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This American Life

Each week, This American Life tackles a theme – frenemies, summer camp, tech patents, you name it – and presents several stories on that theme. It’s mostly nonfiction reported stories and documentaries, but also occasional essays and fiction. The show debuted in 1995, is produced by Chicago Public Media, hosted by Ira Glass, and is often the most popular podcast in the country. PRI distributes it to radio, reaching 1.8 million weekly listeners. About 750,000 tune in via podcast and stream.

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Latest Episodes

  • #495: Hot In My Backyard

    Released 05.19.13

    After years of being stuck, the national conversation on climate change finally started to shift — just a little — last year, the hottest year on record in the U.S., with Hurricane Sandy flooding the New York subway, drought devastating Midwes...

  • #27: The Cruelty of Children

    Released 05.12.13

    Stories about kids being mean to each other... including a mysterious handbook for bullies, a surprising experiment conducted by a teacher who wants to make kids be nice, and a story of youthful backstabbing told by David Sedaris.

  • #494: Hit the Road

    Released 05.05.13

    It's spring, so we're opening windows and going places. This week we have stories of people who, for reasons that they can't always explain, feel compelled to get out and go somewhere. Including the story of one man who decides to take a trip from Philade...

  • #104: Music Lessons

    Released 04.28.13

    What's frustrating about music lessons, what's miraculous about them, and what they actually teach us.

  • #493: Picture Show

    Released 04.21.13

    This week, Israeli soldiers take snapshots of Palestinian boys, one house at a time, in the middle of the night.

  • #492: Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde

    Released 04.14.13

    Dr. Benjamin Gilmer (left) gets a job at a rural clinic. He finds out he’s replaced someone — also named Dr.

  • #458: Play the Part

    Released 04.07.13

    Stories of people who decide to flip their personalities and do the exact opposite of what they normally do.

  • #491: Tribes

    Released 03.31.13

    A Native American tribe is doing exactly the opposite of what you'd think they'd do: they're kicking people out of the tribe, huge numbers of them, including people whose ancestors without question were part of the tribe.

  • #490: Trends With Benefits

    Released 03.24.13

    The number of Americans receiving federal disability payments has nearly doubled over the last 15 years.

  • #233: Starting from Scratch

    Released 03.17.13

    Stories of people starting over, sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to.

  • #226: Reruns

    Released 03.10.13

    Stories of people stuck in their own personal reruns—moments or episodes that they revisit over and over again. You can watch an animated version of Robert Krulwich's Jackie O story from this episode.

  • #489: No Coincidence, No Story!

    Released 03.03.13

    We asked listeners to send us their best coincidence stories, and we got more than 1,300 submissions!

  • #488: Harper High School, Part Two

    Released 02.24.13

    We pick up where we left off last week in our second hour of stories from Harper High School in Chicago.

  • #487: Harper High School, Part One

    Released 02.17.13

    We spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot.

  • #486: Valentine's Day 2013

    Released 02.10.13

    Love makes us do crazy things. But usually not this crazy. This week for Valentine's Day we have stories of people going to extremes to find and pursue their one true love.

  • #188: Kid Logic

    Released 02.03.13

    Stories of kids using perfectly logical arguments, and arriving at perfectly wrong conclusions.

  • #485: Surrogates

    Released 01.27.13

    This week we look at people who see themselves in others and try to live out their lives through stand-ins — including the story of what one father saw in the convicted murderer he decided to adopt.

  • #173: Three Kinds of Deception

    Released 01.20.13

    A story of self-deception, a story about deceiving others, and a story about accidental deception. And how one type of deception can easily turn into another.

  • #484: Doppelgangers

    Released 01.13.13

    Calamari is on one side of the plate, sliced hog rectums are on the other. Which is which? We got a tip about a meat plant selling pig intestines as fake calamari, wondered if it could be true, and decided to investigate.

