie (2012)
“Growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, John Biewen says, nobody ever talked about the most important historical event ever to happen there: in 1862, it was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged after a war with white settlers. John went back to Minnesota to figure out what really happened 150 years ago, and why Minnesotans didn’t talk about it much after.”
[I’m apparently among the generation of Minnesotans who learned about this in school. I was honestly shocked to learn previous generations did not.]
461—Take the Money and Run for Office (2012)
“For anyone who has ever heard the term ‘Washington insider’ and felt outside — we are with you. So this week, we go inside the rooms where the deals get made, to the actual moment that the checks change hands — and we ask the people writing and receiving the checks what, exactly, is the money buying?”
441—When Patents Attack (2011)
“Why would a company rent an office in a tiny town in East Texas, put a nameplate on the door, and leave it completely empty for a year? The answer involves a controversial billionaire physicist in Seattle, a 40 pound cookbook, and a war waging right now, all across the software and tech industries.”
427—Original Recipe (2011)
“The formula for Coca-Cola is one of the most jealously guarded trade secrets in the world. Locked in a vault in Atlanta. Supposedly unreplicable. But we think we may have found the original recipe. And to see if the formula actually might be Coke, we made a batch. Or, anyway, we asked the folks at Jones Soda and Sovereign Flavors to whip up some up, to see if it tastes like Coke. The recipe is here.”
403—NUMMI (2010)
“A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn’t learn the lessons—until it was too late.”
383—The Origin Story (2009)
Act 2:
“Ira tells the story of the 1953 U.S. Supreme Court case that formed the basis for the controversial state secret privilege—the precedent that allows the United States government to stop lawsuits by claiming that national security secrets might be revealed in court. Ira talks to Barry Siegel, author of the book Claim of Privilege, and Judy Loether, whose father’s death was at the center of the landmark Supreme Court case. (14 minutes)”
373—New Boss (2009)
Act 2:
“An accountant, Bruce Wisan, is hired by the state of Utah to clean up a very complicated mess in a complicated place: Short Creek, home to hundreds of members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—or FLDS, which practices polygamy. The community had been run by the notorious Warren Jeffs, now in prison for rape. Jeffs had been in charge of the FLDS church, and also of the giant trust which church members paid into all their lives. But when Jeffs became a fugitive, he began to mismanage the $112 million trust, and so the Utah attorney general stepped in, giving Wisan control. Wisan had plans: He was going to modernize the town utilities, improve the roads, and most important, give people titles to their homes, which under Jeffs were owned and controlled by the church trust. But Wisan quickly ran into an enormous problem: The majority of people in Short Creek would have nothing to do with him or his ideas. Claire Hoffman reports. Claire also wrote about Wisan for Portfolio Magazine in June 2008, in an article called ‘Satan’s Accountant.’ (23 minutes)”
368—Who Do You Think You Are? (2008)
Act 1:
Studs Terkel, the Chicago reporter who recorded oral histories of ordinary Americans, died last week. We assembled a collection of his work from his Hard Times radio series, in which people talk about their experiences during the Depression—how everyone simultaneously became poor, regardless of their class. (32 minutes)
353—The Audacity of Government (2008)
Acts 1-2, 3 a little:
“Ira Glass tells the story of a little-known treaty dispute with far-reaching ramifications for our understanding of executive power. The dispute is between the President and one of his appointees…to the International Boundary Commission with Canada. This little-known commission carried out its function without fanfare or incident for over a hundred years, until a couple of retirees in Washington State built a wall in their backyard and, quite literally, set off an international incident. (23 minutes)”
“This American Life contributor Jack Hitt uncovers a strange practice within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. If a foreign national marries a U.S. citizen and schedules an interview for a green card, but the U.S. citizen dies before the interview takes place, the foreign national is scheduled for deportation with no appeal—even if the couple has children who are U.S. citizens. Jack talks with Brent Renison, a lawyer who’s representing over 130 people in this situation, mostly widows, who are seeking to overturn the Immigration Service’s rule. (20 minutes)”
“Ira Glass interviews Charlie Savage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Boston Globe, who’s written a book called Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy about the ways the Bush Administration claims executive powers that other presidents haven’t claimed. Charlie talks with Ira about the current candidates for President and their views on the scope of executive power. (4 minutes)”
350—Human Resources (2008)
Act 1:
“We hear from New York City school teachers about a secret room in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there, and when they arrive, they find out they’re under investigation for something. They have to wait in this room all day, every day, until the matter is cleared up. They call this bureaucratic purgatory ‘the rubber room.’ Some teachers have been stuck in it for years. (23 minutes)”
310—Habeas Schmabeas (2006)
Act 1:
“Jack Hitt explains how President Bush’s War on Terror changed the rules for prisoners of war and how it is that under those rules, it’d be possible that someone whose classified file declares that they pose no threat to the United States could still be locked up indefinitely—potentially forever!—at Guantanamo. (26 minutes).”
