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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.

Two lawyers who work for ICE step forward and lift the curtain on what is really happening inside our immigration system right now.

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 • Prologue: Two lawyers dive into the details of what they’ve witnessed behind the scenes in different parts of the immigration system. (2 minutes)
 • Act One: Former ICE attorney Ryan Schwank explains the chaos and dysfunction he observed at an ICE training academy, which led him to whistleblow to Congress two weeks ago. (12 minutes)
 • Act Two: A federal judge orders the government to immediately release a bunch of people from detention. Days pass, and the government doesn’t comply. So the judge calls a hearing to figure out what’s going on. The lawyer's response is not what he or anybody expected. (25 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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882: Give a Little Whistle

Stories of high drama from America's workplaces — surprising, emotional places full of the greed, jealousy, and ambition of real politics.

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 • Prologue: We hear three stories of how conflicts are resolved in offices. Two of those stories come from sociologist Calvin Morrill, who studied the executive suites at a number of large companies in his book The Executive Way: Conflict Management in Corporations. The last story comes from host Ira Glass, who talks about how he ended up punching his own boss in the stomach in front of all his co-workers. (12 minutes)
 • Act One: Starlee Kine with the story of a company in turmoil. A young employee gets in a jam and discovers that in times of trouble, when all else has failed, companies in her industry turn to one woman in a suburban home in Long Island, who solves their corporate problems while the TV plays in the background. (12 minutes)
 • Act Two: David Rakoff discusses the world of birthdays and other holidays, as they're celebrated on the job... and what happens when you call yourself an editorial assistant but the editor you're assisting calls you a secretary. (15 minutes)
 • Act Three: Julie Snyder explains the office politics of street vendors on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street in New York City. With her is sociologist Mitch Duneier, who spent years working with the vendors and writing about them for his book Sidewalk. (14 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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208: Office Politics

People deciding to do things that most of us do NOT choose to do. 

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 • Prologue: A new documentary called The Boys and the Bees captures a moment where a six-year-old has a very unlikely wish, and his dad decides to grant it. Host Ira Glass talks with filmmaker Arielle Knight about what happens next. (9 minutes)
 • Act One: John Tothill tells the story of Edward Dando, a 19th-century British glutton who would eat hundreds of oysters at a time and then run out on the check. John makes the case that we should all be more like Edward Dando. (15 minutes)
 • Act Two: Producer Tobin Low listens in as Evan Roberts calls up an ex for the first time in years and tries to make the case that they should have been friends all along. (16 minutes)
 • Act Three: Producer Zoe Chace brings us a dispatch from a courtroom in Texas this week, where on the very first day of a landmark federal trial about Antifa, the judge makes an unusual decision that no one sees coming. (15 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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881: I Want What I Want

Kids using perfectly logical arguments and arriving at perfectly wrong conclusions.

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 • Prologue: Ira talks with Rebecca who, using perfectly valid evidence, arrived at the perfectly incorrect conclusion that her neighbor, Ronnie Loeberfeld, was the tooth fairy. Ira also talks with Dr. Alison Gopnik, co-author of the book, "The Scientist in the Crib," about what exactly kid logic is. (6 minutes)
 • Act One: More stories like the one in the prologue, where kids look at something going on around them, observe it carefully, think about it logically, and come to conclusions that are completely incorrect. (11 minutes)
 • Act Two: Michael Chabon reads an excerpt from his short story "Werewolves in Their Youth," from his collection of the same name, about an act of kid logic that succeeds where adult logic fails. (16 minutes)
 • Act Three: Howie Chackowicz tried a risky combination when he was little, kid logic with puppy love. He used to think that girls would fall in love with him if they could just see him sleeping or hear him read aloud. He revisits his biggest childhood crush and finds out that not only did his methods not work, but that no one even noticed them. (10 minutes)
 • Act Four: Alex Blumberg investigates a little-studied phenomenon: Children who get a mistaken idea in their heads about how something works or what something means, and then don't figure out until well into adulthood that they were wrong. Including the tale of a girl who received a tissue box for Christmas, allegedly painted by trained monkeys. (13 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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605: Kid Logic

911 calls unlike any we’ve heard before, and other stories about immigration agents sweeping through America.

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 • Prologue: A collection of 911 calls where you can hear immigration enforcement moving through different cities and leaving chaos in their wake. (9 minutes)
 • Act One: More 911 calls, including people on the line with dispatchers as ICE is chasing them, trying to puzzle out their next moves. (22 minutes)
 • Act Two: Home Depots keep getting raided over and over again in Los Angeles. And day laborers are still showing up in store parking lots to find work every day. So what’s that like? Months and months of that cat and mouse? Anayansi Diaz-Cortes went to find out. (11 minutes)
 • Act Three: Memo Torres tries to build an archive of every person taken by federal agents in Southern California. (11 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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880: What Is Your Emergency?

When a joke could get you killed, should you say it anyway? A group of Syrian comedians test the limits of their newfound freedom, a year after the fall of the brutal Assad regime.

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 • Prologue: Under the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, comedian Sharief Homsi knew which jokes were too dangerous to say on stage. Now that Syria is under the control of a new government, Sharief and the other comedians of “Styria” set out on a national tour to see how far their comedy can go in this new Syria. (6 minutes)
 • Act One: The comedians test out risky material and get big laughs on early tour dates. It’s going smoothly until they find out that their show scheduled in the conservative city of Hama is in danger of being cancelled. (13 minutes)
 • Act Two: The comedians go to battle with local officials. (18 minutes)
 • Act Three: The comedians try everything they can think of to keep their shows from being cancelled. (20 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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879: A Christian and a Muslim Walk Into a Bar

In this special mini-episode, we hear from someone in Venezuela with a very specific take on last week's U.S. attack.

The Americans Outside My Window

People discovering information about their own lives that they did not know, and suddenly everything looks very different.

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 • Prologue: When Pete turned 18, his dad took him on a drive to reveal a family secret he was finally old enough to know. (11 minutes)
 • Act One: Sometimes, a lore drop comes when you least expect it. That happened to Jake Cornell and his grandmother. Producer Aviva DeKornfeld talked to Jake about it. (14 minutes)
 • Act Two: Ben Austen had a kind of new lore drop happen to him recently. But it was not the clarifying kind of lore drop, where everything suddenly makes sense — it was kind of the opposite. (29 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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878: New Lore Drop

How one block in Portland, Oregon became a movie-set war zone that lots of people think is a real war zone.

Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription — or to give one as a gift!

 • Prologue: What the movie Hearts of Darkness and right-wing influencers have in common. (8 minutes)
 • Act One: Producers Zoe Chace and Suzanne Gaber follow a bunch of right-wing influencers as they search for Antifa in Portland. (31 minutes)
 • Act Two: We meet the so-called leader of Antifa in Portland. (16 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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877: The Making Of

When history comes knocking, you have to figure out what to do.

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 • Prologue: Brittany’s job is to answer anonymous calls and texts from people in the military. This year, she’s gotten more than usual–most of them are wondering about what to do with orders they’ve been given. Or orders they’re afraid they’ll get someday in the future. (9 minutes)
 • Act One: Jad Abumrad tells the story of the "ideological genealogy” of Fela Kuti’s anti-colonial politics–his mother. In late 1940s Nigeria, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti found herself at the center of a big, historical moment: an uprising led by thousands of women selling goods in Nigeria’s markets. Jad goes searching for who she really was, and how she became the person who galvanized a movement when history demanded it of her. (45 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

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880: What Is Your Emergency?

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