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This American Life

Each week we choose a theme. Then anything can happen. This American Life is true stories that unfold like little movies for radio. Personal stories with funny moments, big feelings, and surprising plot twists. Newsy stories that try to capture what it’s like to be alive right now. It’s the most popular weekly podcast in the world, and winner of the first ever Pulitzer Prize for a radio show or podcast. Hosted by Ira Glass and produced in collaboration with WBEZ Chicago.

Sometimes, life’s biggest mysteries require one very specific person to answer them.

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 • Prologue: 7-year-old Miles has lots of questions. More specifically, he has questions about the famous car chase from “The Blues Brothers” movie. We arrange for him to talk to stunt coordinator Gary Powell so he can get the answers he so desperately wants. (9 minutes)
 • Act One: Producer Aviva DeKornfeld looks into why comedian Daniel Sloss’s comedy special has been responsible for so many couples breaking up. (17 minutes)
 • Act Two: We hear from Kwaneta Harris, a former nurse incarcerated in Texas, who is constantly asked for medical advice by her neighbors. (17 minutes)
 • Act Three: Producer Diane Wu talks to Juna, a young woman who is getting advice from someone uniquely equipped to guide her to the love life she wants. (12 minutes)

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856: You’ve Come to the Right Person

Artifacts and exhibits of this particular moment we are living through.

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 • Exhibit One: Ira talks to producer Emmanuel Dzotsi, who brings the first exhibit into the studio with him: a chunk of concrete with some yellow paint on it. He got it from the demolition site in Washington, DC, where the giant Black Lives Matter letters are being dug out of the street with heavy equipment. (8 minutes)
 • Exhibit Two: Producer Aviva DeKornfeld talks to Ranjani Srinivasan, who tells the story of how her life was transformed over five days via a series of events that started out confusing and escalated to frightening. (25 minutes)
 • Exhibit Three: Producer Laura Starecheski takes us inside one dramatic court hearing on the Trump administration’s executive order and new policy banning transgender people from serving in the military. (20 minutes)

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857: Museum of Now

People immersed in chaos try to solve for what it all adds up to.

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 • Prologue: A scientist who is used to organizing data starts tracking scientific meetings that seem to exist only on paper—meetings that might decide the fate of years of research. The NIH website shows one reality; the empty conference rooms tell another story. She graphs the chaos. (9 minutes)
 • Act One: American doctors returning from Gaza compare notes and start to see a pattern. (28 minutes)
 • Act Two: A woman watches her partner get taken in handcuffs with no explanation. Days later, she spots him in the most unexpected place. The coordinates of her life suddenly don't make sense as she navigates the bewildering map of the US immigration system. (23 minutes)

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859: Chaos Graph

A show about people who are suddenly confronted with who they are.

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 • Prologue: Guest host Aviva DeKornfeld tells Ira Glass about breaking into a community pool as a kid, and the split-second decision that has haunted her ever since. (4 minutes)
 • Act One: Some people are great in a crisis. Others, not so much. Does that mean anything about who we really are? Tobin Low investigates. (10 minutes)
 • Act Two: Aviva DeKornfeld has the story of Leisha Hailey, who was certain she had the next million-dollar idea. (11 minutes)
 • Act Three: Comedian Mike Birbiglia talks about the questions his daughter asks him and how trying to answer them showed him surprising reflections of himself. (15 minutes)
 • Act Four: David Kestenbaum tells the story of the suspicious disappearance of multiple shoes and a woman determined to explain it. (8 minutes)

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860: Suddenly: A Mirror!

Conversations across a divide: People who are outside a war zone check in with family, friends, and strangers inside.

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 • Prologue: The Hammash family’s group chat unfolds over texts, starting before the war. (8 minutes)
 • Act One: When Yousef Hammash left Gaza a year ago, his sisters decided to stay behind. We hear about the toll that separation has taken on Yousef and the sister he’s closest to, Aseel. (30 minutes)
 • Act Two: Mohammed Mhawish, a reporter who left Gaza a year ago with his family, talks to a young woman in Gaza about how she manages her hunger. Israel blockaded all food from Gaza for more than two months. (15 minutes)
 • Coda: Chana gives a short update about Banias, a 9-year-old girl in Gaza she's been speaking with for months. (4 minutes)

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861: Group Chat

On his first day in office, President Trump decided to freeze all U.S. foreign aid. Soon after, his administration effectively dissolved USAID—the federal agency that delivers billions in food, medicine, and other aid worldwide. Many of its programs have been canceled. Now, as USAID officially winds down, we try to assess its impact. What was good? What was not so good? We meet people around the world wrestling with these questions and trying to navigate this chaotic moment.