294—Image Makers (2005)
Act 1:
“Alex Blumberg tells the story of an audacious act of rebranding done by a group of people who aren’t normally thought of as very audacious: public librarians. In Michigan, they’ve started staging rock concerts in libraries. The band that’s been thrown into the experiment— The High Strung—couldn’t be more perfect for the job. (23 minutes)”
293—A Little Bit of Knowledge (2005)
“Stories about the pitfalls of knowing just a little bit too little.”
289—Go Ask Your Father (2005)
“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.”
282—DIY (2005)
“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.”
270—Family Legend (2004)
“How, one might wonder, could a simple hunk of cheese drive a wedge between an aging aunt and her devoted niece? Sure, every family has its share of grudges, secrets and bad behavior.”
242—Enemy Camp (2003)
Act 1:
“Patrick Wall was a special kind of monk. He was a fixer. The Catholic Church sent him to problem parishes where priests had been removed because of scandal. His job was to come in, keep events from going public and smooth things over until a permanent replacement priest was found. But after four different churches in four years, after covering up for pedophiles and adulterers and liars and embezzlers he decided to make a change. Carl Marziali tells his story. You can read the statement from St. John’s Monastery on sex abuse by their monks, and see the website of the Survivor’s Network of Those Abused by Priests. (21 minutes)”
[Note: Church archives and record-keeping practices are discussed at some length.]
232—The Real Story (2003)
Act 2:
“For many years, Israeli citizens learned a sanitized version of what happened during their War of Independence in 1948. They learned that 700,000 Arabs fled the country on their own accord. But in the late 1980s, a group of Israeli historians gained access to most of the government documents from the war and started writing a truer, less flattering version of the story: That in some cases, the Palestinians were forced out, or scared away, and then not allowed to return. Ira discusses the real history and its impact on the Israeli public with some of the men who uncovered it: Benny Morris, author of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949, and Tom Segev, who wrote 1949: The First Israelis. He also talks to BZ Goldberg, one of the filmmakers behind the Emmy-winning documentary about Israeli and Palestinian kids, called Promises. (20 minutes)”
226—Reruns (2002)
Act 3:
“Sarah Vowell identifies a phenomenon that’s sort of a cultural rerun. It’s an analogy that gets made over and over in different situations: people who often are not black, or women, or in any way involved with civil rights, comparing themselves to Rosa Parks. (7 minutes)”
225—Home Movies (2002)
“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.”
221—Fake ID (2002)
“Stories of people traveling under fake papers, false identities, not for power or personal gain, but for their own deeper personal reasons.”
204—81 Words (2002)
“The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.”
201—Them (2001)
Act 3:
“In a 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.”
200—Hearts and Minds (2001)
“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.”
199—House on Loon Lake (2001)
“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.’”
190—Living the Dream (2001)
Act 2:
“Writer John Hodgman in New York tells the story of how he dreamt of getting to know the B-movie star Bruce Campbell, and how his unlikely dream accidentally came true, partly to his delight, partly to his horror. (16 minutes)”
189—Hitler’s Yacht (2001)
“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.”
178—Superpowers (2001)
Acts 1-3:
“Host Ira Glass talks to comic artist Chris Ware, who thought about superheroes a lot of the time as a kid. In grade school, Chris drew superheroes, he invented his own character named The Hurricane (not to be confused with Reuben Carter), and he made a superhero costume. Sometimes he wore parts of the costume to school under his regular clothes, which went fine until he realized he would have to change clothes for gym class. Click below to see the comic Chris made about this story. His book, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, is also inhabited by a ‘superhero’ of sorts. (6 minutes)”
“Kelly McEvers with the story of Zora, a self-made superhero. From the time she was five, Zora had recurring dreams in which she was a 6’5″ warrior queen who could fly and shoot lightning from her hands. She made a list of all the skills she would need to master if she wanted to actually become the superhero she dreamed of being. Sample items: Martial arts, evasive driving and bomb diffusion. She actually checked off most things on the list…and then had a run-in with the CIA. (17 minutes)”
“Ira talks with Jonathan Morris, the amazingly funny and charming editor of the website Gone and Forgotten, an Internet archive of failed comic book characters. Jonathan explains what makes a new superhero succeed, and what makes him tank. (9 minutes)”
167—Memo to People of the Future (2000)
“Stories of people who are engaged in something that’s both difficult and probably futile: Trying to control how they’ll be seen by generations to come.”
160—Character Assassination (2000)
“In context of the Presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, we hear stories of character assassination…political and non-political.”
153—Dolls (1999)
Act 1:
“Stories of what people are playing at when they play with dolls.”
148—The Angels Wanna Wear my Red Suit (1998)
“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.”
137—The Book that Changed Your Life (1999)
Act 1, 3-4:
“More of Alexa Junge and how Moss Hart’s autobiography changed her life. She followed his path, learned specific lessons, and had a vision of him that was absolutely clear—until she met his widow. (10 minutes)”
“Reporter Jeremy Goldstein tells the story of a man who had many books change his life, even though he’d never read them. (14 minutes) Available: The Journals of Lewis and Clark, containing excerpts from the explorers’ journals.”