  • #483: Self-Improvement Kick

    Released 01.06.13

    A perfectly normal guy gets rid of everything he owns, changes his name, says goodbye to his friends — and begins walking.

  • #110: Mapping

    Released 12.30.12

    Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way — by drawing things we can see.

  • #482: Lights, Camera, Christmas!

    Released 12.23.12

    This holiday season we bring you a show filled with stories of people going to great lengths to throw a special Christmas for their families.

  • #304: Heretics

    Released 12.16.12

    The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who cast aside the idea of Hell, and with it everything he'd worked for over his entire life.

  • #481: This Week

    Released 12.09.12

    This week we take on ... this week. Stories united by one thing: They all happened in the seven days prior to broadcast. We try our hand reporting the global stories in Egypt and Afghanistan; and take on super local stories, too, like a man who tries va...

  • #480: Animal Sacrifice

    Released 12.02.12

    What animals sacrifice for us, and what we sacrifice for them. Including a story from Susan Orlean about dogs in World War II, and the <em>This American Life</em> staff confronts Ira about his dog, Piney. <strong>Photo:</strong> Dog wearing suicide bomb vest, 1943.

  • #479: Little War on the Prairie

    Released 11.25.12

    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.

  • #450: So Crazy It Just Might Work

    Released 11.18.12

    A few years ago a cancer researcher named Jonathan Brody gave a speech at his alma mater saying that people in his field really needed to think outside the box to find a cure.

  • #449: Middle School

    Released 11.11.12

    This week, at the suggestion of a 14-year-old listener, we bring you stories from the awkward, confusing, hormonally charged world of middle school.

  • #478: Red State Blue State

    Released 11.04.12

    Politics have divided our country to the extent that the two sides not only disagree on the solutions to the country’s problems, they represent two different realities.

  • #283: Remember Me

    Released 10.28.12

    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.

  • #477: Getting Away With It

    Released 10.21.12

    Why risk breaking the rules? Because you might get away with it. This week, we hear from people who get away with sneaking new laws on the books, others who break the law, and still others who just go off the grid of normally-accepted human behavior.

  • #172: 24 Hours at the Golden Apple

    Released 10.14.12

    The <em>This American Life</em> producers document one day in a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m.

  • #476: What Doesn&#039;t Kill You

    Released 10.07.12

    Stories of how people cope after brushes with death. Sometimes death comes as a disease. Sometimes it swims up and bites you.

  • #475: Send a Message

    Released 09.30.12

    This week people reach out in all kinds of ways to try and get their point across. And the recipients of those messages try to decipher what they mean. Messages in code, over the phone, and from beyond the grave.

  • #447: The Incredible Case of the P.I. Moms

    Released 09.23.12

    What do you get when you take a P.I. firm, then add in a bunch of sexy soccer moms, official sponsorship from Glock, a lying boss, and delusions of grandeur?

  • #474: Back to School

    Released 09.16.12

    As kids and teachers head back to school, we wanted to turn away from questions about politics and unions and money and all the regular school stuff people argue about, and turn to something more optimistic &mdash; an emerging theory about what to teach k...

  • #352: The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar

    Released 09.09.12

    In 1912 a four year-old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing in a swamp in Louisiana. Eight months later, he was found in the hands of a wandering handyman in Mississippi (the picture at left was taken just days later).

  • #361: Fear of Sleep

    Released 09.02.12

    Mike Birbiglia got used to strange things happening to him when he slept—until something happened that almost killed him (Mike's story is now a feature film, <em>Sleepwalk With Me</em>).

  • #473: Loopholes

    Released 08.26.12

    Only the clever need apply. This week, stories of people acting on a technicality in the face of some of life's toughest regulators: financial regulators, parents and God.

  • #472: Our Friend David

    Released 08.19.12

    Favorite stories by our longtime contributor and friend David Rakoff. <strong>Note</strong> that the podcast and streaming versions contain unbeeped words that could not play on radio.

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