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 • Prologue: Just one box of a specially enriched peanut butter paste can save the life of a severely malnourished child. So why have 500,000 of those boxes been stuck in warehouses in Rhode Island? (13 minutes)
 • Act One: USAID was founded in 1961. Since then, it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars all over the world. What did that get us? Producer David Kestenbaum talked with Joshua Craze and John Norris about that. (12 minutes)
 • Act Two: Two Americans moved to Eswatini when that country was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. With support from USAID, they built a clinic and started serving HIV+ patients. Now that US support for their clinic has ended, they are wondering if what they did was entirely a good thing. (27 minutes)
 • Act Three: When USAID suddenly stopped all foreign assistance without warning or a transition plan, it sent people all over the world scrambling. Especially those relying on daily medicine provided by USAID. Producer Ike Sriskandarajah spoke to two families in Kenya who were trying to figure it out. (8 minutes)

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862: Some Things We Don't Do Anymore

What goes on while mom and dad are away, that mom and dad never find out about. Including the story of two teenagers who decide to invent children to babysit, as an excuse to get out of their own house.

 • We listen in on a ritual that happens in millions of families every week: kids getting dropped off at the babysitters. Six-year-old Dylan and nine-year-old Sarah explain what they can and can't get away with when they have a babysitter. After that, host Ira Glass has a few words about Mary Poppins, who is the Gold Standard of all fictional babysitters. The movie Mary Poppins contains the classic modern song about babysitting. We hear several versions of the song over the course of the program. The first is by Chicago girl punk/pop band, the Dishes. (5 minutes)
 • Act One: Lots of babysitting is done by family members. Hillary Frank reports on what can happen when a teenaged son is put in charge of his younger brothers. It's not pretty. (14 minutes)
 • Act Two: The story of several huge companies that accidentally got put into the babysitting business in a big, big way because of snow on December 26, 1988. Every year on the day after Christmas, divorced kids all over America fly from one parent to the other. In 1988, lots of them got snowed in at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Susan Burton and her little sister were among them. (9 minutes)
 • Act Three: Myron Jones and his sister Carol Bove explain what happened when they were teenagers, and they ended up babysitting children who didn't exist. (25 minutes)

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175: Babysitting

On a summer day in 1951, two baby girls were born in a hospital in small-town Wisconsin. The infants were accidentally switched, and went home with the wrong families.

 • Host Ira Glass introduces four characters: Kay McDonald, who raised a daughter named Sue, and Mary Miller, who raised a daughter named Marti. In 1994, Mary Miller wrote letters to Sue and Marti, confessing the secret she'd kept for 43 years: The daughters had been switched at birth and raised by the wrong families. This week's entire show is devoted to the story of Mary Miller's secret and what happened when both families finally learned the truth. (6 1/2 minutes)
 • Act One: Reporter Jake Halpern tells the story of Marti Miller and Sue McDonald, the daughters who were switched at birth, and the many complications that came with learning the truth. Jake is a writer of several books and creator of the comic, "Welcome to the New World.” (26 minutes)
 • Act Two: Jake Halpern tells the mothers' sides of the story. At 69, Kay McDonald had to cope not only with the news that her daughter wasn't her own, but that another mother had known the whole time. And Mary Miller explains why she was tormented by her secret but unable for decades to share it. (26 minutes)

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360: Switched at Birth

A doctor named Benjamin Gilmer gets a job at a rural clinic in North Carolina. He’s replaced another doctor named Gilmer – Dr. Vince Gilmer – who went to prison after killing his own father. But the more Benjamin’s patients tell him about the other Dr. Gilmer, the more confused he becomes. Everyone loved Vince Gilmer. So Benjamin starts digging around, trying to understand how a good man can seemingly turn bad. Sarah Koenig reports.