“Writer Meghan Daum goes to DeSmet, South Dakota, where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived and where many of the books she wrote in the Little House on the Prairie series are set. It turns out to be remarkably similar to what Meghan had pictured before she went: The people seem like they are genuinely trying to hold on to the values Laura Ingalls Wilder writes about in her books. (15 minutes)”
128—Four Corners (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.”
127—Pimp Anthropology (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.”
125—Apocalypse (1999)
“Stories of the end of the world. More people believe it’s more imminent than you probably realize.”
120—Be Careful Who You Pretend to Be (1999)
Acts 1, 3:
“Ron Copeland is a historical interpreter at the Conner Prairie Living History Museum, outside of Indianapolis. For several months a year, in his job, he pretends to be a slaveowner in the old south. People come looking to experience the slave experience. He screams at them. He bosses them around. And it’s starting to change him. (14 minutes)”
“Alix Spiegel travels with a group of white suburbanites as they pretend to be runaway slaves, at the Conner Prairie Living History Museum. Her goal: to find out what it is that people actually get out of this elaborate game of pretend. (24 minutes)”
110—Mapping (1998)
“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.”
105—Take a Negro Home (1998)
Act 1:
“Rich Robinson’s father is black, his mother is white. They married during the civil rights movement, believing the whole nation was moving toward greater and greater integration. After having three children, they divorced. Rich’s mom went back to her segregated white world. His dad returned to his segregated black world. In this story, Rich sets out to discover the role that race played in their divorce and the role it played in their initial attraction. It’s something he’d never discussed with them before. And he wants something more personal: advice on whether they think he should marry white or black. (32 minutes)”
[Note: This episode explores memory and the fog of history that affects all of us. Also as a black/white person this episode means much to me anyway.]
70—Other People’s Mail (1997)
“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.”
68—Lincoln’s Inaugural (1997)
“A show for July 4th weekend. We begin with perhaps the most moving, poetic inaugural speech in American history, and look at its legacy today. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln wondered aloud why God saw fit to send the slaughter of the Civil War to the United States. His conclusion: that slavery was a kind of original sin for the United States, for both North and South, and all Americans had to do penance for it.”
66—Tales from the Net (1997)
“Are people having experiences on the Internet they wouldn’t have anywhere else? Several weeks ago, This American Life invited listeners to help answer that question.”
14—Accidental Documentaries (1995)
“What unites these stories on the surface is that they’re all made from old tapes, recordings found in attics and thrift stores. What unites them under that surface — and not far under it — is that they all end up being stories about fathers and the legacies that fathers leave their children.”
~~~~~~~~~~
[insert witty, pithy transition. Something that shows how funny and thoughtful I can be. Wait–am I writing that?]
Ira Glass’ weekly proclamation that “each week we choose a theme and put together different stories on that theme” is deceptively imprecise. Glass’ themes are usually episode titles while the meaning behind these titles, the true themes, are folded into his prefaces for every act. Consider episode 204 and the theme 81 Words. Themes of this story, which is actually a single act, about the American Psychiatric Association removing homosexuality from the DSM could be Vindication or perhaps Redemption.
In lieu of the traditional themes This American Life employs an in-house library of 95 general tags, which assist user browsing. Starting alphanumerically at “9/11” and concluding at “writing,” one can guess some tags are used more often than others. At the time I write this there were 102 acts tagged “journalism” but only one act tagged “outer space.”
My effort to write a This American Life libguide began when I entered an essential but tedious aspect of my project position. This American Life became my best friend as the noise of the open office numbed my mind and body like a cold fog.
Ira Glass became my gateway to a different world but I was picky about what I listened to. I initially dismissed the tags as too general and went back to my favorite search method in my ocean of metadata tedium—perusal. I examined every episode summary in reverse chronological order and cherry picked. When I reached the mid 1990s and the episodes on “politics” and “government” became quaint (at best) or irrelevant (at worst) I looked deeper into themes and topics of marginal interest. Typically there were one or two acts in each of these episodes that suited me. When these ran out I finally waded through the subject tags or specific contributors but this was like hand-tilling an already plowed field; sure I was still getting what I wanted but the returns diminished greatly.
I craved soft sciences, history, maps, and other documentation-based stories–the kind of personal interests that steered me to become an archivist in the first place.
To help me in my search I put myself in the mindset of Ira Glass. I asked: What kind of show would I produce and what would its theme and tags be? Sadly it will never come to be but if it did the episode would be titled thusly:
“Labels: How people past and present choose to look at the world around them. How they share their insights. And how the rest of us deal with their perspectives—whether we like it or not.”
If there were such a theme, the acts would have newly invented tags like “oral history,” “primary sources,” “geography,” “anthropology,” “libraries/archives,” and a handful of existent tags like “history” and “government”; Sarah Vowell, Shalom Auslander, Sarah Koenig, Alex Blumberg, and a reanimated David Rakoff would all contribute. The episode would be seven hours long.
I suspect an episode with the above theme would be enjoyed by many fellow librarians/archivists but until it is produced I cobbled together the above list of episodes befitting this perfect theme. As an information professional I naturally excluded many, many enjoyable episodes and acts because they were out of scope.
If any reader can think of episodes I missed, post your suggestion in the comments and I will seriously consider it.
Counterfactual Archivist 