 • As Benjamin settles in at the clinic, and people got to know him, something interesting happens. Vince’s former patients – who are now Benjamin’s patients – start talking to him about Vince. What he finds out surprises him. (6 minutes)
 • Act One: Benjamin starts to get very curious about the murder Dr Vince Gilmer committed, so he begins asking questions and poking around. Soon he develops his own theories to explain the murder, that never came up at Vince’s trial. (25 minutes)
 • Act Two: Sarah Koenig’s story about the two Dr. Gilmers continues. This question lurked throughout Vince’s initial incarceration and court appearances: Was he crazy? Or was he crazy like a fox? Benjamin decides to visit Vince in prison. (23 minutes)

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492: Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde

We spend a month at a Jeep dealership on Long Island as they try to make their monthly sales goal: 129 cars. If they make it, they'll get a huge bonus from the manufacturer, possibly as high as $85,000 — enough to put them in the black for the month. If they don't make it, it'll be the second month in a row. So they pull out all the stops.

 • It’s mid-October, 2013. Freddie Hoyt tries to rally his sales staff to sell 129 cars and trucks by the end of the month. Freddie’s the General Manager at Town and Country Jeep Chrysler Dodge Ram in Levittown, NY, on Long Island. Problem is, the customers are not cooperating. (7 1/2 minutes)
 • Act One: How we found this car dealer. (2 minutes)
 • Act Two: A quick primer of who’s who, and how the place works. (6 minutes)
 • Act Three: Salesman Bob Tantillo has the fewest sales of anyone at Town and Country this month. Robyn Semien spoke to him. (4 minutes)
 • Act Four: Salesman Jason Mascia has the most sales of anyone this month, as usual. Sean Cole spent a week with him watching how he does it. (8 minutes)
 • Act Five: The next-to-last day of the month. Deals fall apart, but not all of them. (10 minutes)
 • Act Six: The last day of the month begins. They have to sell nine cars by the end of the day. "God help us," Freddie says. (2 minutes)
 • Act Seven: Joe Monti’s real name is Joe Montalbano. But when he started in the car business, he didn't want to lose a sale because a customer couldn’t keep his name straight so he simplified it for the job. He's one of the managers of the used cars department at Town and Country. Sarah Koenig reports on what it'll mean if he doesn’t make this month’s goal. (7 minutes)
 • Act Eight: The last day of the month continues and the truism is accurate: some people get great deals because it’s the end of the month and they have to hit their goal. When you look at the numbers, the average car they sell in the last two days actually loses money. (4 minutes)
 • Act Nine: Salesman Manny Rosales keeps to himself in the showroom, with his own sales philosophy. He explained it to Brian Reed. (7 minutes)
 • Act Ten: The last day of the month ends. (8 minutes)

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513: 129 Cars

Our most ambitious live show ever! We pulled together a massive team of theater pros at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House—nearly 50 singers, actors, dancers and musicians. The result? Journalism turned into a Broadway musical, into opera. Mike Birbiglia, Sasheer Zamata, Stephin Merritt, Josh Hamilton, Lindsay Mendez, Lin-Manuel Miranda and others.

 • Carin Gilfry explains how she once accidentally locked herself in a hotel closet, and because today’s show is being broadcast from an opera house stage, Ira is able to take the story to a place he never usually can. (18 minutes)
 • Act One: Lin-Manuel Miranda turns a piece of reporting we broadcast in 2012, into a 14-minute Broadway mini-musical, created by people who normally work on Broadway. (18 minutes)
 • Act Two: Comedian Mike Birbiglia, his wife, and his cat take a trip together and meet some parasitic zombie mice. (10 minutes)
 • Act Three: Joshuah Bearman tells a story that’s a sequel to his memorable episode about his mother and half-brother David. It’s done onstage as a play that’s structured like a radio documentary, with Josh Hamilton playing Joshuah, and James Ransone playing his brother. (17 minutes)
 • Act Four: Comedian Sasheer Zamata stages a radio play, complete with sound effects and comedians Nicole Byer, Chris Gethard, and Frank Garcia Hejl. It’s a true story about a recent bus accident. (9 minutes)

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528: The Radio Drama Episode

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